AFGHANISTAN GOES TO THE POLLS
How quickly people learn! Posters on walls, giant bill boards in intersections, defacing of public monuments, loudspeakers tied to vans, convoy of cars – the works. It is difficult to believe that this is the first parliamentary election in this country in over 30 years! True, they had a presidential election last year, with some 17 odd candidates but this is on a different plane altogether: at stake are 670 seats for the lower house of the Parliament (Wolesi Jirga) and provincial councils of the war torn nation’s 34 provinces, and there are 5800 candidates in the fray! The democratic urges in Afghanistan are alive, well and kicking!
There are differences though, from what we are used to in India. There is no advance booking of compound or house walls leading to their eventual ‘decoration’; for there are no parties to plan these moves months ahead. Well, there are parties but President Karzai has somehow had his way through the UN led JEMB (Joint Electoral Management Body) in banning party based election. So the entire lot are individuals, at least on surface.
So to those of us accustomed to the ubiquitous ‘Rising Sun’, the ‘Open Palm’, ‘Lotus’ or the ‘Farmer with the Plough’ come election time, it would appear strange that there is no party symbol on the ballot paper. There are individual symbols though, and per force such a variety. A story goes that a son of a former warlord is in the field; the father was notorious for setting fire to property of those who opposed him in his fiefdom, and the son chooses his election symbol: a ‘fire extinguisher’
But what is democracy without an Opposition? Not to worry. There is Yunus Qanooni, political advisor to the redoubtable Ahmed Shah Masoud, who by all accounts was the most nationalist of the Mujahideen elements who fought Soviet occupation. I can’t help wondering how the Afghan politics would have turned had not Masoud been killed (just two day days before the epochal 9/11). A bit like wondering what would have happened to the Indian political spectrum had the Mahatma not been assassinated (no comparison on the respective approaches to liberation; Masoud was every bit a hardened military commander).
Back to Qanooni. He lost out to Hamid Karzai in the presidential election and has since been licking his wounds. Here is a chance for him to bounce back to centre stage. His National Understanding Front, an alliance umbrella under the leadership of his New Afghanistan Party is reported to have fielded some 500 candidates. And President Karzai is said to have invited him to be the leader of the opposition. While this may be the eventual outcome and in some respects a desirable one, surely this is what Karzai wanted to scuttle in the first place by banning party blocks in parliament. The spectre of the President individually negotiating national issues with a disparate group of individuals each with his or her own personal, ethnic or tribal agendas defies imagination but yet that it precisely what the President seems to have had in mind. The seeds of suppression can be clearly seen but let us not write off this election as irrelevant.
For wonder of wonders, there are women candidates; nearly 600 of them in the fray! It wasn’t long ago that women were debased and treated like the underclass in this country. No education, no work, no going out in the street unaccompanied by a male relative and no revealing of hair or face, deprived of freedom, robbed of liberty, condemned to a miserable existence with little hope for the future under a bestial rule by a most unusual species called the Taliban. Apparently this despicable brand of MCPs didn’t have mothers, sisters, wives or daughters. Make no mistake, the ghosts of those wondrous creatures are still around threatening these women candidates with dire consequences. But what an opportunity for the Afghan woman to break free from injustice and inequity and take her rightful place in society with some control over her own destiny!
And to spice up the proceedings, there are warlords, some 208 of them in the polls. These are a bit like criminals in Indian politics, though the Election Complaints Commission here has held that several of them are actually ‘benign’. There is a ban on those who still lead private militias or are active participants in one, still holding on to weapons. Some 32 were struck off the list by JEMB but there are rumblings that Karzai’s long hand can be seen in the process, eliminating those inconvenient.
Sure these elections are not perfect (nothing is in this world). There is the curious system of Single Non-transferable Vote in operation. Irrespective of the number of seats in a region, each voter casts a single vote; and in Kabul with 36 or so seats each voter is presented with a bewildering array of 400 odd candidates. The ballot paper is of newspaper proportions running to several pages with all the names, symbols and photographs (many of the 12 million registered voters are alas, illiterate). To be sure, there are seats reserved for women but there is no constituency based competition. The seats simply go to those with the most votes. There has been much heartburn over this antiquated system of election, currently in vogue only in Vanuatu and Jordan, but there it is – democracy moving forward in fits and starts!
_______________
18 September 2005 – Judah