Fasten your seat belts

In the dog days of the current dispensation, there is a kind of eerie calm in the political household. There is the usual banging of pots in the kitchen that can be safely ignored, but there is a sense that deeper down, somewhere in the vaults and cobwebby rarely-opened cupboards, something is astir. Perhaps not Behemoth or a Hobbesian Leviathan, but something big, muddle-headed, with multiple limbs and beyond being motivated to lumber blinking into the light on Election Day not much idea of its place in the world.

Meetings have come and gone to — at the time of writing — no conclusion as to who is going to be the interim prime minister. Interesting names have been bandied about not the least being that of our current permanent representative at the United Nations, a woman of formidable intellect who has trod the corridors of power for many a year. Whether she would be feral enough to handle the snarling — but grinning and fawning and wheedling at the same time — pack that will surround her in seconds is one of the many unknowns.

Then there are those boys and girls, a few anyway, girls that is — who are the bureaucratic cohort that are likely getting a bit twitchy in advance of the reshuffle that is going to happen prior to the election in an effort to keep it if not exactly free fair and transparent, then with the ability to create a credible illusion thereof. Credible to outside observers that is, because few if any in terms of the electorate believe a word that is delivered to them by those tasked with running the show on the day.

Back in my days in Nagar, running an NGO north of Gilgit in the 90s, some of my locally-recruited teachers, men and women who had almost zero exposure to the world much beyond their valley or village, were somewhat bemused and not a little nervous to find themselves at the electoral forefront. They had every reason to be nervous as a slow-burn sectarian war had been the backdrop to most of the time I spent there, and meeting people from a sect other than your own and not be consumed with a desire to see them into the afterlife was a bit of a novelty. No matter, they were duly trained by a distinctly jumpy administration and all came out of it with a full complement of arms, legs, fingernails and eyes, much to the surprise of virtually everybody.

But back to family — teachers, lots of teachers, and who is going to be staffing many of the polling stations? The teachers. So there is a training pack lying on the dining table, reams of detailed notes in English and Urdu and my family will be doing electoral duty as they have every election for at least the last 25 years. Although not personally entitled to vote — my Pakistan Origin Card falls just short of full citizenship — I would if I could, skeptic that I am, because it matters, it really does. And yes I would be happy to serve in any capacity if asked in support of the election, because weary as I am of the eternal shenanigans I still find that democracy does still matter to me personally.

Voting as I did in UK elections there was never that I recall any suggestion of corruption or vote-rigging; and as a senior local government officer found myself caught up in the polling and counting process. Trite as it might sound we believed in it, believed in the rightness of what we were doing, that democracy really was there on display. And our duty was to ensure that the protocols of democracy worked smoothly and transparently and that the result when announced was the product of something that really was free and fair.

I still believe in that, even here in Pakistan. I know that the electoral process is riddled with dishonesty and corruption. I know that there will be vote-rigging. I know that votes are going to be bought and sold. I know all of that — but if I could vote I would. Fasten your seat belts folks!

Published in The Express Tribune, May 24^th, 2018.

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