By-election lessons

What not to do

The feverish political activity that preceded the NA-246 by-election may well set the standard for the type of politics that Karachi will witness in the future. Even though little changed in the final analysis – and MQM retained its stronghold over the area – a number of incidents both before and after the election should serve as important lessons. For example, while such passionate campaigning might be a bit of a novelty for the people of the constituency, they were not really a big part of the politics since party agendas mainly concentrated on either empty rhetoric or demonising the other party.

PTI could have done better than promising to ‘bring the lights back to the city of lights’. The slogan might have attracted a few followers had his party been able to bring back some lights to KP, where it is in power. JI, too, wanted to bring hope, etc, back to Karachi. Neither party, in challenging MQM, said much about what it could do intrinsically to improve the constituency. And at the end of the day the contest was about three parties just demeaning each other. In some cases, even if some just side with the devil they know rather than the deep blue sea, they can’t really be blamed. It is the politicians that do not live up to demands of democracy.

And what happened after the election also left a bad after taste. JI did not like the polling one bit, and complained of all sorts of rigging. PTI, too, after initially taking the defeat in its stride, complained that the ECP failed to conduct the poll properly. All this, of course, when unprecedented measures were taken to ensure transparency. One wonders if these two parties would have observed such irregularities if their candidates had won. And if indeed deep rooted measures are needed to streamline the entire electoral process, then perhaps it is time for political parties to take the parliamentary forum for just such exercises more seriously.