Analysis: Bloodying the ballot

The killing of MQM candidate Fakhrul Islam by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) reveals the bloodier part of the strategy of those who have sworn to derail the elections.

A day earlier, when ANP’s senior KPK leader and candidate Arbab Ayub Jan narrowly escaped a remote-controlled bomb, Pakistan’s soldiers were shedding their blood in a fierce battle against the terrorists in Tirah.

The Taliban consider democracy to be against Islam, and have vowed to disrupt elections by targeting three of the ‘secular’ mainstream parties (PPP,ANP and MQM). At the ideological level, there are those who hypocritically use various provisions of the constitution and law, articles 62-63 in particular, to encourage the returning officers to assume the role of moral police and sit on judgment over the personal piety of thousands of candidates.

Not only is the democratic process and constitutional edifice of the republic under threat from both the ideological opponents of democracy and the terrorists, but also from those who are resentful of the possible assertion of civilian supremacy. The dilemmas of democracy are many. No democrat can deny the fundamental human rights of any person nor can he deny a party or person the right to contest an election, even if that person in fact intends to overturn the democratic system by using it tactically—and there are many of those in the running.

Unlike the mainstream parties, the extreme religious right and the terrorists are united in terms of their actual ideological stance against democracy and human rights. But if the obscurantists, who shamelessly use Islam for their political designs, were so sincere to a unified cause they would have contested the elections on a single platform and also there wouldn’t have been so much bloodletting on sectarian lines.

The TTP and their ilk want to not only disrupt the electoral process in Pakistan, but also weaken the state and its institutions so that Pakistan is restrained from playing a positive role in the process of bringing the Afghan war to an end. Hoping for a Taliban victory, at least in southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, the TTP is bent upon destabilizing Pakistan in order to wrest control of, at least, the Pakhtun belt of Pakistan.

The religio-political parties, while subscribing to the 1973 constitution, not only insist on breaching the compromise they reached with the mainstream political parties but also show rabid opportunism by following the dictates of the terrorists. This is not to justify the mainstream parties who, out of fear and ideological capitulation, have been shying away from taking a consistent stance against theocracy and militancy. If the JUI-F offered a hand of friendship to the terrorists by holding a peace conference while the jawans of Pak army were being butchered in FATA, a timid and grieving ANP took the lead in offering an olive branch to those who are not ready to forgive them. Even the PPP, after its charismatic leader Benazir Bhutto was martyred by the powers that be in cahoots with the TTP, showed unbridled opportunism by not taking a firm stand on the killing of Salman Taseer or on the murderous attack on Malala Yousufzai.

The TTP and their allies in Karachi and Punjab are out to stunt the electoral campaign of the PPP, ANP and MQM. The PML-N and Tehrik-i-Insaf should know that their fate would not be different as the Taliban would eventually turn on them as well. With Benazir’s exit, there is no liberal pole left in these elections. Never has been an election campaign in this country so devoid of ideological divide as is witnessed now. But thanks to the TTP and its killing spree we may find someone to rise to the challenge and confront the beast of terrorism.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 14^th, 2013.