Democracy be damned

Within days of the Panama leaks scandal, our prime minister came on air and told the nation that he had instructed the Election Commission of Pakistan to put back the details of assets of our parliamentarians which had earlier disappeared from the commission’s website. There was no mention why they had disappeared in the first place and who took that decision. The story of the missing list was filed by our senior reporter in Islamabad, Irfan Ghauri.

The list itself is somewhat of a joke. PILDAT, a Pakistani NGO that works extensively on issues that relate to parliament, has now started to highlight through social media the declared assets of our parliamentarians. From these statements, we can see how few assets have been declared. And how the declared assets are undervalued.

The way our politicians continue to behave and the manner in which our parties are run leaves a lot to be desired. For example, the only party that has a truly democratic system of electing its leaders is the Jamaat-e-Islami. The rest of our political parties are either family fiefdoms or one-man-shows.

The Political Parties’ Order 2002, promulgated during military ruler Pervez Musharraf’s regime, had made it binding on the political parties to hold intra-party polls and provide a list of their respective elected office-bearers. The ordinance, which later became an act of parliament, made it compulsory for the political parties to submit details of their assets to the ECP.

Under the law, only those parties were allowed to contest elections that held  intra-party polls regularly and provided details of assets every year. This law has been flouted by almost all the mainstream political parties.

In 2002 when the law was introduced, the PPP’s lifetime chairperson Benazir Bhutto was in self-exile and Makhdoom Amin Fahim was appointed as PPPP’s president so that the party could be eligible to contest polls. Since the incumbent prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was also in exile, the election authorities registered the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) with Raja Zafarul Haq as its chairman.

In July 2011, the PML-N held its intra-party polls where all the office bearers were elected unopposed. Nawaz was elected the PML-N president after the party’s former acting president, Javed Hashmi, proposed Nawaz’s name and the party chairman, Raja Zafarul Haq, seconded the nomination. Apart for a few parties, there is hardly any precedent of genuine intra-party polls in any mainstream party. They provide a list of ‘elected’ office bearers to the ECP which accepts it without verification.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) tried to introduce the idea before the last general elections. In November 2012, the party held intra-party polls in which Imran was elected as the chairman of the party unopposed. No one filed nominations to contest against him. The PTI earlier this year announced that its intra-party polls would complete before its 20th anniversary on April 24. However, they were postponed indefinitely on April 11 on the pretext of launching an anti-government protest campaign following Panama Papers leaks.

A recent report by the ECP tells us that  former president Asif Ali Zardari and his son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari head two different political parties. An updated list of political parties compiled by the ECP shows that Zardari is president of the Pakistan Peoples Party-Parliamentarians (PPPP), the parliamentary faction of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), whose patron in chief is Bilawal Bhutto. The PPPP’s head office is located in Islamabad’s G-6/4 sector while Zardari House in F-8 sector is the headquarters of Bilawal-led PPP, according to the documents submitted to the ECP.

Zardari  continues to call the shots in the PPP and has an edge over Bilawal because of his unique position. Being head of the faction that represents the PPP in parliament, he can get any elected PPP member disqualified in case of a breach of discipline. This power came through an amendment in Political Parties Order 2002. The amendment allowed a party head, even if he himself is not an elected member of parliament, to sack any member of his party in case of violation of party discipline. Earlier the parliamentary leader of the party in the respective house could do this.  The whole concept of democracy has been defeated.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 2^nd, 2016.

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