Boycott is "The Best Option"

As of today, PPP, PMLN and ANP have agreed to participate in a unanimously agreed rigged elections to be held on 8th January coming year. It is not so surprising that these parties will be participating in any kinda election to get back to their lost seats and to protect 'their' billions of dollars through NROs. But that is something we donot need to be surprised as we had clues about these deals already in one way or the other. Good thing is that we now have those political parties which are clear in their stance and still standing on principles. These parties may be smaller in sizes but we the civil society, lawyers and students can make them feel their weights and put their full efforts for restoration of constitution and judiciary. It has been discussed here and here that boycott is not a good option as this will give Musharraf a free hand, politicians have to see things other than just principles and credibility does not matter much in the current scenario.

I will strongly disagree to the thoughts presented by these and other authors and try to put my points as following.

First of all Musharraf is not seeing anyone to give him free hand or not. As mentioned by Mr. Ali Malik, he already posses all required tools which is called a free hand actually. Q league's members of previous govt's MNAs have enough budget to manipulate huge vote banks of poor throughout the country. In the form of city and caretaker governments they also have hold to official machinery to further turn things in their favor. Judges in Supreme Court and high courts are hand picked by Musharraf and his allies and hence expecting anything different than what government wants will be living in fools paradise. Media is already under strict censorship and so in their absence PTV has every liberty to play in minds of people in vast rural areas. These and few others will be enough for Musharraf government to feel free in their self decorated play ground. They donot need outsiders support as a matter of fact, what they need is presence of some contestants.

Second point is that boycotting elections would take away any credibility whatsoever is attached to it. The argument that credibility of election does not matter has its inherent problem; thinking in this way will lead to only disaster. Actually it does not matter if credibility of election does not have any importance for current government because the struggle for democracy is from people of Pakistan and they are the ones to decide and measure the credibility of election and contestants. And if they believe that election was fraud then nothing can stop them resisting.

The most important point is that changing Musharraf regime to Kiyani's or BB or anyone else wont solve the problem and does not mean that our moment has ended with that. I would go to a further step by saying that even restoration of 3rd November bench alone is not final solution of the problem. We have to stop army's intervention in our political system and by changing Musharraf government to another one would only mean to keep the threat as it is. Another 10 to 12 years and there would be another COAS to throw out constitution to the garbage again. This permanent stopper can only be achieved by first boycotting the election completely. By completely, I mean, not only a low turnout but also protests, dharnai and rallies against illegitimate rule of (General) Musharraf.

After doing this and elections, there can be one of two scenarios 1) a government is formed in which different political segments have different ratio or 2) election turn out to be a failure and our movement reaches its peak. For case 1, our movement will be boosted by involvement of anti government political parties and it will also lead sooner to case 2.

Case 2, either directly or through case 1 will definitely lead to another full fledge martial law or regime change without (or with support) army intervention. In case of simple regime change we will only have an option of either sit quietly or get involved in political struggle to introduce a better democracy which will take its time of course.

But if martial law comes then history says Pakistani people have always in good number welcomed martial laws which is the reason army remained brave enough to introduce it as soon as they find some room for it.

This is where the real test of our movement exist. Students, Lawyers and Civil Society members have to show the courage and resist martial law with full force yet in peaceful ways to finally remove the army from occupying the nation again. If we are successful in doing this then we can be sure Inshallah that it will stop army intervention permanently or at least not as simple as it was in 77 and 99.