Electoral constituency delimitations in the country have always been a controversial issue. Most notably, the Karachi gerrymandering because of which representative setups do not reflect ethnic demographic realities. But in this hapless Republic, the aforementioned garden variety deviations from representative democracy are not as surreal as some of the others. Consider the three seats in the AJK legislative assembly elections, the cancellation of whose polling has the MQM in such a huff. The polling stations of these three seats are in Sindh, Balochistan and the Punjab.
The same for some seats in the Gilgit Baltistan assembly. Consider also that other freak of nature, the National Assembly seat for the constituency known as Frontier Region. A cusp between the tribal and settled areas, the FR seat in the house covers areas that are entirely dis-contiguous to each other; a bit of the constituency here, a bit beyond another district.
There are different reasons for each of these deviations. The FR is a case for delimitation by the election commission. The more sturdy way would be to – and this would require a great deal of thought – rethink the whole FR situation to begin with.
The case of the AJK seats is diplomatic. Our foreign affairs apparatus thinks (not without reason) that treating the region as distinct from the rest of the country strengthens our argument in the Kashmir dispute. This results not only in a population less than half the size of that of Lahore to have not only its own president, prime minister and cabinet but also a functioning model of a federal bureaucracy. All this costs a packet. And then there is the argument that Kashmiris everywhere in the country should be allowed to vote in the elections.
The fact of the matter is that many years have passed since the start of the Kashmir dispute. Though we should not deviate from the cause, a realisation that demography isn’t what it used to be is much needed. Who is a Kashmiri, who isn’t, is a complicated mesh of identities. The slippery slope then resembles, more than anything, the antics of the world’s only racist state, Israel, where genealogies were dug up to claim nationality and voting rights.
What all these examples serve to prove is an unwillingness for the positive framework of the state to live in the real world. Like a large number of our rules, regulations and laws, systems of representation are also outmoded and ineffective.
