From the party-hopping Alam ‘Lota’ in the 1930s to the 150-something lawmakers who shuttled between Nawaz and Wattoo’s factions of the Muslim League in the early 90s, ‘migratory birds’ are part and parcel of the region’s politics.
Habitual turncoats, or lotas, as they are derisively referred to in Pakistan’s political parlance — have long been a central feature in Punjab’s politics. Men and women of little substance, they are instrumental in creating crises where there are none, making and breaking both political parties and governments, providing political legitimacy to military dictators, and so on.
These political ‘rolling stones’ have featured prominently in every election cycle since 1988 and every party — national, regional or fringe — has been more than willing to embrace them. The current election cycle is no exception: turncoats dominate the candidate rosters of nearly all political parties in the running, and in constituencies where parties have found stronger candidates, the rolling stones remain in contention as independents.
“The phenomenon of [candidates] changing party affiliations in the run-up to an election is, in fact, mundanely familiar to anyone even vaguely acquainted with Pakistan’s electoral politics,” columnist Umair Javed, who teaches at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums), wrote in an article for Herald in 2018.
“The political class in Punjab is heavily dominated by dynasties. Some politicians have spent multiple, unbroken stints in the national or provincial legislatures. If a serial winner is no longer in the running, a member of his or her family still is. The political system does not appear to matter much, either. These repeat winners and their families have been around through martial laws, authoritarian regimes, controlled democracies and civilian transitions. They have often associated themselves with different parties in different election cycles and have sometimes fought and won independently,” Mr Javed wrote.
1993: A lot-a defections
Although the term ‘lota’ has existed in the Indian subcontinent for well over a century, it entered popular political parlance following the mass defection of provincial Muslim League legislators in Punjab, back in 1993. The events that took place in the Punjab Assembly on April 25 of that year are still viewed as a “watershed moment” in the chequered history of Pakistan’s parliamentary democracy.
The fateful day was preceded by a week-long frenzy of political wheeling and dealing, centring primarily around Manzoor Wattoo’s manoeuvres to win over a majority of Pakistan Muslim League (PML) lawmakers and replace then-chief minister Ghulam Haider Wyne. Wattoo’s power grab had been triggered by the April 18, 1993, dismissal of the first Nawaz Sharif government in Islamabad, by then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan, on charges of corruption. The motive behind Wattoo’s move was to ‘steal’ Punjab from Nawaz ahead of the national assembly polls, scheduled for July. As many as 151 out of around 220 PML lawmakers — in a house of 248 — deserted the party, voted out Wyne, and installed Wattoo in his place.
The Sharifs and their loyalists could only watch. This happened in their hometown, where Nawaz had previously frustrated an attempt by Punjab’s landed nobility to dislodge him through a vote of no-confidence during his first stint as provincial chief executive following the party-less elections of 1985; the same city where he had bought or won the loyalties of a large lot of independent lawmakers to successfully thwart the PPP’s lacklustre efforts to form a government in Punjab in 1988.
Further drama unfolded during the session to elect Wattoo. Lawmakers threw chairs, shoes, glasses, microphones and paper-weights at one another amidst loud chants of “lota”. Those scenes inside and outside the Punjab Assembly would be re-enacted 29 years later — with equal intensity, if not more — during an election for the chief minister’s slot on April 16, 2022; days after more than two dozen PTI legislators switched political allegiance and abandoned their party’s sinking ship to support Hamza Shehbaz’s bid against Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi.
Wattoo, however, couldn’t hold on to his ‘migratory birds’ for long. Once the Supreme Court restored the Nawaz government at the centre on May 26, many of the deserters returned to its fold. The PML promptly announced plans to bring a no-trust motion against the wily politician from Depalpur, who had served as speaker of the provincial assembly three times since 1985. The rest, as they say, is history.
The PML had, by then, split into two new factions: one led by Nawaz and the other by Wattoo in Punjab and Hamid Nasir Chattha at the centre, following the demise of its president, Mohammad Khan Junejo.
In less than three years, Nawaz would once again embrace Wattoo after the latter fell out with both Chattha and his coalition partner, the PPP, which had helped get him elected as chief minister after the 1993 polls.
Nawaz received Wattoo in the same hall of his Model Town residence, where he had once warned him of the ‘unimaginable fate’ that awaited him. The motivation to forge a fresh alliance with Wattoo, who still had a couple of dozen provincial lawmakers on his side, was to secure the premature removal of the second government of their common enemy, Benazir Bhutto, with the aid of the powerful military establishment. Benazir was sent home in November 1996 by her own party man, then-president Farooq Leghari.
1999: A king’s party emerges
That wasn’t the last time Punjab’s ‘rolling stones’ would ditch Nawaz. Mian Mohammad Azhar, once a close associate of Nawaz Sharif, had fought and won elections from Lahore before getting the Punjab governor’s office. He fell out with his leader over his resignation during the 1993 crisis. The decision cost Nawaz his grip over Punjab, preventing him from snatching the province back from Wattoo through a vote of no-confidence or imposition of Governor’s Rule, despite the reinstatement of his government at the Centre. The failure greatly helped Nawaz’s opponents who, encouraged by President Ishaq Khan, deepened the political chaos in the country, precipitating early polls in October.
Later, Gen Pervez Musharraf, who ousted Nawaz in a coup in October 1999, would use Mian Azhar and convince other PML-N stalwarts like Abida Hussain, Khursheed Mahmood Kasuri and Fakhar Imam to abandon their party and form the PML-Q, which came to be known as “the new king’s party”. The PML-Q was to support Musharraf’s military rule and say ‘yes sir’ to all his political ambitions. By the time the 2002 polls were held, constituency-based dynasts from across Punjab had parted ways with the Nawaz League in droves. They flocked to the Q-League, thanks to the connections of the Chaudharys of Gujrat, who had by then pushed Mian Azhar into the background and taken over the reins.
The next exodus from the PML-N would come just before 2018, when some N-Leaguers ditched Nawaz because of political compulsions, and others due to the pressure brought upon them by powerful quarters. Most joined Imran Khan’s PTI, which was the establishment’s new favourite horse. It did not surprise anyone when scores of PML-N lawmakers from across Punjab resigned and announced they would contest the July polls on a PTI ticket, even before a caretaker set-up was installed in the country.
2002: ‘Patriots’
Being the largest political party in Punjab since the early 1990s, the N-League has seen more episodes of mass desertion than others. It was part and parcel of the political engineering done by the powers that be as they refined their experiments to control democracy and civilian governments. However, others, like the PPP and PTI, have also seen their fair share of rolling stones.
Take Faisal Saleh Hayat, for example. He was appointed federal minister in the first Benazir government and a senior minister in Punjab (as part of a deal with PML-Jinnah under the Wattoo administration) during her second stint. Nonetheless, he was instrumental in breaking away several PPP lawmakers elected in 2002 to form the ‘PPP-Patriot group’ that supported Musharraf. The group first forged an alliance with the PML-Q and later merged with it. Hayat then returned to the PPP once the Q-League had outlived its utility, while most of its other dynasts returned to the PML-N between 2008 and 2013. More recently, he was taken back by the Sharifs as they tried to negotiate difficulties finding ‘electables’ in Jhang for their 2024 campaign.
Likewise, Imran Khan welcomed the influx of strong, electable dynasts from different parties, especially N-Leaguers, into his party before the 2018 polls, when he sought to form the government. Many of these same turncoats later helped the PDM remove him through a vote of no-confidence in 2022. Some later parted ways to join the two new parties carved out of the PTI: the Istehkam-i-Pakistan Party (IPP), led by former PTI financier Jahangir Khan Tareen in Punjab, and the PTI-Parliamentarians (PTI-P), headed by Pervaiz Khattak in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The ‘king’ of Dadu
While the feudals of rural Sindh also have a history of siding with the victor, one leader who stands out as a serial turncoat is former chief minister Liaquat Ali Jatoi.
Liaquat Jatoi is the son of Abdul Hameed Khan Jatoi, a man known for his nationalist views and principled stances. However, the apple has apparently fallen quite far from the tree, as he has managed to side with anyone who has emerged as a dominant political force, through the decades.
Once considered the ‘king’ of politics in his hometown of Dadu and undefeated in elections from 1998 to 2007, he started his political career as a member of the 1977 assembly and was also part of Gen Ziaul Haq’s Majlis-i-Shura.
In 1997, he joined forces with Nawaz Sharif and landed the coveted slot of Sindh chief minister, apparently due to the good offices of Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and Sheikh Rashid, who were both considered close to his elder brother, former Senator Aijaz Khan Jatoi.
Then, after Nawaz was exiled following the 1999 coup, he joined Gen Pervez Musharraf’s regime in the 2000s and served as a federal minister in the Zafarullah Khan Jamali and Shaukat Aziz cabinets.
But this association cost him dearly when, following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, he faced public backlash, with his Dadu residence being torched and cases being registered against him, his family, friends and supporters.
In 2009, he formed the Sindh Awami Ittehad, and later joined the PTI in 2017, the year before they won the general elections. But since he was considered close to Jahangir Tareen, he was supposedly side-lined at the behest of Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Haleem Adil Sheikh when the sugar baron from Lodhran quit the party.
Then, in the wake of May 9, Mr Jatoi also parted ways with Imran Khan and joined the Grand Democratic Alliance, which now looks to challenge the PPP hegemony in the province.
A South Asian phenomenon
Lota-ism is neither a recent trend nor one confined to Punjab alone. A prominent lawyer from Lahore, Sheikh Mohammad Alam, was perhaps one of the first politicians to be conferred the ignominious title in the early 1930s. He had a penchant for changing political loyalties quite frequently — he hopped from the Khaksars to the All-India Muslim League, All-India Nationalist Party, Indian National Congress and Majlis-e-Ittehad-e-Millat. The label stuck with his name, and he is still remembered as Alam ‘Lota’.
Nor is this trend confined to Pakistan’s politics. According to Zafarullah Khan, a political analyst who has done enormous work on political parties and democracy, lota-cracy is a manifestation of the tribal mindset that is part of the political culture across South Asian countries. Indians, for example, are well familiar with the phrase ‘Aaya Ram Gaya Ram’, which is used to describe frequent floor-crossing, party-hopping and political horse-trading in the legislature by elected politicians and political parties.
The phrase originated in 1967 in Haryana, where excessive political horse-trading, counter horse-trading and counter-counter-horse-trading triggered several rounds of political defections by serial turncoats over the span of a few weeks, resulting in the eventual dissolution of the Haryana Legislative Assembly and fresh elections in 1968.
Politicians become turncoats to remain on the right side of power. In almost every democracy across the world, politicians leave parties to form new ones or join other, older ones. So why is it that the Pakistani brand of this phenomenon is deemed so ethically repugnant? It is probably due to the fact that it weakens political parties and strengthens individuals, who can sway electoral results without regard for party policy, manifesto or ideology. In the central and southern parts of Punjab in particular, many of the electables, if not most, have not only changed parties multiple times, but have successfully inducted other members of their families into politics as well.
Root of the problem
According to a 2013 study, titled Dynastic Politics in Punjab: Facts, Myths and their Implications, Ali Cheema, Hassan Javid and Muhammad Farooq Naseer note that the roots of lota-cracy are deeply ingrained in constituency-based politics, which is dominated by local dynastic politicians — a term used to refer to electoral candidates who have multiple family members contesting national or provincial elections. Basing their analysis of national and provincial assembly races in elections held between 1970 and 2008, the authors conclude that dynastic families, held together by ties of blood and marriage, enjoy tremendous power in the political system.
The study reveals that in 2008, 53.4 per cent of the National Assembly seats in Punjab were held by dynastic politicians and that dynastic candidates — those who followed a relative into politics — accounted for nearly two-thirds of elected legislators and around half of the top three contestants in the National Assembly elections in the province between 1985 and 2008. Over the past three decades, dynastic politicians belonging to approximately 400 families have been instrumental in shaping policies, programmes and legislation, impacting the lives of millions of citizens.
Given their power, political parties choose to forge alliances with dynastic politicians rather than build effective party machinery around a cadre of dedicated workers. “Given the importance of dynastic organisations, it is no surprise that bargaining between these organisations and political party leadership is incessant, and the frequent switching of political parties by members of these families, or the sprouting of various ‘like-minded’ factions, has become the norm in politics,” notes the study.
Analysts say the roots of this phenomenon lie in four main factors: the non-party elections held in 1985, weak and ineffective political parties, the weakening of parliament by successive military and civilian leaders, and the allocation of discretionary development funds to national and provincial lawmakers.
Badar Alam, a journalist and political analyst, is of the view that the party-less elections of 1985 allowed two types of candidates to emerge: those who could canvass voters based on sectarian and religious identities, and those who had money, muscle and/ or the backing of a large number of constituents based on kinship, caste or clan networks.
“In 1988, the intelligence agencies gathered together both types of electoral players and created the IJI. That year’s election, however, was the last time that the politics of ideology successfully challenged the politics of development projects, money, muscle, religious mobilisation and kinship-caste-clan networks,” he argues.
The electoral culture that came into being during the 1985 election made it impossible to mobilise voters without throwing some goodies at the latter. Money became an essential part of how an election campaign is run. Most people who were still doing ideology politics did not have money, and those who had the money were interested not in ideology but in becoming members of parliament to enjoy the spoils of power.
“So, by 1993, even the PPP wooed a large number of erstwhile IJI candidates to win the election. The allocation of development funds to election contestants allowed them to seek votes based on roads they got built and not on the basis of their legislative agenda or work in the parliament,” says Badar. This monetisation of the electoral arena harmed both political parties and their legislative agendas.
‘De-partification’
Starting from Ziaul Haq in the early 1980s, to Ghulam Ishaq Khan in 1990 and 1993, and then ending with Farooq Leghari in 1996, the sacking of four successive governments and parliaments also weakened democracy to such an extent that the parliament became a plaything for strongmen. “Nawaz Sharif’s heavy mandate of 1997 ended up weakening his party after he started acting like a king to purge legislators on the yardstick of personal loyalty to him. Pervez Musharraf did a further disservice to party politics by breaking older parties and forming new ones on his whim. The combined result of all these factors has been the rise of the so-called electables, who switch parties to ensure that they are never far from power,” Badar concludes.
The study by Cheema et al contends that the episodes of military rule perpetuate dynastic politics. “While a third of Punjab’s current crop of dynastic political families entered the political arena prior to the imposition of martial law by Gen Ziaul Haq, more than a third began their careers with Zia’s non-party elections of 1985. The measures taken by Musharraf to reduce the power of entrenched politicians in 2002, such as the bachelor’s degree requirement, did little more than induce the entry of the next generation of these dynasties into politics. It was completely unsuccessful in making even a small dent in dynastic politics.”
The study challenges the myth that dynasticism is integrally tied to feudal or landed power or is more prevalent in the southern and western regions of Punjab. The presence of significant dynasticism is also found in the less-landed and more equal central-eastern districts. “In fact, there is considerable evidence to suggest that, since the elections of 1985, business-owning, trading and professional elites have been as successful as their landowning counterparts, if not more, in forming dynastic families, and that the power of capital appears to be as potent as the power of land,” it emphasises.
This prompts Badar to comment that since ‘de-partification’ has been strongest in central Punjab, most of the political turncoats are also found here. In southern districts of Punjab, the chasms between Seraiki-speaking natives and Punjabi-speaking migrants are so vast that even the most politically neutral electables have to at least pay lip service to these contradictions. “The phenomenon of non-ideological, freewheeling independents in southern Punjab, however, is also linked to the tribal and feudal influence of some candidates — particularly in Punjab’s districts along the river Indus.”
In Sindh, according to Badar, the urban-rural divide and Sindh’s contradictions with Punjab and the centre have allowed party-based electoral politics to survive to a large extent. “The so-called establishment has made several attempts to undercut this politics by propping up electables in Sindh under various anti-PPP formations and also brought them to power at least twice (in 1997 and 2002); however, these efforts have largely been unsuccessful. This year, too, an anti-PPP alliance has been cobbled together, but its electoral fortunes will remain limited unless something extraordinary happens in the electoral and political arena.”
Zafarullah points out that dynastic politics and frequent defections are primarily the result of weak structures within political parties. “Since Pakistan’s inception, political parties have operated under the long shadow of the military establishment and intelligence agencies, which has impeded their development as institutions. They don’t even have proper offices, let alone an organisational structure. Dynastic politicians are parked by the powers that be in the parties to prop up authoritarian and military regimes in the country. In my view, we cannot get rid of dynasts and party-hoppers unless the establishment’s role in their creation and destruction is ended and our political parties are allowed to develop as political institutions,” he concludes.
Header image created with AI
