Abstract
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.
Authors
1-Manzoor Khan Afridi Head of Department of Politics and IR, International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan.2-Tabi Ullah MPhil Scholar, Department of Politics and IR, IIU, Islamabad, Pakistan.3-Uzma Gul PhD Scholar, Department of Political Science, AWKUM, Mardan, Pakistan.
Keywords
Jamat-e-Islami, Muttahedda Majlis-e-Amal, Islami Jamhoori Ittehad
DOI Number
10.31703/gssr.2016(I-I).05
Page Nos
58-76
Volume & Issue
I - I
