In Love With Voting, Hopelessly

KAMILA SHAMSIE, writer

ONE OF my earliest memories dates back to Election Day, 1977, when I was four years old, and my father showed me a mark on his thumb in indelible ink and explained it was there to identify voters and prevent them from returning to vote a second time. A little over thirty years later, I’m typing this and hitting the space bar with a thumb that is — for the first time in my life — similarly marked in indelible ink.

I was too young to vote in 1988 when Pakistan had its first elections since those 1977 elections of my childhood memory (I don’t count the bogus elections that happened under General Zia’s watch.) Too young to vote, but — at 15 — perhaps exactly the right age to fall in love with the idea of voting. Today I remember it as a kind of dream, the exultation in Karachi’s air as those elections drew near. Even though there were plenty of voices, even then, saying the military would still be the real power in the land it did little to temper that exultation. I remember one party at which scores of adolescents were dancing to the election song of the PPP: Jeeay Jeeay Jeeay Bhutto Benazir! rang the chorus; a young Angrez at the party watched, shaking his head in disbelief and said, ‘I’m trying to imagine school kids in London dancing to a ‘Go Maggie’ song.’ The next song was the MQM’s campaign song and everyone danced to that with as much fervour. It wasn’t just on the dance-floors of private parties — everywhere you went in Karachi there were rallies conducted with a frenzied air of joy, and people singing on the street.

That was 1988. By the 1990 elections, disillusionment had already set in. Then and at each successive election I was still too young or — later — out of the country at election time, so I always watched feeling outside the process itself, though never less than deeply invested in the result. That there was no one I supported — only those whose victories I objected to more or less than others — was only slightly less depressing than the fact that the only time the National Assembly stopped recycling the same old faces was in the heavilymanipulated elections of 2002 when the MMA took its place as a sizable force in Parliament.

It became impossible in the two decades following the 1988 elections to simply stand up and cheer on democracy. Too much was flawed and failing within Pakistan’s democratically- elected governments. And for a while, too much that General Musharraf said after his coup appealed to members of the liberal intelligentsia. And so at every stage it was necessary for those of us who continued to believe in the democratic process to justify, defend, articulate our position. That may be why I haven’t found more zealous proponents of democracy anywhere in the world than in Pakistan — just as I haven’t found more passionate supporters of military rule anywhere else. Aside from the pro-democracy and pro-military groups there is, of course, that third group whose number (undefined, but vast) is the true measure of how badly the state has failed its people: those who believe that the true separation is not between democrats and dictators, but between the powerful and the powerless, with the former caring nothing for the latter.

And now there is a fourth group: militants. When the MMA won an unprecedented number of seats in 2002 there were already those who said those numbers would fall in the next elections. The most common reason given was the inability of the alliance of religious parties to stay together; true enough, the two major components of the MMA — the JUI(F) and JI — have fallen out spectacularly, with the JI boycotting the elections and the JUI(F) taking part. The other reason — more rarely mentioned — was that an incumbent is judged on track-record rather than promises, and the MMA would be unable to convert its popular anti-American platform and its promises for social upliftment into any kind of action. All the pre-election analysis suggests this, too, has been an important factor in the drop in the MMA’s popularity. But no one in 2002 suggested that a party such as the avowedly pro-Taliban JUI(F) would soon be viewed as too moderate by some of its supporters who would move their political allegiances to those who function outside the political system. That those within this fourth group form a very tiny fraction of Pakistan’s population doesn’t change the fact that their ability to damage the nation is immense.

And what exactly is democracy supposed to do about them?

To this question I would answer first: democracy can’t be any less successful against the militants than dictatorship has proved itself to be.

There are other answers as well, of course, less facetious ones — answers to do with provincial autonomy, building up infrastructures, mobilising opinion via populist forces, creating an inclusive political process, allowing the military to concentrate on military matters etc. etc.

And none of this will be easy.

But as I write this, the results are coming in the MMA has been trounced, Musharraf’s PML(Q) has been widely rejected — and although there is much uncertainty ahead (can Zardari and Nawaz really work together for even five minutes?) we are living in a moment where change seems possible — through the ballot box. It’s a moment to savour, though that doesn’t mean it’s a moment we must pin false hopes on. When our politicians fail us tomorrow or next week or next month, as they inevitably will, it can’t be reason to think perhaps we were better off with dictatorship.

In fact, one of the most extraordinary features of these results is that such a result should feel like change: the PPP and PML(N) are frontrunners; the ANP has won in the Frontier; the religious parties have won hardly any seats. This feels like change? But this is exactly what the scenario was through the 90’s. It’s a mark of how far back we’ve been pulled in the last 8 years, that such a results should seem encouraging. We can’t afford more years of being pulled back — never before in Pakistan have I known the mood to feel so urgent, the need for change so necessary.

BUT HOW can we expect change to come from Zardari and Nawaz Sharif? I place my hope not in these individuals or even their political parties but in something else that has come to life in Pakistan through this decade, a counterpoint to the forces of obscurantism who prevent women from voting and use guns to spread their message: civil society. Between the media and the judiciary and all who stand up in support of them, something is shifting in Pakistan. Those who have the most hope for Pakistan talk of the media and the judiciary as the real ‘opposition’ who will keep a check on the government. It’s a lot to ask, but it’s also our best hope. And that’s why the weeks ahead are so crucial — will the new govt restore the judiciary and ease the restrictions Musharraf placed on the media? If not, where will we look when we want to find hope?

Between typing these sentences I keep stopping to look at that mark in indelible ink on my thumb. I hadn’t realised exactly how much I wanted to vote, to finally take part in the process I’d fallen in love with in 1988, until the moment when I thought that opportunity would be denied to me. It was just a few days before the election — I went to the election commission website to find out details of my polling station, but when I entered my NIC (National Identity Card) number, a message appeared telling me there was no such number registered. I refused to believe it — I had been on the voter list, I knew, in the previous elections even though I wasn’t in Pakistan to cast a vote. So I kept retyping the number, over and over, in different formats, trying it with spaces between clusters of numbers, then with hyphens. When nothing yielded recognition I found my hands were physically shaking. Why should it matter, I tried to reason with myself? Everyone knew the MQM was going to win from my constituency — my one vote for the independent candidate wasn’t going to make any difference one way or the other. And yet it mattered.

It mattered enough that I searched the Internet for anyone who could help me and discovered the website of FAFEN (Free and Fair Election Network). As an act of desperation, expecting no reply, I sent an email outlining what had happened. Within 45 minutes they wrote back to say, ‘Try your old NIC number.’ I did, and it worked. I can’t describe my jubilation and my gratitude to yet another fine institution of civil society.

It was almost equally thrilling to find two other people I knew who thought they weren’t on the electoral roll and be able to point them to the election commission website with their old NIC numbers and have them discover they could vote.

Much has been said about low voter turnout — but when I went to vote, shortly before lunch on Monday, I saw what was there rather than what wasn’t. Outside the school which served as polling station, the street was lined with booths for the PPP, MQM and the Independent candidate, everyone in good humour even though the process of finding your name on their lists in order to ascertain which classroom to enter to cast your vote was protracted and inefficient. Motorcycles and vans drove along the road with flags of either the PPP or MQM, two children from the low-income area behind the school shouted ‘Jeeay Bhutto’, strangers stopped to talk to me as I waited for my father to locate our household on the voter list. And inside the classroom where we voted, one of the polling agents laughed when I asked her about voter turnout. ‘Now people are coming. In the morning, no one was here. But it’s a holiday — people like to sleep late.’

Only one thing to add: the candidate I voted for didn’t win. It takes nothing away from the experience of being a voter — at last.