Pakistan: Minorities still await implementation of dual voting right

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"Despite several promises made by the governments and political parties of issuing and using dual voting rights, no one has yet considered to make it official."

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch |
Source/Credit: Pakistan Tribune
By Pakistan Tribune | April 1, 2013

KARACHI: Around 2.77 million religious minority voters across the country will take part in the electoral process, not for their own representatives, but the Muslim candidates.

This has always been the case during general elections in Pakistan. Non-Muslim candidates will not be elected through direct election, but will be selected by Muslim leadership of the mainstream political parties on the reserved seats for minorities.

Officially the religious minorities of Pakistan have dual voting rights, allowing them to not only vote on general seats of Muslim candidates, but also for their own members, but practically the system has not been implemented.

Thus, minorities will vote for general seats, but their own representatives without contesting elections, will be used by whichever party wins the majority to elevate their number of seats in the assembly. It is worth mentioning here, that the same happens on reserved seats for women MPAs and MNAs.

This means, one portion of the assembly will comprise people's representatives as elected through direct voting, while the other portion is of women and minorities who will not be elected by people, rather selected by the male Muslim leadership of the mainstream political parties.

In 1995 former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto promised to give rights of dual vote to religious minorities, but her government did not consider it. Later, former dictator Pervez Musharraf in 2000 issued this right to religious minorities, allowing them to use their one vote for general seats as well as for their own candidates.

However, since the candidates of the minority groups do not participate in active voting and are selected on 'reserved' seats, the rights to cast a second vote are wasted.

The Pakistan People's Party-led government also made several promises during its last five years that they would make amendments in the law, allowing minorities to utilize their dual voting rights, however none of those promises were fulfilled.

The minority leaders fear that following the example of the general elections that were held in 2008, mainstream political parties would again ignore representatives from majority within minority. The concerns are that the influential and affluent figures will be made members of the assemblies, who will not consider resolving the problems of the poor minority.

"Despite several promises made by the governments and political parties of issuing and using dual voting rights, no one has yet considered to make it official," said Pakistan Hindu Sabha (PHS) leader, Advocate PM Dileep. He said Constitution of Pakistan stated that only Muslims of Kashmir had this right to dual vote in which they could cast votes for their Azad Kashmir Assembly and also vote for National assembly of Pakistan in respective constituencies, but not for Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities.

In such conditions, the lower caste or officially declared scheduled caste communities which comprise 92 percent of the country's biggest minority Hindus were unable to get their representatives in the assemblies.

In 2008, assemblies including National Assembly (NA) and four provincial assemblies, there were 33 members of minorities out of which 19 were Hindus and among those only one member was from lower caste Hindus, while the rest of the 18 belonged to the businessmen community or upper caste Hindus.

"These businessmen upper caste Hindu bribe billions of rupees to the political parties and their leadership in the name of party fund and get into assemblies on reserved seats without direct election and when they come into power they work for their party leadership instead of working for the better of poor minorities," said the advocate.

Though, PPP government increased the number of seats for religious minorities of the country in the NA and four provincial assemblies from existing 33 to 44, which includes 14 for NA, four in Balochistan Assembly, four in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) Assembly, 10 in Punjab Assembly and 12 in Sindh Assembly. Despite the increase in seat numbers, the non-Muslim citizens will not be able to take their desired candidate through their vote to the assembly.




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