Representativeness of Pakistan’s Parliamentary System

               

We have already seen in the article   https://secondriseofislam.blogspot.com/2012/07/islamic-political-system-its-main.html  what should be Pakistan’s political system like.  In four parts of this article, the author, among other things,  has suggested that political parties should be structured on the basis of democratic principles; all bodies/posts within a political party should be elected through internal elections so that all decisions made by a political party could be considered as  will of that political party. Another suggestion was to adopt proportional representative system so that all shades of peoples’ will manifested through their votes could be fully represented in the parliament. In short both these suggestions are, in fact, directly relating to true representation of peoples’ will. 

The current parliamentary system adopted by Pakistan lacks in both features stated above and as such cannot be considered as true representative of peoples’ will. Another deficiency in Pakistan’s current parliamentary system is that persons elected as members of the parliament usually do not happen to be technocrats; they do not have special skills and expertise specifically required to perform many a government functions. As a result, parliament and assemblies lack in capability of devising and supervising implementation of governmental policies which are left in the hands of bureaucracy. 

Though representativeness of parliamentary system cannot be improved much without adopting proportional representative system, the gravity of deficiency of representativeness of Pakistan’s current parliamentary system may be reduced to some extent by changing the features of reserved quota system. Presently reserved quota for parliament and assemblies is meant for only women and minorities, and this quota is filled up on the basis of number of seats obtained by the political parties. If this quota is enhanced substantially and a new category of technocrats is also added along-with women and minorities, and if such enhanced quota of reserved seats is filled up on the basis of total votes obtained by the political parties, instead of basis of seats obtained by the political parties, such changes in the present reserved quota system may improve the present parliamentary system in two ways. Firstly such changes in the reserved quota system would enable the parliament and assemblies to induct much required technocrats which would enhance the parliament’s and assemblies’ capability to devise and supervise implementation of governmental policies. Secondly filling up reserved quota seats on the basis of  number of total votes obtained by a political party would allow such political parties to be represented in the parliament and assemblies, which otherwise remain unable to be represented in the parliament/assemblies, despite having a substantial chunk of votes in the elections. For instance in the recent elections, Tehreek e Labbaik was able to bag more than two million votes but still could not get a single seat in the parliament. Such unrepresented peoples’ will may be given partial representation through filling up reserved quota seats on the basis of total votes gained by a political party, instead of  basis of total seats obtained by a political party in the parliament/ assembly (which is the present way of filling reserved quota seats).