On Sunday, people in large numbers came out of their homes and exercised their right to vote for a total of 11 seats in the National and Punjab assemblies in different cities of Pakistan.
The biggest candidate of yesterday’s by-elections was the former prime minister Imran Khan who faced candidates of the government alliance of PDM. A large number of people voted in favour of their candidates including Imran Khan and PDM.
Ask any person in the world for their opinion on any particular issue, be it good, bad or balanced, but one thing is certain one person’s opinion will be different from another’s and it will rarely happen that two people’s opinion is exactly the same. And this difference of opinion is the beauty of democracy.
The very basic definition of democracy is a voter using his or her right to vote for the candidate of their choice. The tragedy here remains that a large number of the population in Pakistan avoids exercising their right to vote and prefers to stay at home, especially during the voting for by-elections.
In fact, it is a great injustice to this beautiful system of government which we call democracy the very purpose of which is to serve the people. Since the people themselves do not show interest in the most important element of the system, i.e. the voting process, the most important element of the system, i.e. public service, dies on its own.
The injustice, looting, nepotism, and dishonesty that we see in our society today are mostly our own fault. Our own elected representatives have not considered our service as their motto and we have deemed the process of voting so trivial that most of us do not like to take time out of our busy schedule for it.
There is a need for public representatives to work for the solution of public problems, but also there is a greater need for the people to give importance to the voting process and make voting a duty.
