Elections without manifestos

With less than a month left for elections, none of the three major political parties has come up with an election manifesto. The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) is one of a few parties that has a formal manifesto for next month’s electoral exercise. The PTI chief did come up with a verbal 11-point agenda. The PPP established a manifesto committee and the PML-N leadership made a few verbal promises but there was nothing further.

Election manifestos play a significant role in developed democracies, taking open positions on issues of public importance. In the 2016 US presidential election, Hillary Clinton promised a tax increase on the wealthy, favourable immigration reforms and enhanced gun control. Donald Trump, on the other hand, was quite vocal on tightening the immigration regime. He also committed construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border, tax cuts and relaxation in gun control measures. We all know whom the American voters sided with.

In Pakistan, however, personality-based politics has always taken precedence over issue-based politics, with the result that nobody takes manifestos seriously. Do these manifestos mean anything for us?

Ironically, manifestos of our political parties stay conspicuously silent on difficult and contentious issues, such as religious extremism, population control, rights of minorities, defence budget, rising foreign debt, water shortage and the relationship with India and Afghanistan.

For the rest, be it fancy infrastructure or health cards, education reforms or good governance, everyone wants to do everything, at least on paper. But there is neither the appreciation of what should be fixed nor the appetite to say things that are needed but are politically incorrect.

For instance, no matter how lucrative public health insurance may be, it can never be sustainable unless public health facilities start charging for their services except to those who do have insurance, so that the demand on their services is rationalised and they have resources to invest. Similarly, creating new companies, projects and authorities is the easier part and of little use, unless we take care of thousands of unproductive employees and redundant departments creating a perpetual drag on resources. We are quick to embrace computerisation of land records but without developing cadastral maps, there is little value that they add. And promulgating laws without any implementation hardly moves the needle.

During last elections in 2013, the PML-N, PTI and PPP all came up with detailed and fancy manifestos, with countless promises. Yes, we would want to invest in infrastructure, social service delivery, law and order and more but we have limited resources and we cannot do everything. But accepting this would mean prioritising one thing over the other and offending at least some of the voters. And we don’t do that. We make promises, knowing fully well that they don’t have to be kept.

In fact, if we do a blind test of sorts and go through promises made by the PTI, PML-N and PPP in their election manifestos of 2013, it is virtually impossible to tell which party’s manifesto we are reading. They look like ideological clones, because they are all saying the right things that we want to hear.

It is not that our political parties don’t have positions on issues. The PML-N, for instance, favours a cordial relationship with India and now it also seems keen on judicial reforms, revamping the National Accountability Bureau and ‘rectifying’ Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution. The PTI, on the other hand, is pushing for creating smaller provinces and has a strong stance on graft. The PPP is perhaps the most vocal against religious extremism, with a proven track record of resolving complex federation issues such as the passage of the 18^th Amendment.

So a smart voter will know what he or she is voting for. However, what remains to be seen is whether these parties will actually end up saying these things or will merely come up with manifestos from previous elections with new glossy titles.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 26^th, 2018.

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