President Pervez Musharraf insists that the polls will be free and fair. But the facts belie his assertion. The election commissioner isn’t approved by the opposition. The judiciary is crippled. Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif are barred from contesting. The former chief ministers of Punjab and Sindh continue to pull strings. The nazims haven’t been suspended. Certain important officials have been posted, transferred or hired to facilitate suitable results. For example, just before he quit office, the former CM Punjab bent the rules and hired 28 former police officers for special duties. The EC has reportedly forbidden local and foreign observers from conducting exit polls. And so on.
Expert opinion posits four stages of election rigging in Pakistan. First, there is system-rigging. This refers to the incumbent’s need to create a macro political framework to favour some parties and discriminate against others. It includes specific rules and laws, including the selection of caretakers and gerrymandering of districts. Then there is pre-poll rigging. This refers to myriad “interventions” by the administration to make life easy for the favoured party and difficult for the opposition. The third is polling-day rigging, which includes facilitating favoured candidates in pulling out voters and creating hurdles for the opposition. Ballot box stuffing or fake voting is part of this exercise. The last stage is post-poll rigging, which starts after polling is over and ends with the announcement of the result.
This post-poll rigging is of critical significance in the face of droves of non-government institutional election watchdogs and international observers. It is conducted in a highly secret and selective manner by a handful of handpicked officials in the hours between the counting of votes at given polling station and the announcement of the cumulative result of the constituency by the election commission some hours hence. In essence this is how it works.
First, there is a careful screening of “marginal” constituencies (about 20%) by the “agencies” where favoured candidates need help in scraping through. Then about 20 % select polling stations are identified in each such constituency and manned with handpicked presiding officers supervised by screened government officials. After the polling is over, the polling agents of the parties at these polling stations are browbeaten, cajoled or bribed by earmarked local police contingents to quietly disappear. The results from these polling stations are conveyed to the key administrative or police official in charge of the constituency who determines how many fake votes are to be added to the kitty in each such polling station. The presiding officer then does the needful stuffing or switching of ballot boxes behind closed doors and passes the “new result” on to the returning officer who duly conveys it to the EC. In this way, a couple of dozen national assembly seats, along with the corresponding number of provincial seats, amounting to less than 500,000 votes, may be easily “stolen” in a big province like Punjab without any overt evidence of rigging, and thereby change the entire complexion of the election.
It is in this context that Benazir Bhutto has cried herself hoarse alleging that hundreds of thousands of ballot papers have been doled out in the Punjab and Sindh to handpicked officials in cahoots with chosen presiding officers to “fix” the result in all marginal constituencies in favour of the PMLQ. The interesting thing is that even Mr Wasi Zafar, the former fumbling law minister denied a ticket by his old party, is now alleging the existence of an election cell in the residence of the former CM Punjab for this purpose.
The confidence borne of this carefully pruned strategy to be exercised by a select posse of mercenaries is reflected in the unofficial assertion that the PMLQ will get 115 NA seats followed by PPP (90), MMA (45), PML-N (40), MQM (20), ANP (12) and Others (20) in a national parliament of 342. In this scenario, the PMLQ is clearly going to try and “steal” the maximum number of seats from the PMLN. This formula is devised to ensure “suitable” governments in Islamabad and Punjab with the help of the PPP or MMA, depending on who is more amenable while ensuring that neither can join hands in parliament with the PMLN to create numerical difficulties for President Musharraf.
Every election since 1988 has been rigged to a greater or lesser extent. That is one reason why most elected governments have lacked credibility and failed to complete their terms. The 2002 election was also rigged, not least by keeping Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif out of the country. But President Musharraf was popular then and could make an alliance with the MMA without ruffling feathers at home and abroad. Even then he has barely managed to survive 2007 by the skin of his teeth. Now it’s going to be different. He is visibly unpopular and the PMLQ has lost its development sheen, as evidenced by the jettisoning of its architect Shaukat Aziz. So President Musharraf would be foolish to rig the elections and risk jeopardizing his fig-leaf legitimacy in this volatile and hostile environment. He must let the people speak and accept their verdict gracefully in the national interest.