Barriers to filling reserved seats in local councils

In the recently held local elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the rate of contestation on all the reserved seats for marginalised sections of the population, including of women, appeared to be extremely low. Moreover, a substantial percentage of seats remained vacant. This is alarming because the elections were held on a party basis and the total reserved seats had been reduced since 2005. On the other hand, interest in the more powerful elected offices seems to have jumped.

The electoral statistics show that on average there were 10.6 candidates per seat for the offices of mayors and chairpersons, and three for the general councilor category. But the seat-to-candidate ratio declined radically for all reserved seats. For instance, it was 1.6 for women, 2.5 for the youth and 3 for workers/peasants. The data also shows a significant number of seats vacant. It is also worth mentioning that nearly 38% of all female candidates got elected unopposed. Despite the youth bulge, pro-youth rhetoric and youth programmes, as many as 21% of the total candidates returned victorious without any contest. For workers and peasants this is 12%.

Considering the above, the Election Commission will have to hold bye-elections on all the vacant seats — an avoidable exercise. But this is not a new phenomenon as it happened in all previous local elections as well. However, the rate of contestation has declined as the percentages of unopposed and vacant seats have gone up since 2001-05. For instance, in the 2001 and the 2005 local elections, there were six and four reserved seats for women respectively in each union council. Isn’t this worrisome? Now, almost 20 years later, instead of seeing an improvement, a kind of regression is taking place in K-P. In 2005, only 22% of women seats were filled without a contest, which is almost half of the current percentage. For other categories of reserved seats, the contestation rate was better in 2005 than in the recently held local elections.

To prevent repetition of this risk in the future, factors responsible for this must be identified. Unlike the previous local elections, the current election was held on a party basis. As many as nine major political parties contested the local elections. The PTI claims to be the party of the youth while the ANP and the PPP think of themselves as the champions of the progressive agenda. Yet, all of them failed to mobilise enough youngsters, women and workers to fill a few hundred seats across the 17 districts.

There is no doubt that all nine major parties with some variation have a vote bank almost in every electoral area and census block. However, it seems the parties have never seriously tried to carve out party chapters out of their vote bank at the grassroots level. What stops the political parties from doing this seems to be a fear of organisation.

From my own experience of working with hundreds of communities, I could generalise with confidence that almost everywhere local elites, though often unsuccessful, tried their best to sabotage the formation of community-based village organisations. Democratically elected village organisations would often demand debate on issues and participatory decision-making, which is not acceptable to the feudal system as it undermines their authority and power. The feudal lords are also the custodians of all decadent traditions including patriarchy and misogyny. But they appear to be the most frightened and insecure lot. No wonder most elites hate defiance and oppose reforms. Why do you think they carry guns and keep armed guards? On the one hand, they frighten ordinary citizens by displaying their wealth, guns and power while on the other hand they negotiate with the upper elites by showing control over their people for more powers. In my view, it is an unholy alliance between the locals and the super elites that is mainly responsible for the lack of organisation at the grassroots level. This has, in turn, resulted in a low rate of participation and contestation in local elections, especially on reserved seats. The more participation, the more headache.

The role of civil society organisations and trade unions also needs some discussion. Although 285 (approximately 12%) of the 2,383 seats reserved for workers/peasants were filled unopposed, most of the returned candidates seemingly don’t qualify the legal definition of workers or peasants. According to the K-P Local Government Act, “Peasant means a person who is a landless farm worker or one who has been the owner of not more than five acres of land and dependents directly on it for subsistence living.” The Act defines a worker as, “a person who is directly engaged in work or is dependent on personal labour for subsistence living.” Very few contesting candidates could fulfil these definitions.

In the local elections held in the past, we found similar trends. For instance, our organisation had investigated the professions of LG councilors of ICT who had contested elections against the peasants/workers quota in the 2015 local elections. We conducted face-to-face interviews with the councilors. With their permission our surveyors also took photos of their houses and business premises. We did not rely solely on our surveys. Like the general elections, contesting candidates for local council elections too need to fill the nomination and assets declaration forms. We requested the Election Commission for the copies of those forms. Except one, all the returning officers willingly provided signed copies of the forms to our teams.

To our amazement, only 11% of the councilors were likely to fulfil the legal definition of a peasant or a worker, while 53% admitted that they were property dealers and businessmen. Interestingly, all of them had declared themselves as businessmen on their nomination forms too. Yet, the returning officers let them contest the elections. Why weren’t they disqualified? Wasn’t this a case of serious negligence on the part of the officers? The most interesting revelation was that one of the three Deputy Mayors of ICT had also gotten himself elected on the peasant quota. The same pattern was found in the 2015 local elections held in Punjab.

It seems reasonable to argue that political parties, civil society organisations, women groups and trade unions have miserably failed to mobilise enough numbers of women, youth and workers in the local elections and there has been no sign of any improvement since 2001-05. The Election Commission is urged to make sure that every candidate who is contesting as a worker or a peasant must fulfil the legal definition. Moreover, it is also likely to be true that political elites are least interested in organising and democratising party chapters at the grassroots level. However, a ray of hope seems to have emerged to set up local chapters due to party-based local elections.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 25^th, 2021.

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