The Bat, the Lion, and the Arrow: Political Identity Through Pakistan's Ballot Symbol Designs (1970 to 2024)

Abstract

In electoral systems serving a low-literacy electorate, the ballot symbol is the most widely reproduced graphic artifact a state commissions, yet communication-design scholarship has largely ceded its study to political science. This article reframes Pakistan's official election symbols as designed communication objects and analyses their evolution from 1970 to 2024. Drawing on a purposive sample of six marks associated with major parties, the tiger, the arrow and its predecessor the sword, the bicycle, the bat, the book, and the kite, the study conducts a diachronic multimodal social-semiotic analysis through a four-layer framework grounded in Peircean sign typology, Barthesian myth, the visual grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen, and Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power. Primary visual data are drawn from the Election Commission of Pakistan symbol record for the general elections of 1970 to 2018 and the 2024 allotment list. The analysis advances a central argument: the ballot symbol is engineered as an instrument of inclusion, a legibility aid for citizens who cannot read a candidate's name, yet through decades of association it accrues indexical and mythic charge that converts it into an instrument of contestation and, ultimately, of exclusion. Two design events anchor the claim: the Commission's 2011 redrawing of the book from a closed volume to an open primer, an act of graphic counter-design intended to strip a sacralised connotation, and the 2024 revocation of the bat from Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, a case of state desymbolisation that reorganised an entire election. The study contributes a communication-design account of civic signs and reads the national symbol library as a pictographic lexicon of the postcolonial state.