Rich man’s polls?
THE general elections to determine Pakistan’s fortunes are just around the corner. On Feb 8, 2024, the people of Pakistan will come out to vote for a party or candidate who they believe is competent enough to rule for the next five years. Much has been said about the level playing field being prepared for a particular party or the lack thereof for another. Yet, Elections 2024 are no different to general elections of yesteryear. Yes, the ‘favourites’ of the powers that be may have changed, but the underlying idea of the general elections being the rich man’s playground continues to be true.
An election in the truest sense of the word is the people’s choice of an individual who will represent them in a particular body. As is customary, elections involve canvassing, ie, reaching out to the masses to market oneself as one whose merits outweigh those of his or her opponents and result in such a person being ‘elected’.
That said, in Pakistan elections have always been about a particular economic class from which emerge individuals of a particular gender to fight it out amongst themselves and to use their financial muscle that can help them get the votes.
A look at the majority of the members who have been elected over the past 50 years to parliament makes this idea clear. A big chunk of the people (read: men) voted into power are either large landowners, sugar barons and construction tycoons or business magnates, whose foray into national and provincial politics is backed by enormous financial clout. This is where the title of the piece comes from.
The average Pakistani will have to save for years to contest.
Meanwhile, the gender difference is appalling. Of the total number of candidates (5,121) contesting for the general seats in the National Assembly, 4,807 are male and only 312 are females (two candidates from the transgender community). For all their claimed progressiveness, even the three leading political parties have allotted only a handful of seats to women nominees. While there are reserved seats for women in parliament, there is little to show that parties are taking a significant stride towards plugging the gap between men and women candidates for the general seats. At the other end, female voters make up around 46 per cent of the total eligible voters — an improvement from the past but one can still see how women are being shortchanged in elections as they are in every other facet of life.
Having established that Pakistan’s general elections have an unhealthy obsession with men at the helm of affairs, we can dissect the financial clout which has become the very foundation of Pakistan’s electoral activity.
The Election Act, 2017, hailed as a complete code of polls in Pakistan, actually facilitates the triumph of rich men over those with fewer resources in the electoral arena. Section 132 of the Act specifies the amount a candidate is allowed to spend. As per the said law, a candidate for the National Assembly on their own and through his supporters and political party cannot spend more than Rs10 million and for a candidate of a provincial assembly that cap is Rs4m. Now contrast that with the average household income in Pakistan which stands at around Rs75,000.
This means that for an average person in Pakistan to be able to spend even close to the spending limit for election to the National Assembly, they will need to save all their income for over a decade. That’s not even the irony. The irony is that the spending limit only applies where a candidate permits such expenditure. If expenses are incurred for a candidate which he or she does not permit, in light of Section 132 of the Election Act, those expenses are not considered part of the candidate’s official expenses to which the limit applies.
To add fuel to the fire, no spending limit exists for political parties, just as long as their expenditures are duly accounted for, legally sourced and not directed towards a particular candidate. This is why when you open your browsers to surf the internet, watch videos or scour your television, you see various political parties advertising themselves having bought valuable ad space and airtime worth millions of rupees. It is only natural then for such political parties to gravitate towards candidates who can finance these splurges.
The purpose here is not to relegate a rich man to the comforts of their expensive homes but to lay bare how the ‘level playing field’ being sought by one and all should actually be realised for aspirational women and socially challenged individuals rather than for the same pensioners who continue to rule the roost in Pakistan.
The writer is a lawyer.
Published in Dawn, February 1st, 2024