Saving elections from 'ill-actions'

Election manifestos seem like hallucinations when judged on the track record of the parties touting them.

As electioneering heats up, politics has shifted to a higher gear of rhetoric. All political parties have completed the ritual of unveiling ambitious manifestos. With a few exceptions, these manifestos give a semblance of half-baked utopian visions and hazy roadmaps. But politicians are promoting them to the points of fantasy. One problem with most of these manifestos is their almost identical recipes for national issues. Franklin Roosevelt, the 32^nd US president once said: “An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in the same pod.” Politicians selling these manifestos are trying to prove wrong the tested philosophy of Roosevelt. And to their advantage, media, intelligentsia and voters are not raising too many questions about the practicability of these programmes.

This disdain has failed to generate the kind of issue-based debate that shapes up election results in western democracies. In the West, elections actually mean competing programmes, ideas and ideologies. In the 2008 US presidential elections, voters were looking for a leader to pull the country out of its history’s most expensive wars that were contributing to its economic crisis. US President Barack Obama was the man of the moment. President Obama believed that George W Bush’s policy of  “either with us or against us” had isolated the US internationally. Americans elected Obama at a difficult moment in their history after being convinced that his roadmap to extending the American century would work.

The wheel of democracy moved in the opposite direction in Pakistan. The PPP ascended to power on sympathy vote after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. It was not elected on its programme but on its political rhetoric — remember the “democracy is the best revenge” mantra?

The PPP lived up to its promise, promoting a strange combination of corrupt political culture and creditable constitutional reforms. It made history by completing its term but left behind a complicated baggage of economic mess and lawlessness. Its rule left deep imprints of statesmanly decisions on the NFC Award, renaming NWFP, the Eighteenth Amendment to thuggishly handling the economy and governance. It piled up the largest ever domestic and international debt in a single term in Pakistan’s history. Pakistan is caught up in an expensive and bloody fight against terrorism, a failing economy, crippling energy crisis and a tattering state structure at the end of the PPP rule. These daunting challenges cannot be met with mere manifestos.

These manifestos seem like hallucinations when judged on the track record of the parties touting them. The biggest losers on this plank of judgment are parties of the erstwhile ruling coalition and the winners could be the PTI, the PML-N and smaller religious and nationalist parties. Voters can save these elections from becoming ‘ill-actions’ by making the parties realise that their vote is no longer available on rosy promises but clear visions and solid roadmaps.

The election results will hold credence only if all players have been afforded an even playing field. The security threats to the left-leaning parties are bad omens. The caretakers must create an environment that denies terrorists the space to dictate the results through their bullets.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 27^th, 2013.