Daily Times

The scrutiny at a preliminary level by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) of the potential lawmakers for the next National and provincial Assemblies through their nomination papers has exposed many of the leading parliamentarians as defaulters of such meagre things as phone and internet payments. More could come out by the time the scrutiny is completed. Such petty fraud does not behove a lawmaker expected to set standards of probity and integrity as an example to the country. It is repugnant to think of a lawmaker being corrupt and it is even worse to find them indulging in petty crimes. Such behaviour by the parliamentarians is a breach of faith with the people with whom they have covenanted to uphold the law and constitution. To name just a few people like the Speaker of the dissolved National Assembly, former prime minister, former finance minister, former interior minister and former information minister as defaulters in paying their dues to the National Telecommunication Corporation sends the wrong message to an ordinary person in the street of license for corruption by endorsing dishonesty as a norm at the highest level. With the current state of the economy, such petty misdemeanours represent a culture of ‘anything goes’, especially in the corridors of power, thereby opening the floodgates of wholesale, massive, across the board corruption. The country has been weakened by the looting of no less than politicians sitting in the lawmaking bodies (although no one should think this trend is confined to politicians; it represents an almost universal ethos today).

It is difficult to envisage Articles 62 and 63 of the constitution being capable of providing a solution to this conundrum by keeping candidates with such habits out of the electoral process, partly because they set no objective criteria or method for determining the honest and integrity of candidates, having been inserted merely to give dictator General Ziaul Haq the cover of Islam for his own political agenda. The ECP can and should employ stringent criteria not only to identify the defaulters among the parliamentarians but if necessary discard those who could spoil the (already rotten) whole barrel. Had such a spirit of accountability been put into practice in the past, and those with the higher responsibility of elected public office held strictly to even minimum standards of ethics, this arrogance of power might well have been taken care of by now. *