In July 2024, the Supreme Court in a landslide judgement, declared PTI eligible for reserved seats in the parliament. If you are interested in colloquial dinner-table conversations about politics or if you follow popular political discourse on social media, there is a big chance that you have come across strong opinions about these reserved seats, opinions which this verdict has brought to the forefront once again. If we are to truly believe that democracy is an iterative process and that it is supposed to evolve through feedback, then public opinion’s condemnation of reserved seats system makes it a relic of the past, specifically when it comes to improving women’s representation in the parliament. However, public opinion is not always informed by the fact of the matter; even then it is easily swayed. For a better understanding of how reserved seats function and where they stand in the current political status quo of Pakistan, it is important to understand how they work and why they are so disliked amongst the general public.
The current reserved seat system works through party lists, where political parties submit ordered lists of nominees for the reserved seats. Parties are then awarded reserved seats proportionally, based on the number of seats they win in the general elections. This selection process is the first thing a lot of people take issue with: “Why are unelected members allowed to be a part of the country’s law-making body?”, is often the question asked on social media by people critical of the system.
In fact, as we will see later in this piece, this opinion proliferates the political class of Pakistan too. If we are to strictly talk about the importance of these seats in providing representation, there is no doubt that this system is crucial in getting women through the door. In fact, in the 2018 General Elections, 60 out of a total of 69 women parliamentarians were elected on reserved seats1.
Unfortunately, the current electoral status quo does not seem to have space for women politicians. This is evident from the incredibly small percentage of women in parliament which are coming in on regular seats. Seeing this, perhaps the question to ask is not whether unelected women should be allowed in the parliament, but whether this nomination process is fair and allows for equitable representation. To understand this, I conducted several interviews with politicians who understand the inner workings of the nomination process and a small survey which allowed me to understand the opinion of the general public.
Through the testimonies I gathered, the general understanding of the nomination process was that it is often marked by personal incentives and informed by personal connections within the party. When asked about the nomination process, the General Secretary for PMLN in Karachi said: “The best-case scenario is that these seats go to members who have been active in mobilizing the party throughout the previous electoral cycle. However, oftentimes these nominations go to women who have some ties to the men already active in the party, or to women who are somehow connected to the funds coming into parties.” Other testimonies from political entrepreneurs also suggest that a lot of nominations are provided to family members of already existing parliamentarians instead of being given to established and young women political entrepreneurs.
This selection process has severe consequences for representation in the Parliament. Data by Free and Fair Elections Network (FAFEN) states that in 2018, 57% of the total women parliamentarians on reserved seats come from 6 major cities, with 14 out of the 60 MNAs hailing from Lahore2. FAFEN also states that 105 out of the 136 eligible districts are unrepresented by women in the National Assembly due to just how concentrated these nominations are in major cities. This data corroborates what the testimonies talk about too: there is a severe lack of equitable representation for women across Pakistan, and the reserved seat system does not have a framework comprehensive enough to combat it.
There is more nuance to the conversation, however. One of the bigger criticisms of the system I found from the interviews conducted is that it brings people who are not capable of lawmaking to the parliament. As already discussed, the nomination mechanism favours proximity to power in the party and does not rely entirely on merit. However, despite a lack of equitable distribution, women in the National Assembly show a markedly better performance than men. FAFEN’s 2018 dataset states that women have a higher attendance record (66% as compared to 53% by men) and double the amount of average participation (18 agenda items to order of the day vs. 9 by men). Their contribution is not strictly about women’s specific issues either. Women parliamentarians talk about important issues like inflation, national security and issues in the energy sector.
Despite this effort, however, the parliament echoes the dismissiveness that these women face in colloquial conversations about politics. More than 2/3rds of all women’s contributions to the agenda were either tabled or deferred to the final session of Parliament. Similarly, men were preferred when choosing participants in activities at the Parliament, with the Questions Session being the only one with women being recognized higher on average than men.
I got to talk about this dismissiveness towards women parliamentarians with Dr. Ameena Zia, who is working on a book about reserved seats for women: “Women have always had to work harder to be acknowledged at the same level that men are for the bare minimum, it is no different in the Parliament.” For Dr. Zia, this issue goes beyond procedural dealings at the parliament; it is symptomatic of a society committed to minimising representation for women in all forms.
To conclude, the testimonies received, and the data analysed suggests a two-pronged issue with the reserved seats. Firstly, they are not effective in allowing equitable representation across the country. The selection process results in highly concentrated representation from the major cities, while the rest of the country remains unrepresented by women. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there is still a very strong dismissiveness against women in politics which goes all the way from the grassroots to the elite. The reserved seats were created so women can benefit f rom the system and then eventually move towards competing in general elections. If the parliament remains similarly dismissive and does not work towards changing the general perception of the system, it is unlikely that Pakistan’s democratic process would ever come out of this representative limbo it has thrown itself into.
Mohammad Owais Sabri is a Political Science graduate from LUMS, with a special interest in Political Economy and Industrial Relations.
1. https://fafen.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/FAFEN-WOMEN-Parliamentaria…
2. ibid