There are a number of reasons to be suspicious about Tahirul Qadri and his talk of a peaceful revolution to empower the people. He is a Canadian national who lives abroad and descends on the Pakistani political scene occasionally for short but extravagantly funded performances whose main purpose is to put himself at the centre of the political stage and to attract the maximum public and media attention to himself. He is no doubt very adept at it and at rattling the government in power but he achieves little beyond generating some political heat.
On his last trip to the country, he succeeded dramatically in electrifying the masses of the country. But, as he must have sensed himself, the reaction of the public on his current visit is one of detachment. The show that he had planned is over even before it had begun properly.
The indifferent response of the public to Qadri’s calls for a revolution has a lot to do with his person. While claiming to speak for the rights of the people of Pakistan, he has acquired the nationality of a western country and made that country his home. He rails, rightly, against dynastic politics and nepotism but the organisation that he has created to achieve his political ambitions is run by him as a family concern and spends much of its energies in promoting his personality cult. Also, the exotic religious garb that he sports for his public appearances has been carefully chosen to increase his mass appeal among the devout.
Yet, for all his shenanigans and theatrics, Qadri is right when he says that the governments and assemblies elected under the present system are unrepresentative of the people. The truth is that they serve mainly as bastions of corruption and privilege and as instruments for the oppression of the common man. If the people are to be rescued from their stranglehold, the first step must be a reform of the perverted election system that has brought them into power.
On his last visit to Pakistan, Qadri extracted a promise from the then government to make a few rather modest reforms in the election system. But during further negotiations, most of these concessions were whittled down, and at the implementation stage, they were virtually nullified, helped by the monumental incompetence of the Election Commission of Pakistan.
The result is to be seen in the composition of the assemblies elected last year, in which the same class of tax cheats, looters of public money and other species of parasites predominates once again. Their performance is also no different. In the recently passed budgets, the tax burden has again been placed squarely on the poorer sections of society, while the rich continue to enjoy generous exemptions and public expenditure on education and health remains abysmally low.
It is no wonder that most of the parties represented in the assemblies want a continuation of the present broken election system. One exception is the PTI, but it has focussed narrowly on vote-rigging in the last elections, rather than pushing for a comprehensive reform of the system. Ending election fraud is no doubt very important but the real challenge is to make those fundamental reforms that will ensure that our legislatures are truly representative of the different sections of society and their interests, instead of being controlled by a predatory ruling class interested mainly in perpetuating its own power and wealth.
Earlier this month, the prime minister wrote to the speaker of the National Assembly proposing the formation of a parliamentary committee to make recommendations on election reform. The letter was obviously prompted by the agitation launched by the PTI and the possibility of a tie-up between Imran and Qadri.
Following consultations on the issue between PML-N and PPP, the National Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution on June 19 on the establishment of a parliamentary committee as proposed by Nawaz. This step has been greeted by some as opening the way for genuine improvements in our election system. But if past experience is any guide, a great deal of scepticism is in order.
A sub-committee of the National Assembly and a special committee of the Senate charged with amending the election laws were also set up by the last government. But the real purpose was to pre-empt possible moves by the Election Commission to introduce genuine election reforms. The recommendations of these committees were largely of a cosmetic nature. Even these efforts came to nought because of a lack of interest on the part of politicians of all parties.
There is also a judgement of the Supreme Court dating back to June 2012 (Workers’ Party case) in which the court ruled that the first-past-the-post system (FPTP) adopted by Pakistan on the British model violates the principle of majority and directed that ways and means should be explored to replace it with an appropriate system “to ensure true representation of the people and rule of the majority”.
Besides its other known defects, the FTPT system has two flaws that are specific to Pakistan. First, it tends to encourage and entrench the practice of voting on the lines of biradari rather than party programmes. Second, since this system skews the result in favour of the larger parties, the party which leads even by a small margin in its share of the votes cast in the Punjab province, which has more than half of the seats in the National Assembly, gets a big lead in the house as a whole and as a result a huge but unjustified advantage in the formation of the federal government.
This is exactly what happened in the 2013 election, in which the PML-N claims to have won a “heavy mandate”. The party got 33 percent of the popular votes, mainly in Punjab but, because of the distortions produced by the FPTP system, it won 55 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, giving it a monopoly of power at the federal level. Under a system of proportional representation, it would have got about one-third of the seats, well short of a majority, and would have had to share power with coalition partners, including those primarily based in other provinces, something which would have been good for the country’s federal system.
In its judgement in the Workers’ Party case, the Supreme Court suggested the adoption of the system of run-off voting, in which a second round is held if no candidate gets a clear majority in the first round. In the second round, only the two candidates who received the highest votes in the first round are on the ballot paper. But this system also does not rule out oversized majorities disproportionate to the popular votes polled. Besides, a second round of voting can be cumbersome and tends to polarise voters, as we saw in the recent Afghan presidential election.
In addition to the proposal to discard FPTP, a number of other proposals have also been made for a reform of the election system. One measure that is long overdue is the introduction of direct elections for the Senate. The present system for filling seats of the upper house, as well as reserved seats in the National Assembly, is in fact not election in the true sense but selection by the party heads. It converts the upper house into a nominated chamber and the sooner it is consigned to the dustbin, the better.
Two weeks ago, opposition leader Khursheed Shah mooted the idea that the term of the national and provincial assemblies should be reduced from five to four years. This is also a valuable suggestion.
The parliamentary committee on election reform must give serious consideration to all these proposals. It is also very important that this matter should be extensively debated in public and not be left to deal-making between the political parties behind closed doors as happened over the 18th Amendment. The three-month period given to the committee to complete its task is clearly insufficient.
Asif Ezdi
The writer is a former member of the Pakistan Foreign Service.
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