Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) announced on Thursday its decision to face the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) by contesting by-polls on vacant National Assembly seats of NA-122, NA-154 and NA-125.“The PML-N will contest by-elections on the vacant seats and will defeat the PTI with an even bigger margin,” Information Minister Pervez Rashid said, while speaking to media representatives after a high-level consultative chaired by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Islamabad. Few days back PM Nawaz chaired a high-level consultative meeting to devise a strategy on the forthcoming by-polls and local government elections in Punjab following the de-seating of the PML-N parliamentarians, according to the PM House. The premier, who is also the PML-N president, sought the party’s opinion to contest by-polls on vacant seats, NA-122, NA-154 and NA-125, or to move the apex court for an appeal.
Further, Railways Minister Khwaja Saad Rafique who had earlier sought a stay order from the Supreme Court against the election tribunal’s decision was advised to withdraw his petition from court and to contest for the seat again. In any democracy worth the name, the people are sovereign, who elect their representatives to parliament to serve them. Theoretically that is the way it is supposed to be. Of course, nothing in life is perfect, and democracies exhibit a wide array of standards that either approach or stray away from the ideal. First and foremost though, and given Pakistan’s chequered history of elections, the irreducible minimum requirement is that the electoral process, like Caesar’s wife, be above suspicion. Only then can a credible parliamentary democracy be erected on firm foundations. Pakistan’s elections have almost always (the 1970 elections being an exception that led to other tragedies) been dogged by controversy and charges of rigging. In most cases there was weight to the accusations of the losing side. Because of the ups and downs and discontinuity attending the history of democracy in Pakistan, serious reform of the anomalies, shortcomings and lapses of the electoral process has gone abegging. Whether one agrees with Imran Khan and the PTI’s approach to politics generally and democracy in particular or not, the party can take some credit for focusing attention on the shortcomings of the election system, even if its allegations of rigging did not pass muster on the touchstone of evidence and proof. For the moment, the balance of convenience lies with continuing with the present Election Commission of Pakistan and venturing onto the fraught terrain of the electoral process with heightened focus on the irregularities and lapses pointed out by the election tribunals and the Judicial Commission. However, we cannot remain forever sanguine about these flaws. The electoral reform process must sooner rather than later be prioritised to put to rest the coloured history of elections and their almost inevitable denouement of charges of hanky panky and the crises these engender.
pk.shafaqna.com
