The value of voting

Of the many terrible things Pervez Musharraf did, the most foolish may have been reducing the voting age to 18 years. The first time I voted was in 2002 when, as a callow and idealistic teenager, I cast a quixotic and pointless vote against giving the dictator another five years in office. A few months later, I ignorantly and immaturely voted for the Tehreek-i-Insaf in the general elections, thinking they were harbingers of all the change we needed. Unsurprisingly, for the 2008 elections, my name mysteriously disappeared off the voter rolls, presumably in the national interest.

Too many of the urban elite act like teenagers, oh-so-impressed with their rebelliousness, come election time. For most of them, voting is a purely symbolic act, a chance to set themselves apart from the mainstream by supporting fringe parties. The rest just treat Election Day as they would any other national holiday — a day to nurse theirs hangovers in bed.

Whether caused by laziness, disgust or apathy, this refusal to participate in mainstream politics has consequences. Urban liberals are already an endangered species; by voting with their hearts rather than their brains, they are ensuring their extinction

The ideological leanings of political parties come from multiple sources. Take the case of the MQM, which has been steadfast and stern in its condemnation of religious extremism. This position can be explained partly by the party’s origins as a student party that battled with the Jamaat-i-Islami’s student wing, the Islami Jamiat Talba. The MQM’s stand, though, can also be attributed to its urban base in Karachi and Hyderabad, which forces the party to be more socially liberal than parties that have a primarily rural vote bank.

Influencing a political party’s platform by being a part of its targeted base is only one way that those who have deluded themselves into thinking they are disenfranchised can change the political direction of the country. We all know Pakistan’s political parties are craven and unprincipled. It is possible to take advantage of this ideological flexibility.

As an example, consider the ANP. Political analysts, in their desire to find convenient labels, have usually conflated its leftist call for greater provincial autonomy with social liberalism and described the party as secular. They ignore that the ANP in power, has been a consistently illiberal force. For instance, after the ‘honour’ killing of Samia Sarwar in 1999, the PPP proposed a resolution condemning all such murders in the Senate. The resolution was blocked by the PPP’s erstwhile allies, the ANP, on cultural grounds.

But the ANP’s definition of what constitutes Pakhtun culture dramatically shifted after they were handed a thrashing at the polls by the MMA in 2002. As the MMA’s draconian Islamic laws and tacit support for religiously-inspired violence turned off many voters, the ANP suddenly discovered the value of social liberalism.

The lesson here is simple. If enough potential voters exist, mainstream parties will be eager to cater to them. Instead of forming fringe civil society groups that seemingly exist only to enforce orthodoxy of thought and cast out anyone who deviates an inch, it is more useful to hold your nose and vote for the party that is closest to your beliefs. Those who argue that voting for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil will always be marginalised.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 27^th, 2011.