President Wasim Sajjad and Prime Minister Moeen Qureshi have been as good as their word. Reasonably bipartisan cabinets are in place, the Election Commission seems to be on its toes and administrative reshuffles are in order. Although some people are still cribbing, on the whole the caretakers are moving in the right direction. So far, that is.
Some crucial decisions, however, remain to be taken. The arguments in support of polling for both assemblies on October 6 are compelling. These should be accepted. The arguments on the necessity of ID cards, however, are more contentious, hence greater deliberations may be in order.
Local Bodies: It is well known how local councils and Zakat/Baitul Maal/Ushr committees have been exploited by self-serving MNAs and MPAs to enhance their economic and political prospects. Many such bodies are controlled by drug-traffickers or infected by rampant corruption. Freezing their funds for the next three months will address the problem of electoral malpractices only partially; it will not stop office-holders from misusing their considerable levers of power and patronage in favour of prospective candidates for the assemblies.
At any rate, everyone knows that these councils and committees were a product of massive rigging or favouritism by sitting provincial governments in 1991. If those very governments have been packed off, there is no justification left for retaining their illegitimate offspring. If the caretakers don’t sweep these local bodies away, their bipartisan efforts will be blotted forever.
Election malpractices: (1) As electoral experts of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, among others, have pointed out, the Presiding Officers are the lynch-pins of the system. If the intentions of even some of them turn out to be dishonourable, the transparency of the whole exercise can be jeopardised.
One way to ensure that Presiding Officers are not tempted to leap beyond the call of duty is to post them away from their home districts. But, apart from being expensive and cumbersome, such an exercise is by no means foolproof. Far better that the armed forces should lend the services of their officers for one day — October 6 — to countersign election results announced by Presiding Officers in the presence of each party’s representative at polling stations across the country.
The army has cobbled together this present dispensation. Its image will be tarnished if the election is tainted with complaints on the day of polling. It shouldn’t shirk its duty by arguing that it cannot ‘spare’ its officers even for a single day.
(2) Everyone suspects that electoral rolls were seriously manipulated in 1990, especially in a number of ‘sensitive’ constituencies belonging to leaders of certain parties. As a matter of fact, evidence is available that thousands of ‘voters’ were fraudulently registered in a number of constituencies belonging to stalwarts of the caretaker governments in 1990 (as, for example, in the constituencies of the Mian brothers of Lahore and the Chaudhry cousins of Gujrat). These malpractices were subsequently strengthened in the 30 months the IJI was in power.
The Election Commission should not leave any stone unturned to rectify these lapses of authority, in particular where the seats belong to ‘leaders’ of various parties. All we need for the elections to turn sour is for some ‘leaders’ to later shriek that they were denied the fruits of victory because the Commission was ‘biased’ in favour of other ‘leaders’.
(3) While the Commission is scrutinising electoral rolls, it might also redouble its efforts to delete the votes of those who have died or permanently moved to some new abode. This is a large chunk of the vote-bank (about 20%) which, if misused as in the past, could once again make the difference between defeat or victory for a candidate.
Ministry of Information: The caretakers have made a fair start by focussing on a few notorious Nawaz Sharif loyalists in this ministry. But that’s just for hors d’oeuvres. Such people are in every nook and corner of the state-owned media. Apart from Khabarnama, those pro-Sharif loyalists who have crept into the woodwork in other news-comment oriented PTV and radio programmes must also be flushed out. PTV in particular is especially vulnerable to the machinations of such people. If they are able to plant their biases even subconsciously, they could seriously impair the credibility of the caretaker regime.
In due course, as election campaigning takes off in earnest, it is inevitable that allegations will fly thick and fast. In particular, if one major party is able to put up a better show at the hustings than the other, subtle pressure could conceivably be brought to bear on the caretakers to somehow ‘balance’ the equation. The temptation to do this must be fiercely resisted.
The job of the caretakers is to allow the people of Pakistan to freely chose their new leaders. If Mr Moeen Qureshi doesn’t want to end up being presented with a garland of thorns, he would be advised to stick to one rule of thumb: when in doubt, change the rotten status quo!