More power to JI?
It comes as little surprise, naturally, that any worthwhile research would find the ruling PML-N the ‘least democratic’ of Pakistan’s many political parties. That MQM, JUI-F and PPP are not far behind is not so shocking either. Strangely, though, PILDAT (Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency) raised a number of eyebrows by identifying the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) as the most convincing in terms of internal democracy, followed by the National Party (NP) and PTI. But scratch the surface a little and you find PILDAT’S calculation criteria sometimes just as much off the mark as some of our mainstream political parties’ democratic credentials.
The first main problem with JI being placed at the top of the list of most democratic parties is that the party is not truly democratic in nature to begin with. Not everybody is eligible for membership to the Jamaat. And it’s not as if the exclusivity owes to a select type of political persuasion. And even then, it has a three-tier membership system, with only a few thousand committed full-time. Also, it was misleading, to say the least, of the report to note a ‘lack of correlation between internal democracy and mass popularity’ of political parties.
There can be no question of calculating proportionality, or otherwise, till there is a trend of ‘internal democracy’. And the world of science requires at least two clean samples to qualify as trend. As things stand, JI’s party elections are neither transparent nor thorough; the National Party is open to all and conducts elections – and perhaps rightly rated so high – but has very limited appeal outside Balochistan, therefore can contribute little to the final analysis. PTI has conducted an internal election, with much fanfare, but at the end of the day it was hardly something to write home about. But the report’s analysis about the mainstream parties is spot on. They can boast few, if any, democratic credentials since their inception, even though they never tire to claim defending and fighting for democracy. And as long as mainstream parties remain shy of overhaul, parties like JI, etc, will win more points from think tanks and analysts at least.
