Parties and local politics

Absence of political parties at the local level, the real ground on which the political system rests, has never been helpful for any democracy-building project anywhere in the world. Political parties have evolved out of political experience, mostly in Western countries, and are now universally accepted as an important tool of modern democratic politics. In our history, political parties have been banned, national and local elections have been organised on non-party basis, and parties and their leaders have been maligned to serve the interests of military dictators.

For building democracy in Pakistan, one of the biggest challenges is to transition from personal to party rule. Our agrarian, caste-oriented and tribal culture binds us to persons that have social significance in the local system. As our representative, because of his social constituency of support and influence, the person becomes the power broker, the intermediary, and has been from colonial times to martial law and civilian-democratic government. The party system has remained weak because of the personality factors. Another reason is that it was deliberately weakened both by military dictators, as well as popular civilian leaders. Actually, the cult of personality starts at the local level and travels upwards to the national level. How can we create a space for political parties at the local level and how will that actually change the regional and national character of political parties?

The best way to strengthen political parties is to organise them at local levels and the mechanism for this can be party-based local elections. As a matter of principle, democracy without political parties at any level — national, provincial or local — would be a farce. It contradicts the principle and practice of democracy and representative form of government. The country has been through this farce several times and we have seen its negative impact on politics and society in terms of perpetuation of the traditional political order, with dominant political families ruling the country.

Without political parties and party identities, individuals may be elected and may even form governments, as they have in some periods of Pakistan’s history, but such individuals proved to be nothing but a political crowd without any discipline of a party, leadership, organisation or hierarchy. In Pakistan’s history, military dictators used party-less elections to control the assemblies by manipulating individual representatives. The sad fact is that our parties, in even under civilian governments, in power or in opposition, remain internally undemocratic because of the control of party basis and suppression of dissent within the parties.


The reason for this control is that parties remain dominated by elite families from top leaders down to individual members of the provincial and national assemblies. The way to break this cycle is to take parties to the local politics level. This way, the parties can develop grassroots level support by giving their label and party identities to candidates. Candidates, in return, bring to the political fold of the parties their constituents — caste, biradari, tribe or village. Party labels in local elections will strengthen parties and give them a popular support base.

Party-based local elections can be a good ground for political recruitment for the political parties, for the local representatives, particularly at the district level, through good work and reputation and having built their party-based constituency of support might not be ignored by the top hierarchy of the political parties.

This will seriously diminish the elitist character of the political parties. Electable elite families may continue to dominate even the local councils, but the chances of party activists moving upwards in the party hierarchy and leadership will be greater under party-based elections than in any other system.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 5^th, 2013.