Analysis of Stunning Gains by Religious Parties in Pakistan’s Elections

It is easy to blame all the past problems on British colonialism and prsent one on US hegemony, exonerating ourselves of any blame.
Author has not considered the possibility of no 9/11 and no US involvement and Taliban still ruling Afghanistan. I pointed that out in my article by suggesting even worse scenario of King`s parties and religious right cooperation. Musharraf would have had much easier time, winning with less rigging, the election based upon military-mullah-PML(Q) nexus.
With or without US involvement in Afghanistan, the power of religious parties would have increased due to overkilling two major political parties as well as voter apathy.
The absence of cold-war era clear ideological divide of left and right of major political forces has contributed to voters apathy. While the tenacity and voters enthusiasm to religious parties remained constant, the traditional left-right voters lost the enthusiasm to back anybody on ideological basis. It might be useful reading, ``In defense of the left`` again with voter enthusiasm perspective.
[General Musharraf, as well as the majority party in the National Assembly, must find a way to work with MMA,.......]
Musharraf is part of the problem, not solution. Get rid of the problem for any solutioin!

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Good article.

I think the voting poor public has just stated how much worse could the maulvis be in comparison with the previous non-maulvi leaderships.

The success of the religious parties in Pakistan, is due to the following reasons, in my opinion.

1) The non-religious parties have not done anything for Pakistan, except bringing it to the point of being a failed state. Other than giving the already influential upper-class of Pakistan, a ``liberal`` atmosphere to have fun, they have done absolutely nothing for the poor (except make them poorer). The poor have given the non-religious army, the non-religious ethnic parties and the non-religious feudal parties a chance. All have failed them. Now they are giving the religious parties a chance.

Had the non-religious parties of Pakistan turned Pakistan into Singapore (or even Malyasia), rest assured, no one would have moved away from them, regardless of how much the US bombed any country.

2) The religious parties united as one party. Traditionally, religous parties have two or three separate unions of parties. This time they had one. They traditionally get around 7% of the vote. This time they got around 11%. So the vote count went up by 50%. But the seat count went up by 26 fold.

3) The areas where the religious parties did well share an ethnic affinity with certain groups in Afghanistan. And they were obviously unhappy with the US using Pakistan to bomb their co-ethnics.

4) In urban Sind, people were tired of the militancy, the bhatta taxes, and the virtual rule over Karachi by the MQM thugs. So they have voted the religious parties back in, in some areas. Before MQM, religious parties were quite popular there.

5) People are tired of the sardar/feudal based politics of Baluchistan, which has left that area one of the least developed in the world. They were bound to vote for a change, and the religious parties are the only ones willing to take on the feudals.

6) The candidates put up by the religious parties, in most cases, were from amongst the people they were representing. Apart from a few, they were unlike the rich candidates of PPP and PML, who spent their whole lives in Lahore and Karachi and show up in their rural areas just to get votes.

On the whole, the religious parties won fair and square. The parties they defeated (ANP, MQM, PML(Q)) are all Musharraf supporters. So, it would be wrong to state that they were brought in by the govt. PPP traditionally rarely wins even a few seats in NWFP or Baluchistan. Thus anyone who was arguing for democracy before must allow the MMA their breathing room in politics, otherwise Pakistan will end up like Algeria, Egypt and Turkey (a country which keeps banning religious parties, due to which the religious parties keep winning more and more elections).

Unfortunately, people who argued vehemently for elections during Musharraf`s martial law have quickly changed colors as the results have not been to their likings. Conspiracy theories galore!!

The feudal and racistly ethnic domination of Pakistani politics has removed the moderate middle-class individual from Pakistani politics. There are actually no non-ethnic middle class parties in Pakistan (other than perhaps PTI). The feudal parties are now trying to sell themselves as secular alternatives to religious parties. Primarily because they have nothing else to offer, other than looting the country.

I think all of this is a healthy phenomenon. Someone needs to kick out the super-upper class feudal parties. The common poor man could care less about co-education, rock concerts, and arts. He just wants a job. And the only parties willing to give the poor man a representation (rightly or wrongly) are the religious parties.

I don`t think this is a vote for religion. Pakistan could not have become religious in just three years. It is a vote for change. It is a vote for moving from a big evil (feudal parties) to a lesser evil (religious parties). This is what democracy is supposed to do. Keep getting rid of evils, until a good group emerges. Hopefully, PPP, PML and MQM will now understand that they can be replaced if they keep hoodwinking the country.

With one province under religious parties (NWFP), two under feudal parties (Sind, Punjab) and one jointly ruled (Baluchistan), it will be interesting to see which one develops the fastest. My guess is the poor of NWFP will develop the fastest, while the rich of NWFP will get fed up of the restrictions that will be put in by the MMA and move to Lahore, Islamabad etc.. However, I don`t think NWFP will develop fast enough to satisfy the people, and eventually the religious parties will be voted out also. At that point, with the feudals, Army and maulvis discredited, Pakistan should start getting moderate, progressive, honest middle class, non-racist leadership into power.

Unfortunately, all the Pakistanis who benefit from the status quo, ``failed state`` leaderships of Pakistan, will try their best to maintain the status quo and promote the feudal parties by pointing to them being more secular than the maulvis, conveniently ignoring the corruption and massive misrule of these groups. Similarly, all the groups who support religious parties will continue to point to their religionism as a reason to keep them in power. Both these groups need to be discredited. And I think that process may have just begun.

http://www.thefridaytimes.com/front.htm

Najam Sethi says the MMA got 2.9 million votes this time in 2002, while in 1993 religious parties got 1.4 million votes, an increase of 1.5 million votes from 1993 to 2002.

He says out of this increase of 1.5 million, 600,000 is the natural increase due to population growth and decrease in voting age from 21 to 18.

The rest, 900,000 in number are the voters who changed their voter preference resulting in huge increase in seats from 9 out of 207 in 1993 to 45 out of 272 in 2002.

So he says only one million voters out of 72 million electorate caused this `stunning gain` for MMA.

Romair writes:

``Had the non-religious parties of Pakistan turned Pakistan into Singapore (or even Malyasia), rest assured, no one would have moved away from them, regardless of how much the US bombed any country.``

Come now,

When you have the feudals and the army grabbing a huge chunk of the national wealth pie for essentially unproductive purposes and having the means to enforce their writ, even God couldn`t turn Pakistan into Singapore. So why blame the non-religious parties?

The religious parties got their ``spectacular`` success simply because of the managed election where anyone with an iota of popularity was manipulated out of the elections. Why is anyone surprised? And the results must have been music to Mushy`s ears: on the one hand there is no concerted opposition to him due to a hung parliament and on the other he can point to the beards and tell the West that he is the only savior that Pakistan has.

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sadna: Out of 900,000 thousand you quoted from Najam Sethi, a big chunk came from NS supporters in Lahore, helping MMA to win 3 seats in Lahore as PML (N) and MMA alliance candidates. Additionally in Karachi and Islamabad, MMA vote bank went up due to many Afghan refugees getting ID cards and voting for MMA.
The support for US has made many Pakistanis unhappy but not stupid to change their vote from PPP or PML to MMA. The MMA gains are primarily of two reasons I outlined in post #1.

Ref Field Marshal #3

[Had the non-religious parties of Pakistan turned Pakistan into Singapore (or even Malyasia), rest assured, no one would have moved away from them, regardless of how much the US bombed any country.]

Just look at Malaysia where the Islamic party PAS is making strong electoral gains.

No matter what we all want to believe, the fact remains that you can Muslims out of poverty but you can`t take them away from the mullahs.

Otherwise, countries so much better off than Pakistan such as Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Iran would not be battling the mullahs. Nor would they have caved in like Saudi Arabia.

sameerjb

...... i agree with you that the army`s manipulation of the elections contributed to the horrifying success of the god-crazy fundamentalists and talibanists, but there is also a more dangerous phenomenon at play - the insidious spread of resurgent political islam and wahabism that has slowly poisoned pakistani society over the past two decades ..........the results of any election can be reversed the next time around, but it might be difficult if the voters are overcome by this horrible disease ............there is only one way to fight it - rock n` roll .................there are over seventy rock bands in beijing that protect the chinese from god and goblins ..........

There seems to be a lot of doom and gloom about the success of the religious parties in the 2002 elections. Some analysts have determined that this was the expected reaction to Musharraf`s pro United States policy and some argue that it was Musharraf`s hounding of the mainstream political parties, which created the vacuum that was filled by the religious parties.

The unsaid reality of the election result was that it was a protest against the Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum politics of Pakistan, where the political parties had nothing to offer the electorate other than being either pro or anti establishment. People of Pakistan are simply disgusted by the apathy shown by the political classes towards their plight and in voting for the religious candidates, the people of Pakistan were using their vote as a protest vote against the norms of the Pakistani polity, which has failed them.

The arrival pro forma of the religious parties in the mainstream of Pakistani politics is a healthy sign, because they are no longer politically marginalized and will have to confront, for the first time, the tangible limits of their religious rhetoric. By being in the mainstream, the religious parties will have to realize that cannot retain their political power only on the basis of their promises. They now have to perform or stand discredited in the eyes of the Pakistani electorate as being nothing different from the cotrie of the usual political aspirants in Pakistan. People of Pakistan want jobs, clean drinking water, security and economic opportunties and that why they voted for the religious parties.

However if the religious parties think that they have been elected to abolish Sunday as a holiday and move it to Friday or ban cable and TV or end co-education, they are mistaken. Such a religious extermism may be pliable in the NWFP or Baluchistan, which over the last twenty years have demographically changed and have been influenced by the Afghan presence, but it will not work in the rest of Pakistan. Banning women from the workplace is a lot easier to say than implement. Most women work, not because they have to, but because they must since a single income family cannot exist in the harsh economic conditions of Pakistan.

Do the religious parties have an answer as to how the income shortfall of the familes will be bridged, when their women stop working? Does the government of Pakistan, under the religious parties, has the money to pay all the idle women in Pakistan? Do they have the resources to create alternative educational facilities for women if they ban co-education in Pakistan. How are they going to seperate the work force of Pakistan, which has both women and men and women are presently working as doctors, nurses, bank tellers, teachers...

Will this logic of sexual segregation apply to the village, where the women do the majority of the work in the fields, while men sit around and smoke their ``hookhas`` and dicuss politics?

The ideas of the religious parties of dragging Pakistan back to the Dark Ages is impractical and if they force their views, then they do not represent Islam and are just using their religion to justify their political ambitions. In other case, the arrival of the religious bodes well for the development of the Pakistani polity, because now that they are in the arena of reality, they will discover that the implementation of their ideals is much more difficult than the phraseology of their rhetoric!

Ciao

Reply ferozk #10

Ferozk Sahab - there are examples of religious parties moderating once they achieve power (Turkey`s municipal elections, Iran`s ridiculously slow movement towards sanity, even the BJP`s general tendency after coming to power in the Centre) - but also examples of how even relatively small segments` refusal to moderate can derail this process and result in a lot of trouble - looking at Iran`s conservatives essentially holding the country back from where the majority of the population clearly wants to go, and of course our own beej`s inability to maintain its Raj Dharm in the face of right wing opposition. My question: what allows some to move towards becoming Christian Democrat equivalents and what stops others? Is having TOO much power, and hence not having to compromise, what does the process in? Or not having enough power to have something substantial to lose, and hence having no motivation to compromise and moderate?

Regards

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Re: ZafarA # 11

Most religious parties moderate their stance once they attain power.

As to your question, I think that it is a combination of both; they do not have enough power without forming a coalition and they do not wish to lose the power they already have by not compromising. In case of MMA and Pakistan, the leaders of MMA will have to adopt a more moderate position or risk seeing their influence decline. Pakistan, in the post election 2002 scenrio, is facing the prospects of a minority government and the only way a government can be formed is through compromises and coalition building. If MMA enters the government through a coalition, its relative power/influence will be directly proportional to its parliamentary strenght and in order to stay in the government, it will have to ``play ball``. The present parliament is fractured into myriad political parties to the extent that a coalition government does not have to include MMA, as there are other choices and parties willing to comprmise in order to form a government. MMA might end up in the opposition, but if it does end up as a part of the coalition forming the government, it will have to tailor its policies to fit the parameters of the coalition`s politics.

The ``name of the game`` of the 2002 parliament is compromise and unless MMA learns to comprmise on some of its positions, it will find itself becoming increasingly isolated in the affairs of the parliament and it will revert to its original intention, which would be that of a nusiance party ``spoiling the broth`` for the other political parties in parliament.

Hence, there is no reason to fret over the election results, because in a Mitternichean sense, if the religious parties in Pakistan want to be a part of the balance of power, they will have to play by the rules and the rules of politics in Pakistan favor status quo - establishment. The question is, are the leaders of MMA prudent enough to realize the limits of their power and act accordingly?

Ciao

Feroze,

Do you think ANY party can make that much of a difference in the direction Pakistan is going?..either in their domestic or foreign policy?

It seems to me, regardless what the parliament wants, the REAL power is in the hands of the army....& the buck stops with Mushy. If the army is moderate in their views vis a vis religion...thats where the country will go...if the army supports Bush`s policy on Al-Qeeda..thats what Pakistan will do..no ifs, ands or buts... I think thats the bottom line...

From an Indian standpoint; Mushy has taken an adverserial confrontative attitude with India. The dominant discourse in India is that India should fight Pakistani adverserial confrontation with adverserial confrontation...doesnt matter who is right or wrong, whether that attitude is justified or not....so the future relationship between the two countries is in the toilet; no matter what....

My personal opinion...if 2 countries are locking horns...refusing compromise...& if the rest of the world has made it VERY CLEAR that it wont take sides...might BECOMES right...

Sameer #6
It would be interesting to see a map somewhere of regional distribution of party-wise wins of seats. I guess chowk can now put up such a map if they wanted.

It might clarify the effect of voter apathy also to tally up the winning margins of MMA candidates, which may be a few thousands or few tens of thousands each, and which will likely all sum up to an even less number than 900,000.

btw, didn`t one of these religious party leaders claim his organisation had a million members. If so the tally of only 2.9 million votes shows his supporters were either pretty apathetic too or his organisation did the best it ever will.

Hope the folks writing in Pakistani newspapers will take a pause from breastbeating long enough to take a look at what the numbers really say. They may just find that God is in these details and not with Mr FazlUr Rehman as claimed :).

The conscience of Paksitan, Nawab Zada Nasurallah Khan is alive and well.

Any party who compromises on Legal Framwork Order and Constitutional Amendments done by this despot, are unacceptable - whether they are Mullahs or non-Mullahs. This is the true test of sincerity of any party.