CAUGHT in an election campaign, as I have been for the past month — phase two of the local bodies’ elections — thoughts turn to electoral contests past and present.

Despite our bad political record as a country, despite the vicissitudes of military rule, this remains an intensely political society, politics the favourite subject of conversation of all classes of people. Go to a village and the talk soon will turn to politics. In a drawing room almost the first question is, “What’s happening?”

In November 1964 just a week before the annual exams, Mr Charlesworth, the principal of my college, called me to his office to tell me that my father wanted me in Chakwal for a day or so because Madar-i-Millat Miss Fatima Jinnah (contesting the presidential election against Field Marshal Ayub Khan) was coming to address a public meeting.

Imagine my astonishment because my father, averse to holidays or indeed levity of any kind, was here getting me away from college just a few days before the exams. But then Miss Jinnah’s coming to Chakwal was no ordinary matter and as I look back over the years I am glad those summons came.

When she arrived in the open space (now a sort of bazaar) just outside our house, I saw flint-hearted men, beyond sentiment of any kind, blubbering with tears. There was nothing charismatic about Miss Jinnah’s person. But she was charismatic by association, the Quaid-i-Azam’s sister in person, and that is why after all these years I still remember the outpouring of emotion which greeted her arrival and her speech a short time later.

Who were the leaders accompanying her? Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, Sardar Shaukat Hayat, Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri (Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri’s father who, incidentally, wouldn’t have been caught dead in anything like the Q-League, but I suppose times change) and Pir Safiuddin of Makhad. Indeed, the bodyguards accompanying Miss Jinnah throughout her tour of Punjab and Frontier were from the Makhad estate.

The star of the show, however, indeed of that entire presidential campaign, was the great Habib Jalib, his poetry and singing voice mesmerizing the huge crowd. Forty years have passed but his verses of that period are still engraved in public memory: “Aisey dastoor ko, subah-i-benoor ko, main nahin manta, main nahin manta...” “Such a constitution (the reference being to the Ayub regime) — such a morning without light, I do not accept, I do not accepts.” The arrival of every military saviour gives Jalib’s poetry a fresh lease of life. Votary of no narrow sect, Jalib spared no one. His heart bled with the separation of East Pakistan in 1971. He was no fan of Bhutto’s and disliked his authoritarian ways. But when Bhutto fell and Gen Zia seized power, some of his most resonant poetry was a response to the hypocrisy and cruelty of the Zia regime. He was a fan of Benazir’s but when she went about making a fool of herself as prime minister there were some withering couplets about her as well. What would he have made of “enlightened moderation”?

When the clouds disperse and the mountain summits are clear, and Pakistan comes into its own and the last of our military saviours retreats into the sunset, a statue in bronze or granite of Jalib, as he was in the 1960s — flowing hair and rebel eyes — should be raised in Parliament Square, Islamabad, with the “morning-without-light” poem inscribed at its base.

The 1970 elections caused a storm to blow across both wings of Pakistan. Caught in the fever of that moment, how could we have known where that storm was heading or what grim destruction it would wreak?

The echoes of the ill-fated 1977 elections deluded many of us into thinking that tyranny (of sorts) was being dealt a blow and democracy’s hour was at hand. Little did we realize that in the witches’ cauldron of that summer of misguided discontent, a right-wing conspiracy was being hatched which, far from securing democracy, would lead inexorably to the long night of Ziaul Haq’s rule, a penalty far in excess of any sins the people of Pakistan may have committed.

The first election in which I did any campaigning was the 1979 local election ordained by Zia — that election too part of the unvarying pattern of military rule. Military saviours invariably go for local elections and, invariably, these elections are “partyless”, the very notion of party clashing with the military’s preference for a sanitized political environment. General elections come later and when they do the objective, no matter what it takes, is the achieving of ‘positive results’.

Ayub, Zia, Musharraf — with minor variations, the same musical score, the same symphony. And therefore the same sounds. They all sound the same, they look the same. And yet the heaviest investment military regimes make is into wanting the nation to believe that they are different, that the corrupt will be held to account, the streets will forever be clean and on the skyline a brave new vista is about to emerge. To achieve credibility, the saviour complex seeks two things above all: collective amnesia and collective gullibility. The nation should forget and the nation should be ready to make a fool of itself all over again.

Campaigning back then was not so much arduous as primitive. There weren’t too many roads in the countryside and, God knows, there weren’t any telephones. Everything had to be done ‘manually’, so to speak, messages being conveyed by word of mouth and a great deal of difficult travelling being undertaken to reach remote areas.

It’s so different these days, the difference itself being a measure of the spectacular progress we’ve made in so many fields. There’s hardly a village now, at least in my part of Punjab, to which a metalled road (forget the potholes) doesn’t reach. And our transport...whereas once-upon-a-time I remember campaigning on a single Suzuki carry-dubba, electioneering these days is a far more swanky affair with candidates and supporters going about in late-model cars, the rhetoric of poverty a world away from all this expense and glitter.

The public meeting still remains the favoured method of voter-contact but the spread of the telephone has added a whole new dimension to the task of political communication in the backwaters of the Pakistani countryside.

And everyone, but everyone, has a mobile phone or aspires to have one. We had mobile phones even in the 2002 general elections but with coverage sparse, most district areas were out of cell phone reach. Which makes these local elections the first real mobile phone elections in the history of Pakistan.

A couple of evenings ago I was out campaigning and because we were behind time and people at other places were waiting, I must have got 20 calls on my mobile phone within the hour asking where I was. I would say just out of Jabbi, now close to Sohair, now about to enter Khara, an ease of communication unimaginable just a few years ago.

So we’ve come a long way technically, technology compressing time and space. But conceptwise we remain stuck in the dark ages, with the old script of manufactured kings’ parties, partyless local elections, heavily-influenced general elections and parliament a mere showpiece, the information and communication revolutions superimposed on the frozen verities of military rule.

Anyway, the roadmap is clear. After the first and second phases of the local elections, polls for the district and tehsil nazims and then the machinery of state cranking up slowly for the ponderous but predictable objective of fixing the 2007 general elections and securing another five-year term for the president. The more things change.