BY IA REHMAN
Pakistanis should find a proper study of India’s latest general
election quite rewarding – that is, if they can abandon their
utterly irrational resolve to learn neither from friends nor from foes. One of
the most peculiar features of the Pakistani mind-set is an incredibly strong
sense of self-righteousness.
As the chosen community, we do not have to learn from any other
people. Indeed the world, especially the non-Muslim part of it, has nothing to
offer us. The ‘godless communists’ apart, we ignore even the believers in the
West because of their ‘obscene practices’ and their high divorce rates. If a
country had questioned our credentials to lead the Muslim ummah, or failed to
vote in our favour at a world forum, it was to be put down in the list of
permanent enemies.
In this regard, India has been selected for the worst possible
treatment. Since we have designated this closest neighbour as our most
inveterate foe, the question of looking at its ways of dealing with issues of
statecraft, development, public welfare et al simply does not arise. So strong
is the Pakistani elite’s aversion to India that it barely acknowledges its South
Asian identity. Most Pakistanis would like to believe that Pakistan is located
somewhere between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
We become jealous of Bangladeshis if we find that their taka has
become a stronger currency than our rupee, or that they have radically slashed
their population growth rate, but we have no interest in examining how all this
has been possible. (An exception is some rudimentary attempts to imitate the
Grameen system of microcredit.)
This mind-set prevents Pakistan from studying Indian strategies
to deal with the various issues that also plague us. Faced with problems of
stagnation in agriculture, we have invited experts from the western countries
that have little knowledge of our soil, our land-tenure system and the strengths
and weaknesses of our peasants but we have made no serious attempt to analyse
how India, a food deficit country in the early 1950s, is now groaning under
stocks of surplus grain. The destruction of Pakistan’s railway system is a most
painful scandal but it is doubtful if we have tried to find out what keeps the
Indian railways running. We have subcontinental diseases and we insist on
applying Middle Eastern cures, quite unmindful of the disastrous results.
This habit of ignoring Indian efforts to grapple with problems
that also afflict Pakistan must be given up, as the cost of persisting in this
folly has become unbearable. This does not mean that whatever the Indians have
done is wholesome and worth emulating because the mistakes made by them are
legion. What is implied here is that when different communities address
identical matters, they can all learn from each other’s experience, their
failures as well as their successes. It is in this context that one would like
to urge state functionaries, public representatives, academics and students of
politics to take a hard look at the latest general election in India.
First, the mechanics of an election. India is the only country
in the world where polling in a general election is spread over several weeks,
the basic reason being the keenness to ensure availability of the necessary
personnel in sufficient strength in each sector. Till some years ago, ballot
boxes used to be kept under strict guard till counting could begin at the end of
polling. It was no small achievement that in a country that was among the first
to report incidents of booth capturing, no serious complaint of tampering with
ballot boxes was heard.
But in 2004 India took a revolutionary step by switching over to
vote recording machines. The success of the system has silenced all those who
had argued that the poorly educated rural communities could not use machines.
True, there have been minor problems here and there but on the whole voting by
machines has yielded huge benefits.
The entire hassle involving the printing of ballot papers, the
dispatch of these ballots, stamps and papers related to polling to faraway
polling stations and arrangements to guard against pilferage has been done away
with. Counting can be done easily and speedily. The need for hard copies of
electoral rolls can also be eliminated. All that a voter is required to do is to
go to the polling station for his residential area and gain admittance by
establishing his identity and his place of residence. True, those who can storm
polling stations – and this species is not absent in Pakistan – will use the
machine as effortlessly as they can stamp ballot papers but that is a law and
order issue, not an electoral problem.
The electoral contest was prolonged and bitter. The ruling
coalition was visibly nervous and the challengers were smelling victory. But
considering India’s vast territory, its mammoth electorate and the presence in
considerable numbers of criminal elements among voters and candidates both,
incidents of violent disruption of the electoral proceedings were negligible.
Some improvements in India’s political culture were evident in
the promptness with which the losers admitted defeat and the manner of their
doing so. In the main, they held themselves responsible for their poor showing
instead of blaming the system or the winners for wrongdoing. It is evidence such
as this that convinces everybody of the election having been free and fair.
The electorate in any country derives immense pleasure from
proving the poll forecasts wrong and the more underprivileged a people, the
greater their happiness in surprising sophisticated mind-readers. Indian voters
have once again enjoyed proving themselves to be masters of the moment. Now all
the experts can indulge in semantics to their hearts’ content over why the
people in a part of India preferred a party/candidate to another, why someone
won and somebody else lost. The voters have spoken and moved on – replacing a
dissection of the past with hopes of turning the corner in the future.
The extent to which the Election Commission has contributed to
the development of electoral processes and conventions in India merits study by
Pakistani experts. India has avoided reserving the chief election commissioner’s
office for the judiciary and succeeded in establishing the institution’s
credibility. Differences have been noticed between the commission’s working
under a stern and authoritarian Seshan and a gregarious and media-loving Gill
and there have been occasions when observers have wondered at the commission’s
laziness or else but on the whole the system has continued to deliver.
No doubt Indian democracy is far from perfect. The ordinary
citizen’s participation in governance is largely restricted to periodic
elections of his representatives with little control over the latter’s
performance. But Pakistanis will do well to appreciate a poor Indian’s feeling
of fulfilment when he recalls that it was he who threw out prime ministers or
reinstated the discarded ones, that he has been part of the process of change.
It is this heady feeling that enables the ordinary Indian citizen to own the
state and to be proud of it in spite of all his grievances about being
neglected, abandoned and exploited.
The greatest misfortune of the Pakistani people has been that
the repeated disruptions of the democratic journey by authoritarian adventurers
have deprived them of the joy of owning the state. The Indian election needs to
be studied in Pakistan in order to settle the question of the state’s ownership
– whether it belongs to an oppressive, incompetent and corrupt elite or the
dumb, exploited multitude.