PARTIES AND ELECTION FEVER

SYNOPSIS: A bit about the party system and politics in Pakistan.

As any travel guide to Pakistan will tell you, things heat up during election times…  Yes, it concerned me that I would be in Pakistan leading up to one of the most important elections in recent years, but it also intrigued me.It was impossible to miss that it was an election period in Pakistan.  Roads sides, bulletin boards, houses, shopping streets and cars were plastered with election posters of all sorts, shapes, and forms.  A bewildering number of faces were staring down at you from every corner.Men on all of them, with one notable exception:  Benazir Bhutto.  I asked Shabir, our driver, how he could make sense of this.  The faces changed from town to town; and even though a few crept up everywhere, the overwhelming sense one got from the posters was that of utter political chaos.  I had noted some curious symbols on many of the posters and Shabir helped me to unlock the secret:  It does not matter so much who is looking at you from the posters; what matters is their party affiliation.  And that affiliation is made clear for the many illiterate, a-political, and uneducated masses by clearly recognizable symbols:  There was the tiger party, the tea-cup party, the book party, the elephant party, the number party, the bicycle party and most of them all, the arrow party!   Knowing that, the fog began to lift and one could begin to make sense of various towns and their loyalties.Pakistan has been a political mess from its inception swinging back and forth between dictatorships which abolish parties and times of democracy which bring forth a bewildering number of unprepared political parties, none of which can rule without alliances.  Not only that, as Shabir pointed out, the political parties are usually dominated by single, influential families who still rule rural Pakistan like medieval feudal lords.  You’d be well advised to “vote” in line with your feudal lords or else…   The Bhutto family is a good case in point.Political rallies have traditionally been the scene of sectarian, political, and ideologically driven violence.  I had promised myself that much:  Stay away from any rally!  For the most part, we succeeded in that but once we turned a corner in a small town and found ourselves in the middle of a  crowd listening to a political speech.  We tried to retreat only to find ourselves cornered by a political parade.   Nothing threatening happened.  The count of dead political candidates leading up to the 2007-2008 election in Pakistan was listed around 50; not very encouraging for any aspiring politicians.The ultimate death that year was the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007 after she had given a speech at a political rally in Rawalpindi.  Saeed's office was located in Rawalpindi.  But that day, we found ourselves in Lahore, next to Bhutto's Party Headquarters!Here is a link to the political parties in Pakistan for further reading:   http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/pakistan/political-parties.htm