- The privilege of the few
Article 223 of the constitution provides a bar against double membership and reads: (1) No person shall, at the same time, be a member of— (a) both Houses; or (b) a House and a Provincial Assembly; or (c) the Assemblies of two or more Provinces; (d) a House or a Provincial Assembly in respect of more than one seat.
However, subsection (2) provides leeway to persons desirous of contesting elections in more than one constituency thereunder, and reads: (2) Nothing in clause (1) shall prevent a person form being a candidate for two or more seats at the same time, whether in the same body or in different bodies, but if he is elected to more than one seat he shall, within a period of thirty days after the declaration of the result for the last such seat, resign all but one of his seats, and if he does not so resign, all the seats to which he has been elected shall become vacant at the expiration of the said period of thirty days except the seat to which he has been elected last or, if he has been elected to more than one seat on the same day, the seat for election to which his nomination was filed last. In this clause, “body” means either House or a Provincial Assembly.
It would be highly impractical and naïve to expect that a candidate originally from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa could manage to help alleviate the troubles faced by the people from interior Sindh or south Punjab
Although no person can hold two seats at the same time in any “body” the abovementioned provisions of the constitution allow candidates to contest elections from more than one constituency, not requiring residential or connective evidence linking or connecting the candidate to a particular constituency but only on the basis of being enrolled on the electoral roll anywhere in the country.
Firstly, this provision has mainly been used as a device for prominent political parties and politicians to minimise their political risks at the time of elections, trying to keep their footing in as many constituencies as possible, securing fallback options/constituencies in case of unfavorable electoral outcomes. It is beyond my humble understanding if this flexibility offers anything more to the socio-political spectrum.
I fail to understand how this provision is beneficial to the cause of a democratic system, if anything this provision rather fetters democracy at the ground level as well-endowed and influential politicians contest elections from constituencies they are largely indifferent, disinterested and unconcerned about, having no connection and unable to relate to these areas, the people, their cultures, their concerns and their needs. For example, it would be highly impractical and naïve to expect that a candidate originally from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa could manage to help alleviate the troubles faced by the people from interior Sindh or south Punjab and vice-versa for that matter. This has nothing to do with competence or credibility of the candidate but rather an issue of pragmatism.
Secondly, in this very process the influential candidates essentially give the masses no options but to vote for the same people again and again and inevitably restrict and undermine any political aspirations the people and the youth of that particular constituency might have, leading to a stagnant, un-evolving and inefficient political system. The notion of democracy in a nutshell provides a voice to all areas of a particular country through elected representatives of those areas. That voice is muted through unnecessary use of such flexibilities which afford the opportunity to influential and well endowed politicians to cut in line and snatch the opportunity or chance from these areas to have a voice through a representative of their choice, from amongst themselves, just because they can. The ludicrousness of this provision is pronounced and magnified on realisation of the fact that there is no clear or certain law barring even a sitting member from contesting for a new seat.
Funnily enough, multiple seats contested by the same candidates will be vacated by the candidate once the candidate has chosen which seat to occupy from amongst his conquests. That would in turn leave the vacated seats and their constituencies unattended without representation and their inhabitants and the election commission in the hassle of being forced into unwarranted by-elections, bearing extra financial burden on the exchequer but truly borne by the people vis a vis taxes paid.
Our neighbour, India, having realised the absurdness of the same, through amendment to the Representation of the People Act (RP Act) of 1951, has restricted the candidates to contesting for a maximum of two seats. Before this law, leaders were allowed to contest from as many seats as they wished to, a situation mirroring the status quo in Pakistan. Countless publications and papers point towards a positive reformation of the remnants of this overly pliable provision in India and it is high time that the law stops being star-struck by the fame, grandeur and influence of the affluent politicians and political parties and is revamped and reformed in order to impart the concepts of efficiency and meritocracy for a fruitful evolution of democracy in Pakistan. Like “one person, one vote”, the principle of “one leader, one constituency” should also be followed.