Vision of Democracy?

Daily Times, March 9, 2006
EDITORIAL: Horse-trading and legitimacy of the Senate

Appearing on a TV channel on Tuesday, opposition politicians complained of the buying and selling of votes in the provincial assemblies on the occasion of elections to the Senate on March 6, 2006. Prof Khursheed Ahmad of the Jamaat-e-Islami said that 24 votes of his alliance, the MMA, were bought in the NWFP assembly. Ilyas Bilour, the newly elected ANP senator, said that the 24 votes, sold to defeat PPP’s Farhatullah Babar, represented MMA’s women MPAs. He said the votes were usually priced at Rs 15 million each.

The election to 45 seats of the Senate has thrown up predictable muck. The government and its allied parties have benefited, gaining more seats than were lost in the ballot in January. In Punjab, the ruling PML has ‘vanquished’ the PPPP and the PMLN who retained just one seat each. In Sindh, the PML-Functional League-MQM coalition could not stop the MMA and the PPPP from walking away with five seats, including one won by a cleric who has on several occasions contested the Larkana National Assembly seat against Benazir Bhutto. Only in Balochistan did the PML lose two seats that it shouldn’t have, for which it is pulling up its local leaders.

The polls seemed to be normal except in the NWFP assembly. The ruling party and its ally PPP (Sherpao) have won three of the 11 seats although the PMLQ has only 10 seats in the 124-member house. The MMA suffered a setback and has cried foul — to no one’s surprise. Chief Minister Akram Durrani had proposed elections by a show of hands, which the opposition was within its rights to reject. The weak point lay in Mr Durrani’s party that forms the majority and it lay among the women handpicked from the relatives of its leaders.

The MMA may be going through an internal moral crisis. After the local polls last year, its leader Maulana Fazl ur Rehman, while alleging “dhaandhli” (cheating), did admit that in places his partymen had succumbed to the lure of money. Reluctantly accepting the special seats for women in the 17th Amendment, the MMA decided to fill these with women belonging to the families of its leaders. That the list of the inducted women read like a wedding party could be seen as an indication of their moral disapproval of the special seats system. Now the MMA is facing a backlash of disenchantment from the same women.

The Senate is important for lawmaking in Pakistan. A constitutional amendment cannot take place unless passed by both houses with a two-thirds majority. Equal representation from the provinces informs the house with a sense of the federation that is not perceived in the Punjab-dominated National Assembly. In 1973 when it first came into being, its membership was 45. In 1977 it was increased to 63 and in 1985 to 87. President Pervez Musharraf increased it to 100 in 2002. Each province now sends 22 members to it. There are 14 general seats and four seats each for women and technocrats etc. Its powers are less than those of the National Assembly because it is indirectly elected “through the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote”.

The ruling PML had a thin majority in the Senate and it was feared that unless good “deals” were struck this month the government might lose even this edge. But the government has clearly done better than last time; it has increased its presence in the Senate to 56 against the combined opposition’s 39 seats, an addition of two seats although it wanted more. Therefore if we ignore the NWFP case, the polls to the Senate may be regarded as “normal” (usual amount of horse-trading) by Pakistani standards. What is worrisome, however, is the decreasing legitimacy of the process in the eyes of the people. After much chest-beating by losing politicians in the wake of each contest, the popular conclusion is that elections in the country are just another name for corruption.

The polarity in national politics is heartbreaking. The Senate is usually deadlocked but is not as obstructive as the National Assembly can be when it is similarly divided. The smaller provinces, irked by Punjab’s numerical edge in the lower house, want the Senate to be given teeth. They want direct elections and the right to reject the budget and hold down lawmaking. Some experts think that such an enhancement in the status of Senate could offset Punjab’s dominance. Even so, one must also look at the obstructive nature of our polarised politics. Given the situation today, some middle-way solution must be found. Horse-trading has dangerously sapped the legitimacy of the way the Senate is constituted today. *