Daily Times

Does the law make
exceptions for follies and crimes committed due to incompetence? Do organisation policies forgive and overlook missed goals and targets due to incapability of their workforce? Do ethical, moral or intellectual standards permit laxness resulting in costly errors? The normal response to these questions is a universal no. However, when it comes to the business of politics in Pakistan the interpretation of law becomes the tricky art of justifying the degree of the legality of laws. The Judicial Commission (JC) report has been accepted by all sides but has raised many questions that need to be answered if the understanding of true justice needs to take place.
There were many positive aspects of this JC. The fact that for the first time the JC proceedings were open to the public and media was unprecedented; the fact that the judges conducted it in a very professional manner was commendable, the fact that timelines were adhered to instead of dragging them was also remarkable. However, the report needs many more clarifications to become a document of complete voluntary acceptance and approval. The major question is that if the elections were marred with gross irregularities due to incompetence does it not merit punishment for people who defaulted on their duty and responsibility? Is the logic that it has always happened like this a justification of continuous flaws in the most important event that affects the governance and performance of the country?
When we start looking at history to verify this statement we do find a reason to question it. Let us take the case of the 1977 elections. Calling elections before time with the intent to give less time to the opposition to prepare, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, through the Election Commission, created loopholes that gave the PPP room to rig and manoeuvre the elections. The PPP won 155 out of 200 seats in the National Assembly. The Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) was only able to win 36 National Assembly seats. Surprisingly, the Alliance could only win eight out of 116 seats of the National Assembly from Punjab, and failed to win even a single seat from Lahore in which they had organised big rallies. The PNA leaders rejected the results and protested that there had been systematic rigging of election results to defeat them. In many places, particularly where the PNA candidates were strong, polling was alleged to have been blocked for hours. There were also reports that the PPP’s armed personnel in police uniform had removed ballot boxes. Marked ballot papers were also found on the streets in Karachi and Lahore. Rumours quickly circulated that the results in key constituencies were issued directly from the Prime Minister’s (PM’s) office. The PNA boycotted the provincial elections that were to be held on March 10. The PPP resorted to bogus voting merely to prove that voters had come to cast their ballot. Overall, the PPP gained 99 percent seats. The voting figures showing the success of the PPP’s candidates often surpassed the actual number that turned up for voting.
Protests started all over the country. The opposition demanded the immediate resignation of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the chief election commissioner. During negotiations the opposition demanded that since clear evidence of rigging in many constituencies was available with them, an inquiry should be conducted in those places. Bhutto issued a notification whereby the Election Commission (ECP) was ordered to carry out a thorough investigation of the rigging charges within two months wherever the opposition had lodged complaints. The election commissioner of Pakistan, Justice Sajjad Ahmad Jan, carried out the investigation and submitted a report to the PM. According to the report, the elections had been rigged and bogus/unverified votes had been polled in 28 alleged constituencies. A failure to act on this report gave space to Ziaul Haq to impose martial law.
From 1977 to 2015, things have changed a lot, some for the better and some for the worse. Democracy has been rightfully accepted as the only answer by the political and military leaderships. However, the process of enforcing individual and institutional accountability has actually reached embarrassing levels. While the inquiry held by the judiciary in 1977 clearly owned up to the problems and performance of the Election Commission, the 2015 report calls it the irregularity and incompetence of the personnel but does not call for accountability for this negligence of duty. Nearly everything that could go wrong went wrong before, during and after the elections.
The judicial report admits that it is incredible that the officials concerned with the election could not even keep themselves abreast of printing of election material and that the action plan may not have been received by the Returning Officers (ROs), that the ballot papers’ demand in Punjab was calculated on the basis of the ROs’ whims, which is a violation of rules, that 35 percent of ballot papers were missing, that provincial ECPs were not being monitored and managed by the central ECP, that there was a huge gap in the testimony of the ECP and National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) chairman on the utility of magnetic ink, that votes not verified are rejected because they cannot be proved valid or invalid, that the result management system failed, that in 11 years the ECP could not build storage space for these sacred documents and violated the law by storing them in treasuries, and that there was no monitoring wing of the ECP and thus no check on what was happening on the day when the future of the country was at stake.
According to the report, these flaws were due to lack of organising, coordination, monitoring and training of ECP staff rather than any intentional design. The question remains: when accidents happen in institutions due to indifference or negligence of staff like train accidents or robberies, are the people whose irresponsible attitude caused those mishaps not dismissed, suspended or brought to court and punished? How are we going to ensure that the same people who have proved their incompetence and made a mockery of the vote of at least 25 million people are not going to repeat this in the local bodies and other elections? New electoral reforms will not suffice if the people responsible for neglecting the existing reforms and rules are not held accountable. Perhaps the most confusing part of the report is the concluding line that states: “An election could potentially be organised in an unfair manner but may still represent the overall mandate of the electorate and vice versa.” If this sentence is not clarified, like the case of fake degrees, people will keep on asking whether that means “election to election hai fair ho ya unfair ho” (election is election whether fair or unfair).

The writer is secretary information PTI Punjab, an analyst, a columnist and can be reached at andleeb.abbas1@gmail.com