An Agreeable Doubt

Elections 2013 will remain the most unpredictable polls in decades for Pakistan. This is largely because of several ‘imponderables’ that have cropped up. It’s a totally new situation. Around 40 million new voters—over 45 per cent of the total registered vote—have been added to the electoral rolls. Another 35 million voters have been wiped off as they were found ‘bogus’ during the digitisation of the rolls. We have no idea who used the bogus votes in early elections and how the new voters will act. However, it is safe to assume the youn­ger voters are likelier to favour the ‘youthful’ Imran Khan, who is all of 60 but smartly focuses his campaign on the youth bulge (perhaps the biggest in the world, with 65 per cent of Pakistan’s population aged between 18-35).

Another factor is that the ruling party former president Gen Pervez Musharraf tailored before the 2008 elections, PML(Q), has been reduced to a few electable individuals, disowning its mentor. The vacuum has been largely filled by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), which has emerged as a mainstream player after 17 years of gestation. It boycotted the last elections in 2008 and was a non-entity in 2002. Imran has generated immense hype around his party by bringing forth 90 per cent new, mos­tly young candidates but we have no statistical means to predict how his party will fare in the coming elections.

The biggest jolt is the obvious downslide of the ruling PPP, which had the country’s politics divided into a for-or-against Bhutto vote for decades. The PPP now runs a virtually faceless campaign. President Asif Zardari was restricted by the courts from participating in partisan politics, as per the req­uirement of his office. The PPP’s first prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, sta­nds disqualified from contesting as a result of contempt of court for failing to write a letter to the Swiss courts to recover money allegedly laundered by the earlier PPP government. The PPP’s second prime minister, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, was allowed to contest elections only this week and may still be disqualified as he faces many cases of corruption. A second tier of PPP luminaries, like Aitizaz Ahsan and Raza Rabbani, are handicap­ped in leading the campaign, cut to size as they were by an insecure Asif Zardari in the last five years. In desperation, Benazir’s son, Master Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, was brought in right after his graduation from Oxford to lead the campaign. But the 24-year-old is seriously constrained by his political inexperience, age, language barrier and threats to his life. Till now, the most he has been able to do is release a video message in accented Oxford Urdu, invoking the dead horse of socialist ideology and the tragedy of his mother’s assassination. This has not clicked too well and the general reaction, at least in the talk shows, was that it was “too little, too late”.

Faced with charges of corruption and misgovernance, pun­dits predict that the PPP might be looking at a rep­l­ica of the 1997 polls, when its frustrated workers failed to come out. The PPP could manage only 18 national assembly seats—and not a single one from Punjab—out of the then general category total of 207. This time, the PPP might also lose its Sindh citadel as it confronts a tough 10-party, first-of-its-kind alliance of nationalists, religious parties, feudals and pirs.

Most surveys see twice-prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s PML(N) leading the race at this stage. Nawaz is definitely better placed if one goes by the old-style analysis of counting the worth of political heavyweights in a clan, tribe and biradari-based elections. This is especially true in the bustling, demographically thick GT Road belt of central Punjab that’s home to 107 seats—after the 2002 revision, the natio­nal assembly now has a total of 272 general seats, plus 70 reserved ones (60 for women, 10 for the minorities). Nawaz, to his credit, has gathered the bulk of heavyweight turncoats from all sides of the political aisle. This has invited huge criticism but it looks like his best bet against what Imran Khan calls his “tsunami”, the popular politics with which the former skipper hopes to sway the public mood.

The Imran phenomenon may have started off more bec­ause of a vacuum (call it non-performance) left by the others—larg­ely the big two, PPP and PML(N)—but now it has gained a momentum on its own. Imran is relying on women (many of whom perhaps still see him as a handsome divorcee heart-throb), urban youth, Shias and disenchan­ted PPP voters, who he hopes will prefer him than their traditional rival, Nawaz.

The crucial battleground remains Pun­jab with 148 electoral seats as Khyber Pakhtoon­khwa (former NWFP), Sindh and Balochistan remain divisive in a four- or five-way fight among the PPP, PML(N), PTI, religious parties (Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s JuI and Jamaat-e-Islami) and nationalist parties—the Awami National Party (ANP), PMAP, NP, BNP(M), MQM, STP. In sum, Elections 2013 is all about whet­her Imran can sway the public mood away from the ‘electables’ in central Punjab. Let’s just say, it’s not over until it’s over.

The polls are being held in, literally, explosive conditions. Not a single day passes when a bomb or two do not go off, targeting the liberal, democratic parties and in provinces other than Punjab. The local Taliban has named the PPP, MQM and the ANP—of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s grandson Asf­a­ndyar Wali Khan—as its prime targets. The brunt of the bomb explosions have been borne by ANP, which has seen many of its top leaders dying in dozens of attacks in recent weeks. For a change, politicians across the board have shown a near-unanimity in carrying on with the electoral process. Perhaps they have learnt their lessons from successive martial regimes. The ANP may, in fact, have received some sympathy for showing such bravery in the face of brutal attacks. Yet  the political parties remain ambivalent about the issue of terrorism. Earlier, it was only Imran who supported a dialogue with the Taliban. Now, he is joined by most parties.

The safest prediction that can be made about the elections is that it will be a coalition government at the centre and in at least three of the four provinces. This has been the case since 1988, except for 1997, when Sharif swept with a two-thi­rds majority. No party seems to win a simple majority and whichever party crosses the 70-80 seats mark is likely to make it to the government in the centre and in the provinces in weak coalitions. This means no government is generally in a position to undertake the harsh reforms required to deal with the crises in energy, inflation, fiscal and administrative sectors. No to speak of the most urgent crisis of all, terrorism.

Interestingly, foreign policy has been discussed much more in media debates than earlier. Most mainstream political parties were found to be on the same page on the issues of giving Gwadar to China, initiating a gas pipeline to Iran, peace in Afghanistan and assertion of sovereignty against the US and its drone attacks were concerned.

Most interestingly, traditional rival India has hardly been mentioned in the election campaign. One can safely say that any major breakthrough on Pakistan-India relations can take some time. It will take a while before a new Pakistani government stabilises enough to take decisions on India and by the time it does, the polls in India might delay things further. The only silver lining: it’s the first time in Pakist­an’s his­tory that a civilian government has completed its five-year tenure with elections being held as part of a “normal” transition. And Musharraf stands jailed in his own house.

(Amir Mateen is a well-known political commentator)