Electoral Politics of Jamat-e-Islami Pakistan (1987-2009)

Jamat-e-Islami (JI) started as a social movement in 1941 and became an influential group to support Islamic constitution in Pakistan. Later, the leaders of this movement decided to take part in electoral politics. And in 1957, the movement evolved into a political Party. In 1964, JI was banned by the dictator Ayub Khan, because they did not support the regimes’ unconstitutional martial law. After Ayub khan, the Bhutto suppressed all opposition parties including JI. In addition to this, General Zia shared power with JI for some time but quickly stripped it of all authority. It can be concluded that JI was never allowed freely participate in the political system of Pakistan. JI also suffered the schisms in the organizational structure because of its strict rules and regulations. However, Qazi Hussain Ahmad took certain measures to push JI in main stream of Pakistani politics. An attempt to find out how JI was operated in electoral politics from 1987 to 2009 has been made in this paper. It has used the Columbian school of thought as a model. This model rationalizes election on the sociological perspective, where voters are influenced by the left-right, ideological orientations, and by religion, sect, ethnicity, class, caste, rural and urban divisions. The data is collected by researching secondary sources that discussed and evaluated the electoral politics in Pakistan. A content analysis method is used to analyze the data leading to the stated findings about JI’s electoral strategies.