Pakistan’s spluttering opposition alliance has no constitutional way to remove government
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The Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) is an alliance of 11 political parties that have joined hands to launch a nationwide movement to bring down the elected government of Prime Minister Imran Khan when he has two and a half more years left in his tenure.
Rhetoric apart, there is only one way to remove an elected government-- by a vote of no confidence. But the numbers are against the PDM. The logic of pulling down a democratic government by agitation doesn’t make any sense, if the interest is in strengthening democracy.
The bigger question is, how can this be possible at all, if one has to remain within the limits of any reasonable ‘democratic’ framework. In the Pakistani political tradition, never have the losing parties accepted the legitimacy of the winning party, and have questioned the fairness and transparency of elections. It is another matter when they get elected through the same electoral system.
There is a strong reason for doing so, as larger questions of power, legacy and influence are at stake. Khan’s narrative against hereditary political families and their corruption, and demanding a clean government for the last two decades upset the traditional parties. But Khan’s tenacity and successful reforms in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of Pakistan’s most complex provinces, won him the country’s most coveted and largest province, the Punjab, in 2018.
There have been two conflicting views among the political parties that lost out in the 2018 elections, on how to respond to the rise of Imran Khan.
Most of the eleven parties can be grouped into two major national parties while the rest of them are ethnic and religious groups. In KP, the religious and ethnic parties have lost out to the PTI where it remains strong. That ended almost half a century of their domination of electoral politics.
The Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam and its leader Fazalur Rahman have been the most unforgiving to Khan for shaking up their power base in KP. After the elections, Rahman insisted other parties not take oath of office, boycott the assemblies and launch a movement for fresh elections.
After much noise and hype, at last moderate voices have won within the PDM, arguing that staying within the system is better than leaving the entire institutional space to the PTI.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
The PPP and the PMLN with real stakes in the system reused to oblige and vowed they’d give the government a ‘tough time’ on the floor of the parliament.
In November 2019, Fazalur Rahman brought thousands of seminary students to Islamabad to force the government to resign. While other party leaders appeared briefly before the protesters, they left Rahman to fight his own battle. Rahman’s frustration is understandable; he is not a member of the parliament, and not in a position of the usual wheeling-dealing around the corridors of power.
In September last year, Rahman played a key role in bringing the eleven parties together under the banner of the PDM and also influencing its very ambitious agenda for removing the government by the end of this month.
Many in Pakistan have wondered how they can do it, as there is only one constitutional way, and that is bringing no-confidence motion against the incumbent Prime Minister.
Late last year, the PDM declared that they would resign from the assemblies in order to create a legitimacy crisis for the government and disrupt the electoral college for the elections of half of the members of Senate, which are due in February-March. They have also threatened to launch a ‘long march’ to Islamabad.
Nothing has happened, and not much is expected to change.
The two major parties have declared they will contest by-polls on vacant seats, Senate elections, and the resignations of their members have yet to be sent to the speakers of the assemblies.
After much noise and hype, at last moderate voices have won within the PDM, arguing that staying within the system is better than leaving the entire institutional space to the PTI.
Practically speaking, very little is left in the arsenal of the PDM, except rallies, rhetoric and empty threats.
– Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Twitter: @RasulRais
