In the Province of Faith: Disaggregating Pakistani Religious Parties’ Electoral Performance at the Sub-national and Denominational Levels

Abstract

This paper analyzes the performance of Pakistan’s religious parties in Senate and general elections, 1970–2021, to re-evaluate widely repeated claims of poor performance. Employing datasets of provincial assembly, Senate, and National Assembly results, I argue that performance has been consistently underestimated and overlooked as a result of “whole-nation bias” in a country with very significant regional diversity. Given that parties’ electoral power coalesces at the provincial level in Pakistan, and that religious parties are built around strong denominational identities, election data has been disaggregated along these lines. The results challenge conventional narratives of political Islam’s trajectories in the country.

Keywords:

• Islamism
• Pakistan
• democracy
• elections
• sectarianism
• Barelvi
• Deobandi
• Punjab

Notes

1 All four provinces have equal representation within the Senate, but the representatives are elected by an electoral college composed of each provincial assembly’s sitting members (Senate of Pakistan 2023).

2 Women’s seats and religious minorities in the NA are not directly elected by the citizenry, but rather are proportionately allocated to parties based on the number of general seats they hold. The nature the Single Transferable Vote system used in Senate elections also makes it difficult to compare results of elections for general seats with women’s and “technocrats and ulama” seats (TDEA-FAFEN 2021; Senate of Pakistan 2023).

3 The proportion of NA seats assigned to each province is governed by the census, which was held in 1961, 1972, 1981, 1998 and 2017. PA sizes have been reset by the Legal Framework Order (1969), the Constitution of 1973, the Restoration of the Constitution Order (1985), Legal Framework Order (2002) and the 25th Amendment (Mehdi 2010; TDEA-FAFEN 2021).

4 Specifically, the pre-poll restrictions and harassment aimed against the PPP and PML-N, the two mainstream parties that could challenge Gen. Musharraf’s military government.

5 Given the partition of Pakistan that took place soon after, and the convening of a rump National Assembly in 1972 with a mandate that derived from these elections, there is a strong case to exclude East Pakistani results when making longitudinal comparisons beyond 1971.

6 The Pakistan census does not record denominational identification; Ahmadis however have been recorded in a separate category since the census of 1981, as a result of the 1974 second amendment to the constitution which recategorized Ahmadis as non-Muslims.

7 The 2017 Provincial Census Report, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa records that 76.86% of the enumerated population in KP spoke Pashto. Balochistan in contrast had 35.34% while Sindh and Punjab had 5.46% and 1.98%. (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2017c).

8 The JI’s median seat share in KP is roughly half of that of the Deobandi parties.

9 The JI’s seats largely come from the north-western Malakand Division within the province (the districts of Dir, Swat, Buner and Chitral), while the JUI’s come from further south.

10 Excluding the disputed territories of Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir.

11 The 1961 census provided the basis for delimitation in the 1970 elections, while the 2017 census was used in the 2018 elections (Election Commission of Pakistan 1972, 2018).

12 These regions had the lowest social indicators (literacy, inequality, etc) and conservative social structures in Punjab, as well as socio-economic conflicts between an emerging middle class of small business owners and large landowners. In southern Punjab, the challengers to the status quo were resettled Partition-era migrants from East Punjab (Wilder 1999). In West Punjab, particularly Jhang, the challengers were drawn into intense sectarian and denominational struggles (Abou-Zahab 2017).

13 Although they continued to head deeni parties of their own, these individuals’ decisions to run on a mainstream PML-N ticket, relying on PML-N support in the Punjab PA means that they are classified in the dataset as mainstream party candidates and excluded from the deeni party tallies. This differs from the 1977 PNA or 1988–1992 IJI where deeni parties and secular parties formed electoral alliances at the party level and ran joint campaigns.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johann Chacko

Johann Chacko is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. His research interests include religious populism, social movements, political communication, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean Region.