Symbols and slang
EVERY country has its own electoral ethos and symbols and slang that go with it. For instance, while the Brits stand for office, the Americans run for it. Now that July 25 has been announced as the date for the 2018 general elections in Pakistan, it is time to dust off our electoral jargon. You can bet new slogans will be coined, insults and innuendoes imagined, but the time-tested ones will prove their endurance yet again.
Let us take the political parties’ choice of electoral symbols first. One need not be Prof Robert Langdon, that famed hero of Dan Brown’s novels, to decipher the symbology behind and mythology attached to electoral symbols doing the rounds in Pakistan. The symbols are needed in the first place because a large section of the electorate still cannot read and has been historically trained to stamp the party symbol on the ballot paper regardless of who the candidate is.
Take the erstwhile sword of the original Pakistan Peoples Party. The party’s founder was the namesake of a historical sword called Zulfikar, hence a sword was a perfect fit for the party. When the powers that be decide to create an uneven playing field for a party, they deprive it of its very identity, its symbol. Having lost the coveted sword, the party settled for yet another martial symbol, an arrow. That its Urdu translation ‘teer’ rhymed with Benazir who had by then taken over the party leadership did not hurt. The PML-N symbol, the tiger, is yet another symbol exuding strength and machismo. The smartest move in this game of symbols has been employed by the JUI-F that plays on religious sentiments,
Candidates don’t only ‘run’ for or ‘stand’ in elections, some ‘sit’ as well.
with some within its ranks reportedly claiming that its symbol, a book, represents the Quran and hence people should vote for it.
Where electoral terminology is concerned, what is generally referred to as ‘assuming office’ everywhere in the world is called ‘coming to power’ in our region. That in itself should warn the voters of what is in store for them. Equally jarring is the use of the term ‘transfer of power’. What is meant by that? There is an electorate out there that in the exercise of its right to franchise elects sufficient numbers of candidates of a party that can either form a government on its own or by entering into alliances with other parties.
It is OK to ‘invite’ the majority party to form a government by the president. But to call it a ‘transfer of power’ clearly implies that a higher authority, beyond the pale of elected representation and constitutional accountability, does so at its own sweet discretion.
‘Fair election’ is another figment of the imagination that has found its way into electoral vocabulary. The truth of the matter is that in the Western form of democracy that everybody has come to accept as the model to emulate, the most one can hope for is a reasonably unrigged election. Fairness does not come into play where one candidate has millions to spend on the campaign and the opponent cannot even get a sufficient number of banners printed. What is fair about one party’s candidates canvassing and campaigning freely across the constituency whereas the opponents cannot leave home for fear of their lives?
This was on full display during the 2013 election campaign when the PML-N and PTI candidates could tour the entire country without a worry in the world, whereas the PPP, ANP and MQM could hardly undertake any campaigning as the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan and its myriad collaborators were attacking them at will throughout the country.
Candidates don’t only ‘run’ or ‘stand’ in elections, some ‘sit’ in favour of others as well. This usually means getting paid or pressured to bow out of the competition so that the voter does not get distracted by too many horses in the race. There is a famous case where a party lost a provincial assembly seat in its stronghold because its voters could not distinguish between a pencil and an arrow. Imagine the pencil guy causing enough confusion among the arrow voters to help the tonga party merrily trot through.
Commiserations to candidates having to pick a symbol from the Election Commission’s list that includes gems like brinjal, crocodile, gun, iron stand, shoes, watermelon, cauliflower, magnifying glass, nail cutter and screw.
‘Dhandli’ or rigging is the most resilient slang word associated with elections in Pakistan because the practice or fear of it just refuses to fade away. ‘Farishtey’ (angels), ‘nadeeda quwatein’ (unseen powers), boots, a two-fingered tapping on the shoulder and ‘khalai makhlooq’ (aliens) all refer to the same ‘outstanding’ player who theoretically stands outside the political field, but plays rough and dirty. Not sure if the 100-day programmes have taken into consideration the dharna or protest sit-in culture popularised in the last five years. After all, what goes around, comes around.
The author is a poet and analyst.
Published in Dawn, May 29th, 2018