Election season poses the age-old question to the left: is contesting elections a bourgeois compromise or not? This time around it came with an added weight: the new election rules had taken on board its point of view. A Supreme Court judgment on a petition filed by Awami Workers Party (AWP) president Abid Hasan Minto had attempted to “balance the playing field” by imposing new rules on campaigning and canvassing.

But the elections came with it two added adages. One, the election rule book Rule 1 outlawed criticising the ideology of Pakistan and the armed forces. With both almost necessary for any serious left-wing political campaign, the dilemma with any left candidates campaign gaining too much popularity is that the candidate could face a “disciplinary hearing” from the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). Two: each candidate would have to go through the Article 62/63 test. One of the running jokes with comrades was: “If any of our party members gets through the Article 62/63 test, we would have to initiate a disciplinary hearing against him/her.”

There is, of course, a third question, or contradiction of sort. What does a left-wing party do when an election, at one end, produces a 60 per cent turnout in the Punjab, at the other, requires the military to hold Balochistan hostage?

The Pakistani left today is perhaps not the same divided and antagonist left it was a while ago. Nor does it have the same antagonism to elections. Members of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP) have contested elections on a Communist Party Pakistan (CPP) ticket, a number of AWP members have contested elections, a number of trade unions have gone the election route and a member of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) also contested on independent seat. CMKP general secretary and Laal Band lead singer Taimoor Rehman and left-wing popular singer Jawad Ahmed both made appearances in AWP general secretary Farooq Tariq’s election campaign in Toba Tek Singh.

But with the “gains made” there is also the question of whether space has been ceded? Or whether elections, in their current form, are a space from which the left can gain anything? The election results suggest, bar some constituencies in Khyber Pakthunkhwa, left parties are not ready to contest even local council seats. The problem is a lot more basic: a lack of engagement in day-to-day politics. People will vote for you if they know you will help them when they are in trouble. That is perhaps the greatest lesson of the PML-N victory in Punjab. The “ideology” of the candidate is barely a question anymore in a political field where all advocate free-market economics – and the class question is subsumed under welfare rhetoric.

But the point that the left in Pakistan needs to be located and responsive is not merely a question if it wishes to contest elections – it is the most important question for it if it wishes to do politics at all. The election results, while cannot be taken as a conclusive indicator since the major left party contesting it, the Awami Workers Party, was only formed six months ago, certainly show that the Left does not yet have the ability to woo people to support its mandate and program.

Apart from one claim of victory from the IMT for a comrade, Ali Wazir , contesting in an independent ticket from South Waziristan in NA 41 [at the time of writing these lines, re-election at certain polling stations has been ordered], left-wing candidates have not come close to achieving targets set by them. A certain qualifier is required here: most left candidates were not fielded with the idea that they should win the seat. The idea to field candidates was to use the election as a tool for spreading the program of the Pakistani left - candidates would attempt to spread as many pamphlets and manifestos and hold as many meetings with people – any votes secured would be an addition.

With this in mind, the campaign in Toba Tek Singh by AWP general secretary Farooq Tariq (1816 votes), holding a total of at least 65 corner meeting, AWP chairman Fanoos Gujjar (over 13,000 votes) in Matta, Buner and Swat to crowds of over four thousand people can be considered a success.

No one was expecting an election victory under the current set of election rules. In fact this was the raison d’être of the petition filed by AWP president Abid Hasan Minto. “An ordinary working class individual cannot contest elections under the current format when millions of rupees are spent on campaigns,” the petition argued. Whatever the changes the Supreme Court sanctioned and the ECP had the will to push through, campaign spending only reached new peaks, even without big billboards being allowed.

In distributing stuffed shers and introducing designer kurtas in party colours to supporters and occupying prime time slots on each television channel, the commodification of the elections 2013 has been unlike any scene before. Billions of rupees are required merely to get your election symbol known and generate the sort of collective effervescence that pushes people to vote for you. This is discounting the continuing – albeit illegal - practices of buying votes, mobilizing caste networks and feeding those who attend public meetings. The Rs1million for a provincial assembly seat and Rs1.5 million for a national assembly seat campaign spending limits are unforceable and successful election spending in election season is at least 100 times the amount. This is not to count the numerous incentives and projects initiated by candidates and mainstream political parties during their elected tenure.

Somehow spending trillions of rupees in preparation for a process of selecting representatives of the ruling class to govern the working class has stopped evoking questioning. If the money spent on electing around 1,000 legislators throughout Pakistan was pooled together, both the electricity and Pakistan Railways crisis could have been resolved – and much more. And none of the mainstream parties, including the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) who claimed it would “give the system an overall,” have not shied away from mammoth spending.

There is nothing contradictory in members of the ruling class – and those who subscribe to its processes – in doing so. But it does ask a question of those who wish to transform the entire social order: activists in the left. One: there needs to be a recognition that the entry of a party of the middle class bourgeois into politics, in the shape of the PTI, and its ability to mobilize billions to further its political agenda and centre its campaign around the charismatic figure of Imran Khan, has not translated into the type of election victory they thought possible. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), with its interests staunchly in pursuing the neoliberal contradiction, made up of industrialists and property speculators, has been able to dig deep in both its pockets and political acumen to ensure that its agenda – and interests remain dominant – and protected.

Of course the candidates fielded by the left have attempted to move discourse – and campaign strategies - outside the trappings of the existing electoral system. The more active campaigners have rang down the message to their audiences that “the reason why you do not see us on television is because we are from among you” and “we are doing this so you can enter this process tomorrow.” Some have gone further to ask a little more: “this is not where politics ends, this is where it starts. The reservoir of power is you. You are not to sit quietly after the elections.” Other candidates, were simply unprepared.

By producing agendas both located in area-specific – what can be called ‘public issues’ in the broadest vocabulary – and tying them to the class order embedded in the political process sanctioned by the Pakistani state, there is a possibility that the left in Pakistan can push the election agenda into one of transformation and class unity.

That said, if we look at the crude numbers, they do not tell a happy story. Overall the left vote in Pakistan, coming from contesting from around 60 seats across the country was less than 100,000. Even the Anjuman Mazareen Punjab candidate, contesting on a People’s Party Pakistan (PPP) ticket, was unable to secure a victory (despite securing around 32,000 votes). This is out of a total of 50 million people who cast votes. Notwithstanding that a left alternative was not available to voters at each polling stations, the figures are not surprising at all. With the withdrawal of the left from its traditional support bases: trade unions, slum settlers, landless peasants, occupied territories (albeit few), the dour showing was not unexpected.

Lessons must be learnt from the decision to contest; but not with the next elections in mind. Both the task of transforming politics and the economy should begin in the immediate – even tomorrow if there is a consensus on praxis. Subsequently, there is a need to re-think what the new support base for the left shall be. In areas where left candidates have connected working class issues with regional deprivation such as Toba Tek Singh, or, caste oppression with transforming the social as in Buner, there has been more listeners to the message. But both the message and the messengers need to perhaps connect with the transforming realities of Pakistani politics.

When the working class and peasant vote the industrial bourgeois into power over a middle-class alternative couching a neoliberal economic and governance agenda within a welfare rhetoric, there is something wrong in the fundamental categories of class within which the left gazes at the peoples that inhabit Pakistan. Revolutionary politics in Pakistan needs a new agenda and a new analysis. But this is not something that contesting the Elections 2013 itself shows. In the reinvention of the Pakistani left, the current elections are another stepping stone. One must not take a heavy heart from the results – rather it must step into the struggles of people; interpret, analyse – but most importantly: do politics!

Hashim bin Rashid