Analysis of electoral politics in contemporary Pakistan involves a discussion of the perennial issue of civil-military relations. The beginning and the end of the three-year period of military rule in the country were characterised by transition from the civilian to military and military to civilian rule, respectively. The 1999 transfer from Nawaz Sharif to General Pervez Musharraf was the result of a crisis in civil-military relations that was resolved, most typically, in favour of the military's bid to take over power. The 2002 transition, instead, was an elaborate attempt at stabilising the civil- military relations at a new level of understanding between the two sides, largely at the expense of the former¹. The military leadership put in place a package of legal and constitutional amendments, called the Legal Framework Order (LFO), which stripped the powers of the parliament and the elected government.

Debate over LFO continued for almost a year after the elections. However, there was no end to the constitutional crisis in sight as the year progressed, especially as the President stuck to his decision to keep the mainstream opposition parties represented by the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD) out of negotiations. At the other end, the elected representatives at the federal and provincial levels enjoyed new legitimacy in the form of public mandate and, therefore, sought to question the overarching role of a President in military uniform in the new order of things. The loss of the political establishment in 1999 was substantive inasmuch as a 'sovereign' parliament had been dissolved. The gain for politicians was much more formal than real in 2002 inasmuch as parliament was reduced to a subordinate house.

What is the true meaning of the 2002 elections in this scenario? Millions of new voters were registered, hundreds of contestants campaigned through the length and breath of the country and dozens of political parties formed strategies and alliances, and mobilised voters in the electoral process. The two houses of parliament and the four provincial assemblies were considerably expanded. Female representation in elected assemblies went up several times. A large number of new faces occupied seats on the floors of assemblies, thus bringing forth a whole new generation of politicians. The electoral performance of the alliance of Islamic parties, Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), sprang up a total surprise on the political stage of Pakistan, as it formed the government in North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) and became a coalition partner in Baluchistan. The two mainstream parties, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), suf,ered through the shenanigans of the military government. While the PPP stayed aloft with a considerable number of seats to its credit, the share of PML (N) was meagre. While Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto and Altaf Hussain stayed abroad and the family of the celebrated Pakhtun leader Ghaffar Khan took a plunge in popularity, there was a real vacuum of political leadership in the country. The critical element of leadership was virtually absent in the 2002 elections.

We can discuss the process and implications of the 2002 elections for the bodypolitic of Pakistan in the context of the objectives set and means adopted by the military government. Similarly, we should look at the way the political forces responded to the opportunities for public mobilisation in order to enhance their organisational potential and individual careers. What follows is an analysis of the way politics in Pakistan was meandering through political, legal, judicial and organisational activity during the three years on the way to elections; the process and results of polls, and government formation after the polls.

The Civilian Interregnum
Between the two elections of 1997 and 2002, politics in Pakistan changed in both substance and style. The former saw Nawaz Sharif return with a two-third majority party at the federal level, seeking to reshape the political rules of the game by restoring parliamentary sovereignty. He sought to centralise power, both horizontally, i.e. vis-à-vis the state institutions of army, bureaucracy and judiciary, and vertically in terms of center-province relations. In doing so, Nawaz Sharif relied heavily on the representative character of his government, rooted in the much-touted 'heavy mandate'. Since he did not rise from the ranks of Pakistan Muslim League (PML), he lacked sensitivity for institutional life per se. He neither understood nor learnt to live with institutions of a modern state. Instead, he followed a patrimonial style of government. The cabinet became a rubber stamp for decisions taken elsewhere. The PML degenerated into a forum for patronage-seeking individuals and lobbies during the two years in office (1997-99).

As a shrewd politician, Nawaz Sharif discounted policy and depended on patronage. He targeted specific vote blocs and followed a strategy with an in-built multiplier effect in electoral terms, within a relatively short time frame. Pursuit of flagship projects such as the Lahore-Islamabad Motorway was bad economics but good politics. It transferred national resources to the public sector through his cronies and clients. Sharif secured victories against persons at high places -- President Farooq Leghari, Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah and COAS General Jehangir Karamat. And yet, he landed in successive crises of foreign policy, sectarian violence, collapse of government in Sindh, isolation from political parties from the left, right and center as well as tense civil-military relations. His successes were individual; his failures were collective. These together brought an end to his rule.

The decade-long period of parliamentary rule under prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif was characterised by leader-specific political idiom. The two leaders discounted the role of party workers in the locality in terms of policy input and reduced the latter's role to mere clients. The two parties failed to mobilise people on the basis of issues and policies. Instead, they focused on creating a devil-image of each other. The PML gathered votes in the name of anti-Bhuttoism. The PPP mobilised the public against the legacy of General Zia. Both parties cultivated hero-worship and then depended on their heroes as political resources. Once these leaders were out of the country, their parties suffered from the lack of alternative political resources. In this way, the post-1999 coup situation developed along blurred lines of leadership. The Musharraf government ensured that there was no challenge from the political leadership of the two mainstream parties.

The Accountability Leash
The new government started with a vehement campaign to discredit the two leaders by alleging them and a host of others of massive corruption. Earlier, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) established by Nawaz Sharif had brought out corruption cases against Benazir Bhutto and her spouse Asif Zardari, whereby the Court sentenced them to a joint term of five years and a fine of Pound Sterling 5.3 million, along with disqualification from public office and partial confiscation of property. The judgement was, however, turned down by the Supreme Court and the judges had to resign on charges of convicting Bhutto while seeking guidelines from the then government.² Under Musharraf, the NAB took up corruption cases against the whole gamut of Nawaz Sharif's government, along with pressing the ongoing cases against the PPP stalwarts. All this contributed to discrediting the party leaderships which had dominated the political scene for a decade. A spate of disqualifications followed, similar to the earlier attempts at discrediting politicians under Field Marshal Ayub Khan, General Yahya and General Zia-ul-Haq. Politicians turned to the higher courts for relief against what they considered draconian laws, enshrined in the NAB Ordinance issued by the Musharraf government. In their view, the NAB acted as both plaintiff and the parallel judiciary. The Supreme Court's verdict on the issue was symptomatic of the moral authority of the judiciary tempered by pragmatism.

While the Supreme Court suggested amendments in the NAB ordinance, it avoided disturbance in the ongoing pattern of rule. It accepted the constitutionality of the NAB Ordinance in principle. Even the powers to give remand of people in custody continued to be with the Accountability Courts. Only, these were now required to give reasons for nabbing them in order to present their cases to High Courts, possibly for the purpose of bail application. The provision of bail application to High Courts itself was a step forward inasmuch as it partially took the steam out of the frustrated individuals and their families caught in the legal vortex of accountability. Judicialisation of both the structure and process of accountability was the net result of the Supreme Court judgment. The Accountability Courts were now to function under the High Courts, not under the federal government. A majority of petitioners in the cases against the NAB belonged to the political class, among them Nawaz Sharif, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, Anwar Saifullah, Naheed Khan, Dr Farooq Sattar and Hakim Zardari, Ms. Bhutto’s father-in-law. A strong contingent of lawyers led by the Supreme Court Bar Association also filed cases against the NAB Ordinance. The leading industrial family of Saigols also filed a constitutional petition against the new law. In other words, members of the political, legal and business communities were all agitated over the question of the controversial NAB Ordinance.

De-institutionalistion and Localisation
While the military government filed legal cases of corruption against politicians, it sought to create space for itself in the political system with a view to holding elections. One can mention two broad features of the official policy in this regard. First, the military government pursued a policy of political de-institutionalisation by creating factions out of the mainstream parties. Thus, a breakaway faction of Nawaz Sharif's party, led by Chaudhary Shujaat-Pervaiz Elahi duo, became the kingpin of the establishment's strategy to install a pro-Musharraf government of elected representatives after the proposed elections. Later, a breakaway faction of Benazir Bhutto's party in NWFP led by Sherpao became the focus of the government's strategy to divide the PPP. De-institutionalisation of politics remained the policy in the short term.

The second major determinant of the emergent electoral profile was the element of localisation of politics, operationalised through an ingenious scheme of devolution of power. Indeed, localisation of politics had been a cornerstone of the military thinking from Field Marshal Ayub Khan onwards, in the form of strengthening local government institutions in order to undermine the political base of politicians. The devolution plan prepared by the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) implied a doctrine based on localisation of politics by taking away the element of horizontal linkage patterns represented by political parties. In this way, the society remains potentially unorganised in the face of a state, which enjoys a near monopoly over organisation. The devolution plan sought to activate a direct communication channel between the two nodal points in the administrative hierarchy i.e. at the centre and in the district. The province, which symbolised ethnic aspirations, cultural tradition, linguistic profile as well as geographical identity, was thereby effectively bypassed.

The NRB's devolution plan became official policy after 14 August, 2000. While formally the district administration including police were to be accountable to the district nazim (administrator), no police official -- except District Police Officer (DPO) -- was to be answerable to elected representatives of people. In this framework, DPO was destined to be potentially more powerful than the nazim. Whereas the former has strong institutional links with his superiors, the latter has no such links with higher authorities, especially as he is devoid of links with political parties in the context of the non-party elections for local bodies. The district council was indirectly elected, i.e. by union council members. This was a retrogressive step. Here, the basis for election of public representatives took a backward jump into history, going even beyond the Basic Democracies system of the 1960s in which the district council was directly elected.

The new plan provided for non-party elections for local bodies. The past tradition of non-party elections ensured that private benefit, not public ethos, motivated the political dynamics in the locality. In this context, a person would be evaluated in moral, cultural or religious terms. This involved subjective criteria, primordial loyalties based on primary identities and, most of all, money. On the other hand, a party is evaluated on relatively objective criteria -- efficiency, issue salience and policy profile. Obviously, the non-party dynamics sought to weaken political parties for the coming general elections. The idea was that non-party dynamics should take over the exercise in mass voting.

Despite careful planning of the government to the contrary, the party-based dynamics increasingly characterised local bodies elections. Indeed, it completely took over the last round. For example, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) made alliances in various constituencies with such parties as PML (N). Similarly, various ethnic and religious parties such as Awami National Party (ANP), Baluchistan National Movement (BNM), Jamiat-ul-Islam (JUI-S) and Pakistan Awami Tehrik (PAT) made strange bedfellows with their erstwhile political or ideological rivals. Nazims and councilors were disallowed from becoming members of political parties, which are typically organised horizontally across districts and vertically up to provincial and national levels. Being cut off from these links, the district politics was boxed up within unnaturally defined parameters of public life. Thus the 2000-1 local bodies elections militated against the message that people must learn preference ordering of parties. Their varying 'distance relationships' with parties would have laid the foundation of a relatively stable process of party identification. People would have identified themselves with the perceived party space along the continuum of left-right, liberal-conservative and traditional-modern dimensions. In the event, nothing of the sort happened. In this context, party politics was rendered meaningless and clueless.

Towards the Precipice
The devolution plan and the local bodies elections served the function of localisation of politics and elimination of policy from the national agenda, which was supposed to be handled by public representatives. Even after that, the military government hesitated to hold general elections without guaranteeing the continuation of the powers of oversight in its own hands. For that, it needed to ensure that President Musharraf would continue in his office after the installation of a representative government in Islamabad. The political scene prior to elections did not promise emergence of a pro-Musharraf coalition of forces at the federal and provincial levels. The government found it difficult to make the would-be parliamentarians to elect him President under the constitutional provisions. Therefore, President Musharraf felt obliged to take a non-constitutional route to his election as President via referendum. The 1984 referendum for Zia as President became the model for the Musharraf government. The April 2002 referendum turned out to be controversial in terms of allegations of large-scale rigging. The world opinion pointed to the unconstitutional nature of the Presidential election through referendum and to incidents of multiple voting, allegedly supervised, arranged and promoted by the state machinery. Examples of procedural laxity included: virtual non-application of indelible ink; allowing polling beyond the stipulated time; counting of votes in the absence of poll observers, polling agents of opposition or any members of neutral organisations; stamping of ballots by the election staff or, under their supervision, by voters or even school children; taking away unopened ballot boxes at the end of 'polling'; and collecting identity cards from people prior to elections and using them for bogus voting.

All along, the government seemed to fall prey to its own propaganda. It had focused on discrediting Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. It believed that it had effectively rendered their rival patterns of leadership unpopular, along with the whole political class in general. That meant that there was now a political vacuum in the country. The referendum campaign was organised on the basis of the vacuum theory. The government organised mass rallies on the pattern of the 1988-90 period of political polarisation in Pakistan. This was President Musharraf's answer to the acute voter apathy during the 1984 General Zia referendum, which carried bitter memories of fraud. Instead he concentrated on public mobilisation to get people out to vote for him.

The civil society in Pakistan found in the referendum an example of steamroller politics. The legal community alleged that the referendum was both illegal and illegitimate, in the context of a gross violation of the Constitution. There were tremors of restrained but painful expressions of dissent emanating from the traditionally pliant judicial community. The press was agitated over what it considered the one-sided nature of the whole activity. The two mainstream political parties PPP and PML (N), along with a number of smaller parties represented within and outside the ARD as well as MMA heaped criticism on the regime. In view of the prospects of the Musahrraf government continuing by other means even after the proposed elections in October, political parties felt obliged to oppose the referendum.

Outside Pakistan, the feeling of betrayal was growing among the Commonwealth and European Union countries. The leading dailies and weeklies published from western capitals, including Washington DC, London, Paris and Berlin gave a hostile verdict against the government's effort to win legitimacy through, what they considered, unconstitutional means. It was pointed out that voting exercise was carried out without electoral lists during the referendum. The policy measure of waiving the provision for checking the credentials of voters through the national ID card as the sole proof of identity also nullified the political consensus developed through the 1990s for a mechanism to get rid of the curse of impersonation. After referendum, the public controversy focused on the voter turnout. The opposition put it around 15 per cent. However, the Election Commission of Pakistan put it at nearly 60 per cent.
Electoral Reforms
The message of the April 2002 referendum, if there was any, was that people were firmly with political parties. While the public debated the morality and legality of the referendum, the government continued to move ahead with its programme for electoral reforms. NRB conducted meetings with various stakeholders, public activists and intelligentsia. The leading demands from the civil society and the political community included: expansion of the size of assemblies; enlarged representation of women in elected assemblies; merit-based qualifications for legislators; and elimination of the controversial separate electorates for different religious communities. Consequently, the number of the National Assembly seats was expanded from 207 to 342, with a corresponding increase in the four provincial assemblies. The idea was that the electoral contestants should be able to personally contact people in their constituencies. Also the task of contestants would be relatively easier if their financial and organisational resources were put to use in smaller constituencies. Their potential to fight elections was considered to be over-expanded. The electoral reforms provided 60 women's seats in the National Assembly, to be filled under the party list system of Proportional Representation (PR). In this matter, NRB ignored the demand of various women activist organisations to provide for their representation in parliament by opening the public arena for their participatory activity. In this context, a significant proposal related to reservation of 33 per cent seats for women on a rotational basis, to be elected jointly by male and female voters and through a mass campaign out in the field.

The typical middle class bias of the army and bureaucracy against uneducated politicians was played out in the form of the provision for graduation as the basic qualification for electoral contestants at the national and provincial levels. The resulting controversy about educational qualifications for electoral contestants was symptomatic of the ongoing tussle between politicos and the military-bureaucratic establishment. If articulation of interests of one's constituents was the basic idea behind all elected dispensations, then it was the communicability, accessibility and capacity for reaching out to state functionaries rather than a mere bachelor's degree that rarely mattered. On the other hand, the relatively less educated public representatives are generally considered disadvantaged vis-à-vis bureaucrats who are often highly educated and well trained. Also, uneducated or half-educated legislators were generally excluded from the process of law making, almost by default, especially as they found it difficult to operate in forums such as parliamentary committees. In the end, the requirement for graduation for candidates was made essential for the 2002 elections.

An important development was elimination of separate electorates in favour of a joint electorate for all religious communities. Ever since 1979, when General Zia introduced this system as part of his Islamisation programme, there was a pressure to withdraw the provision. The demand for this emanated from various liberal sections of the intelligentsia, political parties such as PPP, NGOs, human rights organisations and the world opinion as reflected through various forums. The provision for separate electorates was condemned as 'religious apartheid', which had generated insecurity among religious minorities and virtually disenfranchised them. Throughout the 1990s, the civilian governments shied away from accepting this demand out of the fear of a backlash from Islamic parties. However, the religious minorities generally boycotted the 2000-01 local bodies elections.³ This effectively paved the way for reform in this matter. Finally, in the post-9/11 scenario, after the fall of Taliban in Afghanistan and military operations against Al-Qaeda along the Pakistan-Afghan border, the Musharraf government took the moral courage to accept the demand for a joint electorate.

Towards Presidential System
Towards the middle of the year 2002, the government moved in the direction of constitutional amendments. It felt that there was need to reshape the constitutional edifice of the nation in favour of streamlining the parliament. According to the military establishment, the starting point for reform is the constitution, not parliament. The argument is that there should be constitutional amendments to the effect that state authority is placed in responsible hands. In other words, public representatives should be disallowed from playing havoc with the administrative and financial resources. Given the political scenario of the 1990s, it is argued, such responsible people are not found in the parliament. In this situation, real power should be taken outside parliament, if not wholly then at least in strategic areas of public policy. Making the executive responsible to a directly elected parliament was tantamount to surrendering initiative to politicians. The answer lay in legislation in the direction of empowerment of the extra-parliamentary office of President. The shift of power from Prime Minister to President would, therefore, represent a shift of power from parliament to extra-parliamentary forces.

This is diarchy par excellence.⁴ Historically, the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms ushered a period of rule by diarchy in British India. Diarchy represented a joint government of representative and official elements, first at the provincial level and later, on the eve of independence, at the federal level in the form of 'interim government'. Whether it is the Chief Executive's ascendancy to the position of President as per 1962 Constitution, or shift of constitutional powers from Prime Minister to President as per 1985 8th Amendment, or instituting the National Security Council (NSC) or similar steps in the direction of institutional or constitutional engineering, a kind of rule of diarchy is the outcome. Various models of power sharing between parliament and extra-parliamentary forces represent asymmetrical patterns of distribution of power, whereby the former stands out as a loser. The Musharraf government issued the Legal Framework order (LFO) in an attempt to indemnify its legal and administrative measures, provide for NSC and restore Presidential powers to dissolve the national assembly.⁵

Leaderless Opposition, King’s Parties and Clergy
All political parties tried to adjust with the new political realities that had taken the initiative away from public representatives for three years. The parties now faced elections in the midst of new legal and constitutional controversies. The two mainstream parties PML (N) and PPP shared the discrediting of their respective leaderships for corruption and misrule, and degeneration of their organisational dynamics. The biggest political resource of the PML-N was Mian Nawaz Sharif himself. With his exile, arranged through a deal brokered by Saudi Arabia, the party surrendered that resource. With it, the catch-all mobiliser par excellence disappeared from the scene. The party was unable to survive this blow, which hit it hard down to the core. For months before the exile of Nawaz Sharif to Saudi Arabia, his wife Kalsoom Nawaz had built a momentum for political activity. Obviously it paid off in the form of putting an end to the agony of her husband in jail. At the same time, the exile of the lady along with her husband and other members of the family put an end to street action sponsored by the party. The PML-N failed to seize the political initiative ever since.

The PPP continued to struggle under a situation that kept its leaders under pressure from the NAB. Benazir Bhutto tried to keep the initiative in party matters, but her absence from the scene cost the party in organisational terms. Like PML (N), the PPP decided to participate in elections under all circumstances. On the eve of elections, it hastily put together a new entity PPP-Parliamentarians (PPP-P) to avoid being axed under the new laws. Both parties dreaded the scenario of the 1985 MRD boycott of elections, which left that alliance out in the lurch as the political process moved on. Thus, there was general willingness on the part of political parties to participate in elections even in the absence of a level playing field. The mainstream parties were vulnerable to the government's pursuit of a carrot-and-stick policy to win their members over to the PML (Q) side. These parties represented local interests defined by caste, faction and tribe. On the other hand, MMA was more resistant to divisive manipulation from outside. As opposed to representational parties such as PPP and PML, the MMA was an alliance of mobilisational parties. Instead of local interests and reformist agenda of the former, the latter displayed a commitment to a totalist approach to politics, aimed at a systemic change. All this shaped the process of the 2002 elections along unpredictable lines.

The Punjab-based national divide between the two mainstream parties PPP and PML characterised the decade-long electoral profile of Pakistan. Both parties sought to expand their constituencies in the smaller provinces, except in Sindh where PPP was already present as an ethno-nationalist party. However, in the face of somewhat resilient ethnic vote blocs in these provinces, both PPP and PML had found it expedient to win over the existing smaller parties into election alliances. The Mohajir (later Muttahida) Qaumi Movement (MQM), Awami National Party (ANP), Baluchistan National Party (BNP) and Jamhoori Watan Party (JWP) as typical ethnic parties as well as Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) and other Islamic parties became coalition partners of one or the other mainstream party at one time or another at the federal or provincial level. In this way, electoral politics in the 1990s produced two parallel series of concentric or overlapping circles, which drew meaning from the fact of representing a wide spectrum of political groupings compressed into a bi-polar conflict.⁶

The situation in 2002 was different. Here, no party was sure of its standing with the electorate. The government relied on what was generally known as the king's party, i.e. PML Quaid-i-Azam (Q). A second alleged king's party was the National Alliance (NA) put together by the government. This included the former President Farooq Leghari's Millat Party, as well as the Sindh Democratic Alliance (SDA), which was itself rooted in the official initiatives. Along with that, a large number of independent candidates contested elections under the common symbol of crescent. Some of them had earlier belonged to the Musharraf government. They were collectively known as the third king's party. It was widely speculated that the new alliance of six Islamic parties -- MMA -- enjoyed the support of official circles as a counterweight to PPP, PML (N), ANP and MQM.

By the time the October elections were held, the political atmosphere was rife with allegations of pre-poll rigging.⁷ It was alleged that officials were posted and transferred in scores. Nazims took part in the political campaign in favour of various 'kings parties'.⁸ Election observers from EU, Commonwealth, NDI (National Democratic Institute) and Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) severely criticised the electoral arrangements including the role of the Election Commission as well as LFO.⁹ Most of the political parties in opposition to the Musharraf government alleged blatant malpractices even before the elections were held. The October elections for the National and provincial assemblies were held in controversy and confusion.

Election Results
As expected, the October 2002 elections returned a hung parliament. The profile of the two party-led lower house of parliament in the 1990s gave way to triangular pattern of party representation. PPP as one of the two earlier mega-parties survived. The other two were new entities comprising old faces: the PML(Q) and MMA. Along with that, a large space was covered by ethnic parties such as MQM and JWP, smaller factions of the mainstream parties such as PML(N) and PPP (S), one-man parties led by Imran Khan and others and independents. The PML(Q) won 77 seats, PPP-P 62, MMA 45, independents 30, PML(N) 15, MQM 13, and NA 13, followed by miniscule parties who won 1-4 seats each in the National Assembly. By the time elections for women's seats and minorities' seats were held, followed by by-elections held on the seats vacated by winners on two seats each, the following party position emerged in the National Assembly.