ISLAMABAD: A large number of voters in Pakistan are not so keen on voting for religio-political parties in general elections, denting the popularity of these religious outfits, including Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), who are increasingly becoming unpopular in the electoral arena.

Out of 175 registered political parties, there are around 23 religious political parties with Islamic or sectarian names, but their performance in the elections has been close to negligible and neither the Election Commission nor the relevant NGOs have maintained data on votes obtained by these groups in the elections.

Except for the JUI-F led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, Islamic political parties are not doing well across the board. According to social activist Shahid Jatoi, the JUI-F was not a religious outfit per se.

“The JUI-F is largely a right-wing Pakhtun nationalist party, filling the vacuum created after the banning of the National Awami Party in the 1970s,” he said while commenting on the popularity of the party in the Pashtun belt.

Religious outfits fail to impress constituents

The proscribed group Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) entered the electoral race in 2013 as part of an alliance titled ‘Muttahida Deeni Mahaz’, which included JUI-S.

The candidates belonging to the ASWJ got up to 6,000 votes in most constituencies. During the next elections, the outfit contested polls on the platform of the Rah-i-Haq Party, and its vote bank dropped further.

The Majlis Wahdat Muslimeen (MWM), a Shia representative party, obtained only 12,360 votes in the 2018 elections, down from 41,532 in 2013. Similarly, Markazi Jamiat Ahle Hadith, led by Senator Prof Sajid Mir, obtained only 520 votes in 2013 and the party did not show any interest in the 2018 polls.

The reincarnation of Jamaatud Dawa (JuD), registered as the ‘Allah-o-Akbar Tehreek’ obtained 172,121 votes from 69 constituencies in the 2018 elections. In 2013, it was the Milli Muslim League, but at the time it could not woo voters.

Islamabad-based Shahid Jatoi said that though people generally do not vote for religious political parties, voting based on religious sentiments is one of the key determinants of voting patterns.

Such a pattern was visible recently with the rise of Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP). The party gained political mileage from the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri and the subsequent Faizabad sit-in in 2017 against the PML-N government.

The party fared well in Attock but remained way behind the winning candidates. In NA-52 (now NA-48), it obtained only 11,996 votes out of 234,508 registered votes. In NA-53 (now NA-47), out of 312,142 votes in the constituency, the TLP candidate bagged only 5,144. In NA-54 (now NA-46), the TLP candidate got 3,637 votes out of 312,142 votes. Since 2018, the outfit has faced a steady decline. At the moment, it is facing a shortage of suitable candidates for national and provincial assembly elections.

Meanwhile, analyst Tahir Mehdi said that the general trend in Pakistan was that the logical motivation for the people was not the ideology, but their personal preferences and party following.

Similarly, the JI is mostly active across the country, but voters do not seem to be impressed by the party.

JI Naib Emir Mian Mohammad Aslam contesting on the platform of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) got 7,320 votes from NA-54 in 2018, a sharp decline from 25,048 votes he obtained from the same area in the 2013 elections. He won this constituency in 2002.

Minority politics

In addition to political outfits which base their politics on Islam, a few ‘Christian parties’ registered with the Election Commission of Pakistan have also failed to attract voters. These parties include the ‘All Pakistan Minorities Alliance’, ‘All Pakistan Minority Movement’ based in Multan, and the Lahore-based ‘Masihi Awami Party’ and ‘Pakistan Masiha Party’.

A former minority lawmaker said these parties were not interested in elections, but they acted as a community organisation.

Lal Chand said: “The fact is that establishing a political party is easier in Pakistan compared to starting a community-based organisation (CBO) or an NGO.”

Even if these parties aimed to use faith for political mileage, their attempts have failed miserably. For instance, a candidate belonging to the ‘Christian Progressive Movement’ got less than 100 votes in the 2013 polls in Islamabad, which has a sizeable Christian community. In 2018, this party preferred to get delisted.

According to Sindh’s ex-MPA Anthony Naveed, the fruits of the 2002 decision by the government for joint electoral was visible now. He gave the example of Hari Ram and Gyan Chand – both belonging to the Hindu community – who won the provincial elections on PPP tickets from Mirpurkhas city and Jamshoro, respectively, in 2018.

“There was hardly any non-Muslim population in these constituencies,” he said, adding, “It shows that it was not the people of Pakistan but the political parties that were slow in implementing inclusion.”

Activists have urged the political parties to award more tickets to non-Muslim nominees for general seats and give more political posts within the parties to members from the non-Muslim communities.

Published in Dawn, january 1st, 2024