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Monday February 17, 2025

Quitting assemblies, boycotting elections: PPP bears in mind old bitter consequences of being out of system

By Tariq Butt
January 02, 2021

ISLAMABAD: A bitter lesson that the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had learnt decades ago has always weighed heavily on its mind, preventing it from resigning from the assemblies. The party has come to believe that taking such a decision throws it out of the system and into the wilderness for a long time to come.

In the approaching decisive meeting of the heads of the constituents of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), the PPP was not expected to budge from its present stand: always remain part of the electoral process and never abandon it for others to capture. Its judgement has now cast doubt on the cohesion of the opposition alliance and has the potential to seriously aggravate tensions within it.

Even after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on Dec 27, 2007, when the PPP had plunged into a massive crisis, it had contested the parliamentary elections although the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supremo Nawaz Sharif had announced that his party would boycott the polls due to the tragedy. The PPP had not agreed with him and had persuaded him not to boycott either.

This was part of the old lesson it had learnt -- not to be out of the electoral process regardless of how difficult the situation is. The PPP, which was pitched against General Ziaul Haq after the imposition of martial law in July 1977, had officially stayed away from the non-party local bodies elections held for the first time in 1979. Although those polls were party-less, political forces had got their candidates elected without using the party names or flags.

After four years in 1983, the PPP had also maintained its policy of shunning the local polls. At the time, it was engaged in an effective street struggle against the martial law government under the umbrella of the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD).

For many years, the PPP, because of this boycott, failed to have any representation in the local councils, which as a result were dominated by its opponents. Faced with such a scenario of having no say in the local bodies, it kept rendering the local governments dysfunctional or dissolving them altogether whenever it came to power.

However, its most momentous boycott of the electoral process, which it always subsequently regretted, happened in 1985 when the military regime held the first non-party elections to the national and provincial assemblies. Their party-less character was, however, negated shortly after when the then Prime Minister Muhammad Khan Junejo formed his own party within the National Assembly.

The post-boycott situation that the PPP encountered for years was grim. It remained out of the system as well as the legislatures or several years and saw a new alternative national leadership take shape. As a result, after Benazir Bhutto had won the 1988 general elections and formed the government, she was hamstrung for having not even a single senator in the Upper House of parliament that had come into being from the party-less national and provincial elections where the PPP had no representation whatsoever.

Benazir’s administration, which had lasted for barely 20 months amid a host of conspiracies hatched at the presidential palace with the full complicity of anti-PPP political forces, had failed to pass even a single law in the parliament because it had no presence in the Senate.

The government had to be run by issuing and reissuing presidential ordinances. Since then, the PPP has taken a conscious decision that whatever the circumstances and whether a civilian or military regime is in place, it will never leave the electoral or parliamentary field open to its rivals to occupy.

It has concluded that such an eventuality leads to its banishment from the system for a long time to come. There was a time when the PPP got just 17 seats in the National Assembly and was constantly rocked by imposed fissures inside the parliament, but it persisted with its position that it will continue to fight all the elections and will never stay out of the ring.

The recent decision taken by the PPP central executive committee to fight the upcoming Senate elections and by-polls -- to the consternation of the PDM -- reflects its time-tested mindset that it will never walk out of the electoral arena and will not repeat the blunder it had committed several years ago.

By all accounts, it is now clear that the PPP will not quit the assemblies, an option that the two key PDM components – the PML-N and Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) – obsessively want to exercise.

Back in 1993, Benazir Bhutto had made it known that the PPP lawmakers had handed over their resignations to the then President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, to provide him justification to dismiss the Nawaz Sharif government and dissolve the assemblies under the eighth amendment.

But it transpired later that she had in fact not delivered the resignations to the president and it was just an announcement to put pressure on the government.