It’s been an uneasy year for democracy in Pakistan. If there is a takeaway, it is that politics at the grassroots level continues to be an unequal game despite the twin pressures of demographic change and democratic growth.
Ours is a legacy of state-led elite capture that has cannibalised processes of grassroots activism, and perpetuated cycles of political reproduction. While many of today’s outstanding parliamentarians rose from this country’s grassroots, its jails and its student politics, the question of who might fill our parliament and indeed lead Pakistan in 2029, 2039 or 2049 prompts the mention of only a handful of candidates.
The 2018 election has shown that the political playing field in many districts has been razed to the point of social and economic uncompetitiveness, still allowing either for ready-made electables who sit atop pyramids of social power, or for the scions of incumbents who have already inherited their political advantages. Erstwhile mechanisms of political mobility, through local government elections, grassroots canvassing and student activism have been hit hard by a domino-chain of inequality, historical immobility and discretionary entitlement.
We should be worried. The cult of the few at the expense of the many does not sit easily with our belated experience of economic modernisation, or with our erratic history of democratic consolidation. The tractability of narratives around anti-corruption, the welfare state, judicial imperialism, and even civilian supremacy are essentially a function of the social and political exclusion that determines who competes for political power, and who emerges victorious from that competition.
Nor does our national dialectic make room for the have-nots of Pakistan’s last two decades of neo-liberalisation, or the demographic change that may be producing invisible political aspirants, without political mobility. For a population that does not need statistics to tell us that we are a young country, this is deeply unsettling. Last year’s study by professors Adil Najam and Faisal Bari found that 30 of 100 young people in Pakistan are unable to read or write; only six have 12 or more years of education; 29 have none. Ninety-four have never seen a library, and 75 have no access to the internet.
These statistics are a sobering indictment of those who believe in a political future that is not perpetually wedded to elite capture. Put differently, if we were once capable of producing leaders and legislators who were neither moneyed nor landed, does the same hold for today? Is the…
