Musings on the recent election

Election 2013 was the worst managed ballot in which I have participated since 1970. I had to make three trips to my designated polling station housed in a boys’ school off Zamzama Boulevard in Karachi — because the electoral staff did not turn up until 1600 hours. There were no apologies, no explanations, no excuses. The two-furlong queue that was there in the morning and early afternoon had disappeared, after having acquired a nice tropical tan. Inside the premises, it was suffocating. The place was teeming with women. We were, after all, in a PTI citadel. The heat was unbearable. A scuffle broke out when a woman slapped somebody else’s child. It was unrelentingly miserable and grizzly. But there were also a couple of touching scenes when somebody administered first-aid to two sweet old ladies who had fainted.

Upstairs, a young man with long hair burnished like the autumn leaves and a tattoo on his wrist asked me who decided to hold elections in the hottest month of the year, when one could have quite easily held the popularity contest a bit earlier in March. It was a rhetorical question, which was followed by another equally testy one. What kind of a country are we living in where we don’t have money for the special paper used in passports, but plenty of funds to purchase cruisers and armed guards for parliamentarians who get paid for doing no work? I told him that he was unleashing his frustrations on the wrong person and should address his queries to the president. Apparently, the fellow’s passport had expired and he couldn’t get back to his college in the States.

If one looks for a simple explanation, it will have to be the usual cliches ... unprofessional conduct, gross incompetence and a total disregard for time. These are three national traits that we have worked exceptionally hard to develop and perfect. That’s why voters in different parts of the country, who faced similar problems, accepted the administrative cock-up with calm stoicism. That’s the way things are done in this country, mate. One or two rather irritable citizens did contact the chief election commissioner to complain that the electoral staff had not turned up at their polling centre. And a harassed Justice (retd) Fakhruddin G Ibrahim is purported to have said, “What can I do? I’m short of staff.”

As expected, there were serious allegations of rigging. This is nothing new and was to be expected. After every national poll some party or other asks for a recount of votes or a fresh election in those constituencies where the performance of their candidates fell short of expectations. That there has been rather spirited rigging in a selected number of polling stations in Sindh seems fairly obvious. It appears that something is being done to remedy the travesty. Well, there won’t be a change in the country in the sense that Imran Khan had promised. But the voters have at least gotten rid of the ham-fisted PPP that pushed the dollar to a hundred rupees. Nawaz Sharif has made the right political gestures with the oleaginous heartiness of a successful businessman. Currently, his associates are fighting for their place in the political pecking order. Had Imran Khan held the scepter, there is every likelihood that he would have skewered the rich in their own hubris and lived in a modest three-bedroom house in the capital and turned the prime minister’s house into a hotel. Frankly, I would do the same with the presidency.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 19^th, 2013.