Dream of a fair election

How people’s mandate was always stolen

“I don’t want to pay a single rupee to any voter as bribe to vote for us. That I will never approve. I prefer defeat to winning election by adopting dishonest and corrupt methods.” These were the solemn instructions of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah to G Allana, who was in charge of the All-India Muslim League election campaign in the province of Sindh at the time of the general elections in December 1946. This should be the guiding principle of all political parties and contestants in all types of elections. Moreover, this should be the spirit under which elections should be conducted.

Historically, this has not happened in Pakistan as all elections have been allegedly rigged or manipulated by either the candidates or their parties or by the very authorities that were entrusted the task to hold free and fair elections. This does not mean that all the politicians and political parties taking part in the elections or the personnel involved in overseeing the electoral process indulged in unfair practices but the important point is that not a single election held in the country has been termed fair and has been acceptable to all the stake holders. As a result, the general impression formed has been that elections can never be held fully fair and free in Pakistan. That is why even the most sympathetic foreign observers of the electoral process commented that the recently held May 2013 general elections were “fair by Pakistani standards.” This is shameful! Doesn’t this mean that the Pakistani standards of fairness are far below the accepted international standards of free and fair elections?

This worldwide perception of electoral unfairness in Pakistan has taken roots due to our poor track record. A journey down the memory lane may help to understand why it has been so. The earliest elections that the country could hold after independence were the provincial elections of 1951-52. The high standard set by Quaid-e-Azam as mentioned above was not followed by Quaid-i-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan. Under his premiership, elections in Punjab, NWFP, and Bahawalpur were widely rigged by the abuse of state’s machinery. The violations were so blatant that their subsequent condemnation forced Liaquat to call re-election in Bahawalpur. In the popular jargon, this entire exercise of elections and the massive manipulation of the results were dismissed as an act of ‘Jhurlo’.

Thence enters Ayub Khan. In the light of his tall claims to clean the ‘mess’ created by the earlier governments, one would have expected fairness in the presidential and Basic Democracy elections held under his guard; however, it was not to be so. Money and coercion were used as the tools to tar the electoral process. To defeat Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah, the sister of the Quaid who contested the 1964 presidential election against Ayub, about half a million rupees were paid as a bribe to Maulana Abdul Hameed Bhashani, the head of the National Awami Party (NAP) and the most vocal supporter of Ms Jinnah in East Bengal by a minister of Ayub to betray her. Money works wonders because initially when Ms Jinnah was reluctant to take on Ayub, it was the very Bhashani – the Red Mullah of Bengal – who had prevailed upon her to contest by promising complete support of his party.

Large sums of money were also required to purchase the political conscience of the 80,000 Basic Democrats which constituted the electoral college to elect the president. The dustbin of history has coughed up at least two secret letters written by the All-Pakistan Textile Mills Association directing its members to contribute rupees two per spindle and rupees twenty-five per loom as their ‘contribution’ to Ayub’s election campaign. These two letters raised a sum of fifteen million.

As if all this arm-twisting was not enough, the press was also pressurized to manufacture a favourable public opinion of Ayub. The all-powerful governor of Punjab, Nawab Amir Mohammad Khan of Kalabagh came into action. He called the owner of a leading newspaper to ‘nail the fact’ that it was Ayub, who should win and not the other way as his paper was yapping. The outcome was ‘self-censorship’ and as a rule, Ayub Khan’s crap was published under a six column headline while the maximum display allowed to Ms Jinnah’s speeches was not more than three columns.

Ayub did not want to leave anything to chance so he fixed a price ranging from Rs3000 to 5000 to buy the votes of each of the Basic Democrats (BD members). An eyewitness to the haggling between BDs and Ayub’s agents in Karachi has stated that he “saw many BD members taking an oath on the Quran to vote for Ayub and accepting envelopes containing cash.”

The 1970s weren’t either better. The opposition called Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) accused Mr Bhutto of the ruling PPP to have rigged the election under a set plan codenamed “Operation Victory” – the details of which have yet to be exposed. The very PNA leaders, who termed the 1977 elections for the National Assembly as fraud and resultantly boycotted the provincial elections, had actually reached an understanding with Bhutto prior to the elections whereby the latter had guaranteed the victory of all the top PNA leaders in the elections.

There seems to be a lot of foul play in the ’77 elections. While Bhutto accused the PNA of having received funds from the US and Anwar Sadat’s government in Egypt to oust him which the opposition denied but an ’American scholar’ present during the PNA agitation movement against Bhutto in Lahore admitted that before a dead demonstrator’s body reached his home, his dependants were paid Rs25,000. Such allegations and counter-allegations aside, the malpractices were so flagrant that even the Chief Election Commissioner at that time is on the record to have made an admission in this regard which was published in a Gujarati language newspaper before the strong arm of censor could come in action.

The trend of irregularities and malpractices in the elections became an acceptable norm in the 1980s and 1990s. A political alliance by the name of IJI was cobbled together to deprive Ms Benazir Bhutto’s PPP from gaining majority in the 1988 elections. The ‘heavy mandate’ that Nawaz Sharif got in the February 1997 elections was challenged by many to have been ‘engineered.’ Moreover, the presidential referendum held by General Musharraf in April 2002 to have himself elected as president was thought to be largely ‘manipulated’ whereas the general elections conducted by him in October 2002 were also marred by charges of rigging. Consequently, when Mir Zafarullah Jamali took oath of premiership, the opposition clamored: “We do not accept Jamali’s regime as it is a product of rigging.”

We have seen that elections are likely to be unfair if organized by the incumbent government. So, a need was felt to hold elections under a caretaker government. Even this did not turn out to be a satisfying experience. A White Paper on the 1990 election entitled, “How an election was stolen?” issued by PDA, an electoral alliance led by the PPP well explains why and how elections have been rigged in the country. The most disturbing aspect is that they are manipulated as a “part of a larger design to give certain direction to the politics of Pakistan.” Well, that ‘certain direction’ is often in conflict with the will of the people, and that is why the election process and the results are questioned and rejected. An experienced politician, who had till then contested almost all elections in Pakistan, telegraphed a pithy couplet to the Election Commission to register his protest over the widespread irregularities in the October 1990 elections. This couplet may have been lying somewhere in the archives of the Election Commission. It aptly sums up the tarnished electoral politics in our society:

Piyein na roz, yeh zahid kay bus ki baat nahi,

Tamam shehr hey, do char das ki bat nahi

The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]