IT is well known that political parties play an indispensable role in the operation of a democratic political system. It is known also that it takes a good deal of money to run a political party. A genuinely functioning party must maintain some sort of a secretariat with permanent staff to take care of routine business. Then there are expenses in connection with periodic election campaigns: public meetings, rallies, demonstrations, and processions, all of which cost money. Party notables hold their own consultations requiring travel and stay away from home.

I was a bit surprised to read a report issued by Transparency International in December 2004, saying that in 36 of the 62 countries surveyed the general public perceived political parties as just about the most corrupt among political institutions. The next in line were parliaments, followed by the police and the judiciary. In Pakistan illegal, in some cases even forced, donations to parties are not uncommon.

Those who manage political parties in Pakistan would appear to be independently wealthy. The Sharifs are industrialists. Benazir Bhutto and Makhdoom Amin Fahim are landlords. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain is a landlord and an industrialist. Altaf Hussain is listed as a “political activist,” with no known source of income, but he is nevertheless prosperous. In the second tier, Raja Pervez Ashraf and Jehangir Badr are businessmen, Iqbal Zafar Jhagra is an engineer and a landlord. Imran Farooq is a physician but apparently he is no longer practising as one. The chiefs and their deputies in the Islamic parties are mostly religious scholars and teachers. Their careers cannot possibly afford them enough to support their lifestyles, and it may be assumed that they have other, undeclared, sources of income.

Political parties in Pakistan are required to submit annual statements of accounts to the Election Commission. Those for the year 2003-04 show (rupees in approximate figures) that the MQM made slightly more and spent slightly less than four million rupees; PML (Q) made Rs 3,256,000 and spent Rs 5,952,000, presumably drawing upon the balance from the previous year to meet the deficit; Jamaat-i-Islami received Rs 2,958,000 and spent Rs 2,863,000. PML (N) made and spent a little less than two million, ending the year with a deficit of Rs 16,610. Curiously enough, JUI spent exactly as much as it had made (Rs 1,138,428). Incredible though it may seem, PPP parliamentarians opened and closed the year with a cash balance of one thousand rupees, received no money whatever and spent none.

The sources of funds in most cases are said to be membership fees and voluntary contributions from members and supporters. That the above figures do not reveal the full picture of party finances may be taken for granted. It is more than likely that, beyond the Islamic parties, the bulk of a party’s expenses is met out of the “purse” of its top leader. It may be assumed also that its main office-holders at the national, provincial, and district levels get chosen because they are wealthy enough to meet the cost of running the party (to the extent that it does any running) in their respective jurisdictions. It is then not without reason that some observers have compared political parties in Pakistan with privately owned estates or corporations.

Given the predominance of a very small number of individuals, sometimes that of a single person, in a party’s affairs, it is not surprising that its rapport with the general public is tenuous. According to a recent opinion poll, a substantial majority of the respondents (62 per cent) in this country felt that the “leaders” of political parties were more concerned with their personal interests than they were with the people’s needs and aspirations.

A party may charge persons seeking its “ticket” in a forthcoming election a hefty application fee, often non-refundable, and thus make a fair amount of money. But this will be spent on the election campaign, leaving little for the years between elections. One approach to this problem may be that the needed funds will come from its own principal leaders, in which case one cannot blame them if they regard the party as a personal enterprise. Alternatively, one may say that the party does not really need a whole lot of money because it does not intend to do very much during the years between elections. As noted above, the PPP spent nothing whatever during 2003-04, a fact from which we may deduce that it did nothing during this time, which is indeed to be regretted.

The law in Pakistan (Chief Executive’s Political Parties Order, 2002) recognises that “political parties play a pivotal role in furthering constitutional, federal, and democratic political culture.” But it does nothing to provide them a decent way of attaining financial viability. Concerned with safeguarding their integrity, it allows individual contributions to them but forbids donations by corporations or professional organisations in the form of cash, kind, stocks, hospitality, accommodations, fuel, or transportation.

Good health of political parties is evidently a part of the public interest. A way should then be found to enable them to keep functioning during the years between elections. Funding them is a live issue in several democracies. The Labour party in Britain used to get most of its money from the workers’ unions, but their contribution, like their membership, has been declining since the 1980s. Membership of the parties themselves has also declined with the gradual erosion of their ideological differences, which induces voter apathy. Labour borrowed 14 million pounds, and the Tories 21 million, in low interest loans from wealthy supporters to finance their 2005 election campaigns. Prime Minister Tony Blair and David Cameron, the Tory leader, met recently to discuss the option of public funding of political parties, but apparently they did not reach an agreement.

Public funding in Italy, first introduced in 1974, has gone through vicissitudes as a result of several subsequent acts of parliament and two referendums (1978 and 1993). The latest legislation on the subject, adopted in 1997, allows individuals to designate 0.4 per cent of their income tax liability as a contribution to political parties. The proceeds go into a fund which is distributed among parties, having at least one seat in the chamber of deputies or the Senate, proportionately to the number of votes each received in the preceding national election. Additional contributions by individuals and corporations within prescribed limits can be tax deductible (meaning that they can be deducted from one’s taxable income for computing one’s tax liability).

Similar proposals are being broached in Pakistan. The Centre for Civic Education (CCE) in Islamabad, which has been doing a lot of good work for reforming political institutions, has recently proposed public funding of political parties on an annual basis. It recommends the establishment of a fund in which a certain sum of money per every registered voter may be placed. Let us say there are 60 million registered voters in Pakistan, and let us say the government puts 100 rupees for each voter in this fund. This will mean six billion rupees every fiscal year, which, considering the volume of government spending, is not very much. Monies may be disbursed out of this fund in proportion to the number of votes the parties received in the previous election, excluding those which received less than one per cent of the total votes cast.

The CCE figures that this pre-requisite will leave only about half a dozen parties that remain eligible for assistance (notably PML-Q, PML-N, PPP, MMA, MQM, and PML-Functional). In addition, the centre proposes tax deductible individual and corporate contributions within prescribed limits. It would also allow parties free time on state-owned electronic media to carry their message to the public.

These proposals merit the most serious attention of all concerned. Issues of the integrity and viability of political parties in Pakistan are grave enough. Ruling parties steal money from development funds under their control. Intelligence agencies provide covert assistance to make and break parties, according to their passing whims of what may be expedient, and thus botch up the nation’s political system. The current ways of funding parties make for a plutocracy that excludes men and women of moderate means, howsoever capable and patriotic they may be, from elective offices. Something needs to be done. The CCE’s proposals appear to be eminently sensible and, I think, also viable.

One of their implications may be noted in passing. In disbursing monies from the fund one could go by the number of Assembly seats the parties won or the number of votes each of them got in a previous election. The multiplicity of parties and candidates contesting the election brings these two criteria into conflict.

For instance, in the 2002 election the PPP parliamentarians received 28.42 per cent of the votes cast nationwide and won 80 seats. On the other hand, PML (Q) received 26.63 per cent of the vote (nearly 1.8 per cent fewer) but ended up with 118 seats (38 more than the PPP’s). The MQM received 3.55 per cent of the vote and got 17 NA seats. PML (N) received 12.71 per cent of the vote (9.16 more) and 18 seats (just one more than the MQM). By contrast, MMA received 0.43 per cent fewer votes than the PML-N did but won 59 seats, that is, 41 more than those of PML-N.

If the anomalies produced by the multiplicity of parties and candidates, and manipulations of government agencies, are to be avoided, and if the true nationwide standing of the various parties is to be reckoned, it may be best to distribute available funds on the basis of the votes each has received in the previous election. This procedure may be open to the objection that the previous election (that of 2002) was rigged. This is an insurmountable problem in that all preceding elections were also rigged; except that of 1970 at which time several of the present-day major parties did not even exist. Unless we want to conclude that nothing for the better can ever be done in Pakistan, a lesson of despair, we have to make a beginning at some point.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US. Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

THE parliamentary form of government and a permanent civil service were the common inheritance of India and Pakistan, or their colonial legacy as we are wont to call it. Both institutions have survived in India but not in Pakistan.

Obviously, the lifeline of the two is common and runs through the acceptance (or at least acquiescence to) of the public conduct of parliamentarians and civil servants by the people.

How the parliamentary system has been able to sink roots in India despite the country’s huge territory and enormous diversity of races and religions, and why it hasn’t been able to do so in a smaller, more homogeneous Pakistan remains the subject of unending research and conjecture. A simple explanation of it, however, is to be found in the fact that the permanent civil service, which underpins the parliamentary system, has been purposely and systematically dismantled in Pakistan since independence, except during the first few years.

In the first decade of independence, though political governments changed fast, state policies remained consistent and economic progress steady. Yet the army commanders and technocrats of the time determined that the parliamentary government did not provide the kind of confident and durable leadership that the country needed in its formative years to confront the enemies at the borders and to deal with restive elements at home. The country, they argued, needed a strong leadership untrammelled by parliamentary controls or bureaucratic red tape.

In pursuit of this plan the civil servants became the first target of frequent and arbitrary purges. The political leaders too, unwittingly, went along in the hope that a civil service that was not a stickler for rules and propriety would help promote their personal and party agenda. A sovereign parliament and a permanent civil service thus gradually gave way to charismatic or corrupt leaders who drew their strength from the commanders, if they came from the army, or from their party cadres or clansmen if they were civilians. Ayub Khan, Ziaul Haq, Z.A. Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif all of them to varying degrees came to use parliament as well as the civil service as a seal of validity for their whimsical or dishonest actions.

On the other hand, India without much ado, chose to adhere to parliamentary traditions and, equally important, submitted to the discipline of the colonial legacy of the permanent civil service. India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh put it across clearly to a thousand civil servants comprising collectors / district magistrates (more familiar here as deputy commissioners) who were summoned to Delhi for consultations spread over days.

Manmohan Singh deserves to be quoted at some length from his hour-long concluding address on the occasion. He said: “One has to reckon with the fact that all is not well with the way our political system functions... Politics in a poor country has to mediate between societal tensions that are built into the body dynamics of a poor society trying to modernise itself... Many a time politics becomes an instrument of self-aggrandisement... It is the duty of all of you... to steer our republic’s ship in the desired direction... You are the establishment in this country, you are the only people who have secure tenures and who can therefore and are obliged to take a long view of the evolution of our polity. Politicians come and go ... many times they don’t have the occasion to think about the long term consequences of what they are doing...”

One may recall that the founder of Pakistan had expressed similar thoughts half a century ago while addressing the newly-independent state’s civil servants. This is what Jinnah told them at Peshawar on April 14, 1948: “You should not be influenced by any political pressure, by any political party or individual politician. Do your duty as servants to the people and the state, fearlessly and honestly. Service is the backbone of the state. Governments are formed, governments are defeated, prime ministers come and go, ministers come and go, but you stay on, and, therefore, there is a very great responsibility placed on your shoulders.”

No army general or political leader in Pakistan today feels persuaded, as Manmohan Singh does, to advise the civil servants not to yield to political pressure for they all expect them to do their bidding. Nor are the civil servants prepared to make any sacrifice for doing the right thing as Jinnah said they must.

When Pakistani’s Public Service Commission insisted on following the rule of merit in the promotion of civil servants, the commission with its chairman, who happened to be a general, and the members, who were all senior civil servants, were sent home. Sindh’s Public Service Commission has closed down while the jobs of teachers, doctors, inspectors, etc. running into thousands are being apportioned among the politicians in preparation for the elections which the newly-appointed chief election commissioner keeps assuring will be free and fair. Shouldn’t he direct and then make sure that no job is given except through a transparently fair competitive system? Rigging, after all, does not mean casting bogus votes alone.

Manmohan Singh in his address to the civil servants recalled what Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had to say in the early years of independence: “You will not have a united India if you do not have a good all-India service which has the independence to speak out its mind and which has a sense of security.” Sardar Patel is not a loved name to recall but Pakistan, perhaps, would not have been torn asunder if its public servants then were more independent and secure to speak their minds. Now they are neither independent nor secure and are not expected to speak out.

Notwithstanding the colonial character of the British empire, Manmohan Singh told the Indian civil servants, it was “an enterprise of great creativity. The administrative system it handed down had served well and the civil service was a prized institution and a proud legacy.”

Compare that with the ideas (abbreviated here) of General Musharraf, Pakistan’s latter-day innovator, as expressed in the bumbling jargon of his National Reconstruction Bureau: “The colonial system of governance was rooted in a feudal-imperial system designed to seek the twin ends of collection of land revenue and raising troops to fight an adversary. The governance paradigm was that the interest of the crown must never be sacrificed, the people’s will or welfare were non-issues.”

It is left to the people and historians to judge the merits of the views of Manmohan Singh and Musharraf. The conditions in both countries are open for all to see and draw their own conclusions.

In a recent interview on Pakistan TV, General Musharraf conceded that he had left the task of reconstructing the civil service to the next government for it was too cumbersome and controversial for him to attempt and he had better things to do. He did not care to explain why he had to demolish the civil service in the first instance. It is in the tradition of Pakistan’s politics that a ruler does whatever he likes and he cannot be persuaded to do what he does not want to do.