WHY do people fight? Now if this were not difficult enough to answer, these days the question is, why do people want to fight an election?

This is specifically about the third type of people who are in the run. The first type consists of those who contest an election to win it. Then there are those who want to compete. But why do we have so many of those who don’t appear to have too serious a claim on representing the people and who show little or no aptitude for giving it a real shot?

The knowledgeable put it down to the human desire for prominence. But surely there are more respectable ways of winning a bit of fame than allowing yourself to be swept away by a desire to give the people their true representative, a messiah they had all been waiting for and are likely to not recognise when he arrives.

We do write up this crap that an individual has a right to be not always counted — an individual can initiate a bit of counting in his or her own name, by standing in an election. It is frightening to notice just how many of these simple souls appear to believe what they hear or read.

There is no more easy explanation for an ‘also-ran’ enrolling in an election than a few people’s craving for some light-hearted fun at the expense of an obscure candidate spiked by the candidate’s faith in miracles. The one who fights deep inside believes in the people rediscovering their common sense right when they are about to stamp the ballot paper. They are because they think they can win.

Often inclined to stand independent of any party afflictions, this time these people with hardly any pretensions to power or any known record of pursuing politics as a pure sport without any (apparent) consideration for rewards have found some party banners to contest under. Many of them have, surprising the onlooker with the pluralism that has set in around us without it being noticed.

There are the 250-odd Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) candidates in Punjab introduced to the people on the weekend among the anti-feudal roars. There is one gentleman peering down a pole as a Pervez Musharraf nominee, and there could certainly be more of his party waiting to be discovered in the rich pile made up of various groups and well-intentioned heroes of their own streets.

The MQM and Musharraf’s All Pakistan Muslim League are national players. But there are in the picture parties no more prominent than their chosen candidates. If anything, these candidates have been a more permanent feature of the campaign so far.

Unrecognised they may be, but they have at least been spared the ignominy of the party ticket having been snatched away from them after the posters had been printed and hung and the close relatives, always in the vanguard of the thrust for change in a party, in a household, been informed.

They are there hanging by the polls, looking down from posters that must have cost a few bucks, decorated with titles of caste and profession, like the drowsy-looking gentleman in my constituency who would have been real but for his current existence in a Muslim League which doesn’t really matter.

In comparison, the parties which are there to win or to compete have had too many to choose from and too many to ditch, until they have found the person, usually a man but in rare instances a courageous woman, to carry the party’s colours.

There are more parties than we had thought there were, a phenomenon which a cynic in Lahore puts down to the lack of unity in our ranks. He obviously prefers the simple old city neatly demarcated into two camps. Run the list of ‘potential winners’ by him and he would shake his head at every mention, until we are down to a clutch of independents.

From there we work our way back to the parties and the winners and the earnest competitors among them right until we have restored the two-camp system of our convenience. The Sunday socialising hour has been purposefully utilised instead of being wasted on mundane subjects of jobs, marriages and the remembrance of what it was once.

This could well be it. Perhaps the candidates who are not there to compete are there to spend time in activity which cannot be easily described as a waste. In local conversations, they are invariably identified as people with a little extra to spend. They could be fathers or brothers with sons and brothers abroad or in earning positions here.

According to the economist’s classical theory, they have the money, and are now trying, in the best manner they can think of, to assert as best as they can their right to power.

The old saying is that once you are in an election, you can never be out of one, meaning the next time you are more likely to be picked by a worthy party as its candidate. A few have benefited from this logic, just as many have realised the fallacy of it all rather too late to restart with investments in more worthwhile ventures.

In the cities more so than in the villages, the current election brings more proof of how a majority of independents are left alone to reflect on the cons of their past attempts at providing the people with an alternative. This has been a ticketed circus. The loyalties are changing at the drop of a name.

The independents in the towns, however, remain largely unsought and unsolicited. The parties are more inclined to replace their own less-wanted election candidates with those from the old or current rival camp. The tickets have been given and taken away at a speed turning the affair into a mass wedding where saying who is marrying who takes a lot of skill.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.