Since 1970 there have been nine elections based on adult franchise in Pakistan. But none of them have been studied or analysed by Pakistani political scientists and academics in the manner in which elections are usually studied in democracies.

Analysing election results are an excellent way to understand the political, social and economic currents taking shape in a country. Yet, even those Pakistanis who have penned detailed theses on such currents have largely ignored studying the many elections which have taken place in Pakistan, despite the fact that Pakistan was one of the first Muslim countries to experiment with democracy.

Pakistan’s first main election held in 1970 is perhaps the most comprehensively studied election. But the best available data and analysis on the mentioned election was almost exclusively dug out and investigated by non-Pakistanis. For example, political scientist and author Dr Phillip E. Jones closely studied the results of the 1970 elections when he was based in Pakistan. Author and professor Dr Craig Baxter also studied the 1970 elections in some detail.

A Pakistani political scientist Dr Muhammad Waseem thoroughly studied the 1993 elections and discussed his findings in a 1994 book of his. However, those willing to spend days and even months in local newspaper libraries like I have often done, can certainly formulate a pretty good idea about how or for what Pakistanis have voted.

Despite the pressures on religious minorities ever since the 1980s due to the growth of extremism in Pakistan, the size of minority voters has actually increased

Our interest in this article is to determine how Pakistan’s ‘minorities’ have voted in general elections. Dawn recently published a remarkable document on minority voters in Pakistan released by the Election Commission of Pakistan. The document is interesting because despite the pressures which most religious minorities have faced in the country ever since the 1980s due to the growth of extremism in Pakistan, the size of minority voters has actually increased. Currently it stands at about three million. Almost half of them are Hindus (1.49 million).

The second largest group of minority voters comprises Christians at 1.32 million, followed by the Ahmadis, Sikh, Zoroastrians and Buddhists. This suggests that, now more than ever, the minority vote can determine the outcome of electoral contests in various constituencies.

During a tense contest in Sialkot in the 1970 election, PPP candidate Kausar Niazi managed to persuade a large concentration of Ahmadi voters in Sialkot’s NW-75 constituency to vote for the PPP. Niazi was contesting the election against some established Muslim League candidates and those belonging to well-organised religious parties. Niazi managed to obtain over 90,000 votes, the most received by any candidate in the Punjab. Of course, the Ahmadis were yet to be relegated as a minority group, but they were still treated as a distinct Muslim cluster at the time.

According to both Baxter and Jones, the Christians and Hindus in Sindh and Punjab overwhelmingly voted for the PPP in 1970, mainly due to the party’s progressive manifesto. However, Jones adds that the “elite Christians” opposed the PPP’s manifesto due to its (the manifesto’s) emphasis on nationalisation. Elite Christian groups voted for the Convention Muslim League, a party which was formed by Ayub Khan in 1962.

It is also important to plug here the fact that a major Christian outfit in undivided India had backed Jinnah’s All India Muslim League.

A detailed paper authored by Dr Munir Al-Anjum and Dr Shahnaz Tariq documents how a large Christian organisation in the Punjab, the All India Christian Association (AICA) backed Jinnah’s call for a separate country. On June 23, 1947, when a resolution was moved in the Punjab Assembly to make Punjab part of Pakistan (which would come into being in August 1947), all the Christian members of the assembly voted for the resolution’s passage.

In her book Christians of Pakistan Linda Walbridge writes that by the 1977 election, the PPP had lost much of its Christian electoral support due to the Bhutto regime’s nationalisation of educational institutions run by Christian priests and nuns.

In 1985 the Zia dictatorship introduced the separate electorate system in which Pakistan’s minority groups could only vote for candidates belonging to their respective religions. This system stayed put across the 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1997 elections and the two major parties, the left-leaning PPP and the centre-right PML-N that came to power during these elections did not change it.

Since the Muslim candidates couldn’t receive votes from minority groups anymore under the separate electorate system, minority interests were ignored by the parties. The system was finally abolished by the Musharraf regime (1999-2008) and joint electorates were reintroduced. The minorities were clearly not happy with the PPP and PML-N when they went out to vote during the 2002 election.

In his analysis of the 2002 election, Craig Baxter wrote that a majority of Christians and Hindus in the Punjab voted for the pro-Musharraf PML-Q. In Sindh, according to him, even though the PPP was successful in bagging a majority of Hindu votes, in the more urban areas of the province a majority of Hindu votes were cast in favour of either pro-Musharraf parties or the Mohajir nationalist party, the MQM, which received the bulk of Hindu and Christian votes in Karachi.

During the 2008 election which marked the ouster of the Musharraf regime and when the economy had begun to nosedive and extremist violence was on the rise, the PPP and PML-N managed to win back minority voters. Newspaper reports suggest that the Hindu and Christian vote in the Punjab was split between the PPP and PML-N. In Sindh, again via newspaper reports, Hindus voted overwhelmingly for the PPP, except in Karachi where a majority of Hindus once again voted for the MQM.

Things got a lot more interesting during the 2013 election. The PPP regime at the centre was a disaster, but in Sindh it seemed to have done well because it swept the polls here while being routed elsewhere. According to a report in Dawn (March 19, 2013) the fate of as many as 96 NA and PA constituencies in Punjab and Sindh depended on how the minorities were to vote here. If we take into account the final results of these constituencies, we can see that in 2013, a majority of Hindu, Christian and Sikh votes in the Punjab went to PML-N, whereas in Sindh, Hindu votes were again cast in favour of the PPP (even though in lesser numbers compared to 2008).

In Karachi during the 2013 elections, Imran Khan’s centre-right PTI reportedly bagged the majority of the city’s Christian votes. According to some reports, MQM managed to sneak past PTI in some tight contests in Karachi due to Hindu votes. Certain reports on the 2013 election also mentioned minority voting patterns in Balochistan and KP. For example, Hindu votes in Balochistan largely went to Baloch nationalist parties and PML-N, whereas in the KP, a bulk of minority votes were cast in favour of PTI.

But just as the importance of minority votes is increasing among mainstream parties (thus triggering certain minority-friendly legislation), the Ahmadiyya ‘minority’ have been boycotting elections. According to a report by Zofeen T. Ebrahim (Dawn, April 11, 2013), the Ahmadis haven’t voted as a community since their ouster from the fold of Islam in 1974 by the state and government.

There are 119,749 registered Ahmadi voters, mainly in the Punjab. Just before the 2013 election, Imran Khan tried to bag Ahmadi votes by making some statements which were sympathetic to the plight of the Ahmadis. But due to the criticism he received for this by the religious parties, he retracted his statements on the advice of some of his party members.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 15th, 2017