Pakistan’s political parties should not be family heirlooms anymore
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India has its Gandhis, the Sri Lankans their Bandranaikes and Rajapaksas and Bangladesh its Sheikhs and Zias. Pakistan, similarly, has its Bhuttos and Sharifs. Dynastic politics runs through the South Asian political landscape, like pedigreed DNA.
In recent years, there has been greater debate in the region about the impact of dynastic politics with analysts questioning this keeping of politics in the family and the failure of parties to keep up with modern egalitarian concepts of political pluralisms. Last week, dynastic politics generated a fresh controversy in Pakistan with former Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and former Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi announcing they were launching their son and daughter respectively to battle for a seat in the National Assembly in a by-election in Punjab’s Multan city.
This has raised heckles not just with the public and voters expected to choose between the offspring of aging leaders, but also led to muted grumblings within the political parties on why more experienced party leaders and workers are being bypassed in favor of silver-spooned rookies.
While dynastic politics is legal in Pakistan, as elsewhere in South Asia, a rapidly expanding young electorate which is cynical of politics in general, views the trend as having outlived its utility. Indeed, relatively new political rivals of established political clans heap scorn on what they see as both a failure of political parties to grow out of their own founding family cults and ignoring the aspirations of a whole new generation of voters who want their share of influencing political agendas.
Parties across South Asia must embrace a broader spectrum of opinion so that narrow family interests do not drown out more representative streams of popular participation in politics.
Adnan Rehmat
Former prime minister Imran Khan for example, has made an art form out of blaming the Bhuttos and Sharifs for their alleged corruption and mis-governance, which he thinks has stymied Pakistan’s chances of plugging into the global economic order. He often says neither of his two sons will join politics to perpetuate a political family. Indeed, before he became prime minister in 2018, a key reason for the break-up of his second marriage with Reham Khan was that he forbade her to take part in party meetings or make political statements. No one has seen his third and current wife who observes strict purdah and shuns both the party and her husband’s politics.
But his detractors counter Khan by ridiculing the fact that he has been the sole chairman of his party for all 26 years of its existence, and that over the years he has dismissed serious efforts to reform in-party election processes. The irony here is that Khan’s detractors are guilty of the same – Pakistani parties are characterized by tightly-controlled family fiefdoms that often do not even hold meetings of their central bodies where demands for in-house reforms can be aired beyond media and public eyes.
To be fair, in historical perspective, dynastic politics even while receiving due flak for being anathematic in this century, have played a crucial part in protecting democracy in Pakistan. One of the main things all four military dictators that have ruled Pakistan did after staging coups, was to try and break up parties by engineering in-house rebellions through fear or favor and installing their proxies.
The parties thus defied hijacking and remained functional and relevant with the help of family members while their seniors were eliminated or pushed out. Dynastic politics, at least in this context, saved political parties and therefore, kept democracy intact in Pakistan.
Having said this, mainstream Pakistani political parties such as the Bhuttos’ PPP, Sharifs’ PML-N, Fazlur Rehman’s JUI, Asfandyar Wali’s ANP and Imran’s PTI, in general have become lumbering entities led by aging leaders. There are over 110 million Pakistanis under 30, nearly 60 million of whom are voters while the age of eligibility to become a parliamentarian is 25 years. This demographic is not represented in even third-tier leadership in parties, in parliament or in cabinets of ministers.
By not representing non-member intelligentsia even in tokenism in party leadership, political parties are setting themselves up for irrelevance and contributing to disillusionment with politics. The parties can start changing this by engaging civil society in its internal decision-making bodies and creating functional youth, women and labor wings and engaging with the intelligentsia to infuse parties with new ideas and to broaden ownership.
Parties across South Asia must embrace a broader spectrum of opinion so that narrow family interests do not drown out more representative streams of popular participation in politics. The parties must broaden their family of supporters rather than keep it all within bloodlines.
- Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science. Twitter: @adnanrehmat1
