System’s failings

One of the fundamental reasons why some of us prefer to fight for greater democracy in this country is because it remains the only attainable system, which can both open up space for alternative forms of politics and contribute to pro-poor uplift. That said though, the important thing for many who strive for something greater than procedural, electoral democracy, is that these goals need to be kept in sight, and a workable politics needs to be constructed in what we can call ‘peace-time’, i.e., when we’re experiencing a procedurally democratic regime.
The tasks of pro-poor uplift and developing an alternative form politics are deeply interconnected, and, unfortunately, strongly contingent on the way a regime organises the state at a local level. In 2007, during the heyday of Musharraf’s devolution plan, one of my instructors at college, Dr Ali Cheema, wrote a paper analysing impediments to pro-poor governance in Pakistan. His basic premise was that electoral accountability is one particular route for people to make government’s (local, provincial, or national) responsive, and there are a host of other strategies and instruments available, such as citizen participation in local development, media oversight, court petitions, and public advocacy. All instruments, voting included, require some manner of political organisation based on a collective projection of interest.
Dr Cheema’s analysis of the 2001 devolution system yielded some fairly important results. For starters, the entire system suffered from an anti-poor bias, in the sense that it allocated token seats for peasants and women, without adequate safeguards to ensure that their voice was actually being paid any attention. In his research, Dr Cheema uses the example of allocation of development schemes to see which segments of society were being serviced by the local governments. The results were fairly unsurprising. In the 7 field-sites evaluated in his research, most development schemes (sanitation and road soling) were being carried out in areas where politically influential individuals resided, while negligible attention was paid to villages that hosted marginalised groups (landless labourers, mussalis, artisans and craftsmen). More than that, it was concluded that limited choices within the electoral sphere resulted in either dependent voting i.e., poor people voting for local influentials, or poor people not voting at all. The places that deviated from this were areas where political parties had penetrated down to the village level, and where collective class-based groups were more active.
Given the present-day, bureaucrat governed local context we find ourselves in, the space to project pro-poor interest on local governance is even more restricted. In all four provinces, the ruling coalition/parties, while making rhetorical commitment to elected local governments, decided to resuscitate the commissionerate system with little affliction to their conscience. In Punjab especially, the assembly has been busy postponing a decision on local government elections for the last three years. All of this, at least on the face of it, shows a degree of wariness on part of political parties to expose themselves to the vast underbelly of Pakistani society.
Content on using intermediaries, be they MNAs, MPAs, or UC level machine politicians, political parties have mostly stayed away from the task of organising local level marginalised interests. Even during times of devolution, contact between working class people and politicians was limited, to the extent that only eight percent of respondents during the surveying said that they had met their union council representatives, and all of them admitted that these meetings were through informal channels. Taking an educated guess, one can safely conclude that the percentage of people meeting their MNAs and MPAs is even smaller.
In the backdrop of such limited levels of political interaction, it’s easy to understand how patron-client politics has become so entrenched in the country. Historically speaking, the last three decades, and the constituent devolution programmes, 1979 and 2001, were instrumental in impeding political party organisation at the local level. Even now, the Pakistan Peoples Party, thanks largely to Bhutto’s movement, is the only mainstream group that can lay claim to some level of grassroots penetration, while other parties continue to opt for expedient ways.
So how does one go about changing a system that’s dug its roots over such a long period of time? Well for starters, political parties need to realise that working to gain pro-poor sentiment is only in their benefit, in so far as it will help them win votes. Secondly, people who wish to spread an alternative socio-cultural agenda (such as wealth redistribution, land reform, and anti-extremism) need to work in organising collective interests at the local level, and use a host of other strategies, like public advocacy and litigation, available to them outside of the electoral sphere.
And finally, provinces need to enact an elected devolution system that ensures citizen input in planning and implementing development schemes, transfers fiscal resources to the local government level, and is conducted with full participation of all political parties. In the presence of such measures, procedural democracy will finally take on a more desirable, substantive shape.

The writer blogs at http://recycled-thought.blogspot.com. Email him at [email protected], or send a tweet @umairjav