PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY/PARTIES, CLASS, ETC

The legislative branch of government has faced innumerable obstacles in fulfilling the role outlined in the 1973 Constitution. Additionally, the cyclical turn between militarism and civilian rule has greatly affected the formation and development of the political sphere more broadly.

Here, in concluding this discussion of the legislative branch and the political sphere, the point that needs to be made is that military praetorianism cannot provide a complete answer to the question of why democracy has not found sure footing within Pakistan. In 2007 the leaders of the PPP and PML-N drafted and signed an agreement by which they agreed that, irrespective of who formed the government and who was in the opposition, the role of each would be respected and that neither would seek to have the military intervene in order to destabilise the other. Additionally, they would put an end to political victimisation through the partisan appointments process to national accountability institutions.^[229] The 2008 elections returned no clear vic­tor and for some time these two parties entered into a coalition, albeit a short-lived one.

Some analysts have looked further to suggest that broader failures of representative government are the reciprocal effect of a congenitally underdeveloped social sphere. Factors such as the perpetuation of bira- deri and tribal loyalties, low levels of education and extreme disparities of opportunity are seen as limiting the development of a democratic culture.^[230] However, the absence of indicators of a robust or ideal type civil society are also to be understood as the ill-effects of the elite state’s deliberate neglect of the vast cumulation of persons who form the subordinate classes of the nation.

The Workers Party petition is interesting because it indicts the formal legal apparatus of elections as a site where elite consensus transmogri­fies into a popular mandate. It also presents a profound critique of political parties and actual democratic functioning in the country that goes beyond prognostics about the deep state and cultural atavism. The petition quietly pushes the question, ‘why have political rhetoric and party policies become so oblivious to the socio-economic needs of the rural and urban poor?’ In identifying the coupling of low voter turn-out and the first-past-the post electoral system, the petition draws attention to the fact that the system itself recreates a broader elite hegemony; the capacity of electoral exercises to return majorities in Parliament or enable the creation of coalitions on the basis of horse-trading is related in turn to Parliament’s imperviousness to popular demands. The suggested remedies include ballots that offer a choice for ‘none of the above’, run-off voting in the absence of a conclusive win in any con­stituency and the introduction of compulsory voting.

The disjunct is felt in the neglect of issues of human development by all political regimes in Pakistan. Whereas assemblies through the 1980s and 1990s may have been forestalled from passing any signifi­cant legislation by virtue of the extreme fragmentation of the political sphere, recent assemblies that exist in a more cooperative environment also show only minimal deviation away from this systemic neglect. In terms of budgetary outlay, along with the government’s own admin­istrative funding, military spending continues to be the highest single output and in recent times has increased at an average rate of 11 per cent per year. In contrast, education and health come in pitiably behind, together accounting for less than 5 per cent of the annual budgetary outlay. In replication of what has now long been a pattern of politi­cal homogenisation apparent in many different parts of the world, no promises for an economic reform agenda that clashes in any way with the infamous liberalisation agenda pushed as structural adjustment by multilateral donors is on offer from any of the major parties in Pakistan. The dependency yoke of external debt reaches to $7 billion per year in servicing costs and this amongst other features of Pakistan’s political economy keeps major political players in a posture of obedi­ence to an agenda that does not seek to redress the extreme wealth and opportunity deficits in the country.

In spite of the many failures of parliamentary democracy, many of which are listed in this chapter, Workers Party represents not just these failures but some of the hope that has been built through the steady implantation of democracy over what is now approaching a full decade of uninterrupted Parliamentary rule in Pakistan. Over the course of two consecutive democratic governments, the rules for the holding of elections have grown palpably fairer. Particularly, the Eighteenth and Twentieth Amendments try to ensure a non-partisan character for the Election Commission and also for the interim governments that are appointed. The even more recent Twenty-second Amendment Act extended the Election Commission’s oversight to cover the increasingly important realm of local government elections.

The Supreme Court and, to a lesser extent, High Courts through­out the country have finally taken up the mantle of regulating other democratic activities. This includes directing the government to remove obstructions to legitimate political protest by rival parties. They have also mandated the bounds of such protest themselves without an over­heavy deference being shown to the internal security paradigm that was the hallmark of courts’ functioning in previous decades.^[231]