'Mainstreaming' & the upcoming 2018 Pakistan election

By Omar R Quraishi


The PML-N government of Nawaz Sharif began its tenure in early June in 2013. That mean's five years of the current dispensation will end in early June 2018 -- after that we will have 90 days of a caretaker government and general elections (unless they happen earlier due to an unforeseen circumstance, or don't happen at all, also because of any unforeseen circumstance) no later than early September of this year.

I will write in more detail about the prospects of the major mainstream parties in the coming election at a later time. However, there has been much talk of late about the 'mainstreaming' of religious groups other than the parties such as Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam etc. in an effort to include them in the political mainstream.

The first such example that comes to mind is the Milli Muslim League which many observers seem to think is an offshoot of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD). Last week, the MML won a big victory in its effort to be recognized as a political party when the Islamabad High Court ruled that a ban by the Election Commission of Pakistan on the MML was of no legal effect and that the League could now be registered as a political party under the electoral laws of Pakistan.

Milli Muslim League chief Saifullah Khalid


It's information secretary Tabish Qayyum is at pains to point out that the party has nothing to do with the JuD





In the NA 120 Lahore bye-election held in September 2017, the MML backed an independent candidate who came in 4th with 5,822 votes. He received more than 5 times the votes that the PPP's candidate got. The seat, a long-standing PML-N stronghold, was won by Begum Kulsum Nawaz Sharif with over 61,000 votes and the PTI's Yasmin Rashid came in with over 47,000 votes.

The MML-backed candidate did relatively well given that the party is very new. One can only surmise but it would be fair to assume that some pro-PTI voters would have voted for him. 

Then take the case of the Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), whose effort to present itself as a political party has gained considered momentum of late. In recent days, it's banners have sprung up in many major cities -- asking people to go online and register with the party, in preparation for the coming election. This is the same group that shut down a major highway connecting Islamabad with the rest of the country for 20 days, resulting in a botched government crackdown on the protesters. 



The TLP fielded a candidate in the NA 154 Lodhran bye-election held earlier this year and he managed to come in 3rd obtaining a very healthy total of 9,981 votes. Clearly, the TLP will be able to win a health amount of votes in the coming election in Punjab and even in parts of Sindh (such as Karachi). 

Of course, the debate over mainstreaming will continue, but the argument that such groups do represent at least some Pakistanis and hence should be allowed to contest elections can hardly be denied. 

Comments

  1. UnknownMarch 19, 2018 at 10:09 AM

    The investigative journalists should do some serious digging and tell the people of Pakistan about the "financiers & backers" of these so called political parties.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is an Indian FM channel doing in Karachi???!!

yes you read it right -- last night while driving to do an errand i turned on the radio and came across an FM channel where the host was talking in what appeared to be Gujarati -- initially i thought it was perhaps a new channel in gujarati -- apna karachi 107 FM has a segment in Gujarati i believe as well so perhaps someone took the initiative to cater to karachi's sizeable gujarati-speaking population. However, this morning again, as I was checking various FM channels, I came across the same one -- 93.5 FM -- with a man and a woman both talking in a mixture of what seemed to be urdu, English and Gujarati -- the songs were all indian but that doesnt necessarily mean that the channel would be indian because many pakistani FM channels also air Indian songs -- but then came an ad for Bisleri which is India's leading mineral water provider -- Bisleri is not sold in Pakistan so the ad couldnt be for Karachi -- and then it made sense -- this was clearly an FM channel coming from the...
Read more

Mysterious plane spotted at Karachi airport

Image
Yesterday had to make a quick dash to Lahore -- Took a PIA flight at 3 pm -- the plane reversed from the gate and was slowly taxiing to the beginning of the runway -- and i have a habit of looking out of the window as much as i can -- and i saw one of the PAF sheds on one side -- you can tell from its camouflage colours -- and in front of it were three unmarked jets -- with very few windows -- they did not have any tail design or colour -- one however had a blue and red marking on the fuesalage and it said 'meridian' -- saw the same plane when i got back to Karachi later that night. The plane that I saw is kind of identical to the one shown in the picture here. The issue is that it's not a military plane but a private one and hence the question arises that what is it doing at Karachi airport. (Juxtapose this with a well-researched and detailed report by Jeremy Scahill that appeared in The Nation in November 2009 of the presence of US private contractors in Karachi hired by ...
Read more

Banned Indian channel the most watched on Pakistani cable TV

Yes you read that right -- Star Plus, the Indian television channel otherwise banned in Pakistan, but presumably available in most parts of the country, is the most-watched channel on cable television. In fact, it leads the next most-watched channel, Geo News, by such a wide margin that more people watch Star Plus than the next four channels on the ratings list. Not only that, the top five also includes two other banned Indian channels, Sony and Colors. Lest people be suspicious of where I'm getting all this from, this is in fact in the public realm, thanks to brandsynario.com, a Pakistani marketing and advertising website, which has posted the results of an exhaustive survey by Media Logic detailing the viewing habits of Pakistanis for 2010. Media Logic is incidentally the same company that does market research and ratings for the industry and hence its findings are normally taken at face value and accepted by all the channels. There are two ratings lists that are of interest. The...
Read more