60 THE CARAVAN
bearing the cross · reportage
sumed under Zia-ul-Haq in 1985. Zahid Nazir, who
runs a forum that tries to bring minority-rights’
activists together on certain issues, said the prob-
lem with separate electorates was that because
Christians could not vote for unreserved seats, the
legislatures would effectively ignore minorities’
problems. After much campaigning by Christian
leaders and civil-society organisations, the system
was, once again, revoked by Musharraf.
The Musharraf government then introduced
a joint-electorate system. This system allows all
communities to vote in the general assembly elec-
tions, and once the elections are over, each party,
depending upon the number of seats it has won,
gets its share of seats reserved for leaders from mi-
nority communities. As Nazir S Bhatti, the presi-
dent of the Pakistan Christian Congress, stated
in a memorandum, the big political parties then
pick the leaders who would represent the minority
communities according to the parties’ own whims
and fancies. The memorandum also alleged that
these seats are being bought by leaders through
“bribes in millions of rupees,” and that the system
gives minority communities no say in who repre-
sents their interests.
The memorandum demands the right for reli-
gious minorities to vote for their representatives
in reserved seats, but also to participate in gen-
eral elections—a new system that is being called
“dual electorates.” Khokar of Youhanabad said
the PTI, too, is on board with the demand for
dual electorates.
But some leaders who have already won favour
with big political parties are opposing the initia-
tive. Tariq Javed argued that dual electorates de-
feated the purpose of opting for joint electorates.
That religious minorities would have to campaign
for votes across the province placed an unneces-
sary burden on them, he said. “We cannot be a
part of the political mainstream without joining
large political parties,” Javed told me. “People
who argue otherwise do not want to be a part of
the mainstream, they do not even recognise them-
selves as Pakistanis.”
Under the joint-electorate system, however, mi-
nority candidates who do not have the support ofbig political parties have pretty much no chance to
win elections. “Religious Minorities in Elections—
Equal in Law, Not in Practice,” a report by the
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, or HRCP,
covering minorities’ voting patterns in 2013, gave
an example. In 2008, Mahesh Kumar Malani, a
Hindu candidate of the Pakistan Peoples Party
Parliamentarians, contested the election from a
national assembly seat in 2008 and polled 28,411
votes but lost. In 2013, he was not awarded a party
ticket so he ran as an independent candidate and
received only 85 votes.
Minorities clearly feel underrepresented in this
system. According to a pre-poll survey conducted
by the HRCP in Youhanabad, a majority of the
area’s residents did not believe that Muslim can-
didates could adequately represent their interests.
Moreover, according to the report, the people
“think that the Christian candidates nominated by
the political parties for the reserved seats are not
true representatives of the community.”
This was particularly true in the aftermath of
the Youhanabad attacks. As cars bringing Tahir
Khalil Sandhu, the provincial minister for human“I mean, you can’t memorise
facial features of hundreds
of people, so the police went
around picking up anyone they
thought would be involved in
the lynching. They didn’t bother
the Muslim residents though.”right: Pakistani
Muslim
demonstrators
shout slogans
during a protest in
Lahore over alleged
blasphemous
remarks by a
Christian man in
March 2013.
arif ali / afp / getty images