Last Wednesday, the newly created Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Reforms held its first session and elected Ishaq Dar as its chairman. The committee has three months to finish its job. As everyone knows, our electoral system is completely broken and is badly in need of fundamental reform. Electoral fraud and manipulation is only a part of the problem and fixing it, while essential, would not be enough to improve the abysmal quality and performance of our legislative institutions. There are many grave faults in the way our legislatures are elected; and these have to be addressed in any genuine and meaningful reform. The two main defects are: the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system for the national and provincial assemblies which has further entrenched our rapacious ruling class in power; and indirect election of the Senate under a method which makes it practically a body nominated by party heads. Among other shortcomings are the following: the filling of seats reserved for women and the minorities effectively through a process of selection, also by party chiefs, from among close relatives of their favourites; the absence of a system to screen candidates who do not fulfil the qualifications stipulated in the constitution; and dynastic control and lack of democracy in the political parties. This is not of course an exhaustive list. The result of these systemic faults is seen in the quality and character of the people who sit in our legislatures. With some exceptions, they all come from our parasitical ruling class; a large number do not pay their taxes and are involved in graft in its different forms; many have won their seats through fraudulent means; and quite a few are suspected to be holding foreign nationality. As lawmakers, their primary interest is to preserve and expand their own wealth and privileges and those of their kind. Almost every single piece of our legislation seeks to benefit either their class or some powerful individual member of the ruling clique. It is therefore no wonder that our politicians have been the biggest obstacle to electoral reform. Whenever there was a move for genuine reform, the initiative has come from outside and the politicians have ganged together to frustrate the effort. Two examples will suffice. First, in 1979, Ziaul Haq, the then usurper and military dictator, proposed a system of proportional representation for election to the national and provincial assemblies in place of the FPTP system. Zia hoped through this measure to prevent the PPP from winning an outright election victory. His motives were thoroughly dishonest but the proposal was essentially sound from the point of view of long-term national interest. If it had been adopted then, many of the political crises in the coming years would probably have been averted, but it was dropped because of opposition from the political parties. Second, in its judgement of June 2012 in the Workers Party case, the Supreme Court gave several directives on electoral reform, including one regarding the introduction of a system that reflects the majority will more accurately than the FPTP system. Neither our parliament nor the Election Commission has given any serious consideration to this directive. In fact, the only step our parliament has ever taken in the area of electoral ‘reform’ was through the famous 18th Amendment. This amendment surreptitiously introduced two changes whose real purpose was to strengthen dynastic control over the elected legislatures. The heads of all parties represented in parliament were party to this conspiracy against the people of Pakistan. First, Article 17 of the constitution was amended to dispense with the requirement that office-holders in political parties should be elected. Ahsan Iqbal gave two mutually contradictory explanations for this ‘reform’ at the time, both patently untenable. The deletion of the relevant clause was justified, according to him, firstly because it had been introduced by a discredited military usurper; and, secondly, because the law on political parties already provides for intra-party elections. The more plausible explanation is that a constitutional requirement of intra-party elections can invoked to make a complaint under the original jurisdiction of the high courts and the Supreme Court that a party office-holder has not been duly elected. This is not a risk to which our party heads want to expose themselves, because, as is well-known, the ‘elections’ held by most parties are a sham and merely rubber-stamp selections made by the party chief who is often also the dynastic head. Second, the 18th Amendment inserted a new Article 63A to empower the party head, in place of the head of the parliamentary party as before, to declare a member of parliament to have defected and thus disqualified himself from continuing to sit in the house. According to an explanation given by Ahsan Iqbal, the real purpose of this amendment was to separate government office from party posts. But if the PML-N is so committed to separation of party and government offices, it should explain why Nawaz continues as president of the PML-N even after his election as prime minister. Besides passing the 18th Amendment, the previous parliament also set up two panels on electoral reform: a sub-committee on election reforms of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs; and a Senate Special Committee on Election Issues. But these two bodies were interested not in promoting reform but only in stalling it. They succeeded, and a proposal for a meaningful scrutiny of the tax and other records of candidates was successfully thwarted. The task of the newly established committee, as defined in the resolution of the National Assembly resolution under which it has been set up, is to “include, but [is] not be limited to, making recommendations in respect of electoral reforms required to ensure free, fair and transparent elections, including … constitutional amendments”. These are quite broad powers but the question is whether the political will exists to introduce genuine reform. The signs are certainly not encouraging. At its first meeting, the newly elected chairman said that the committee’s focus would be on the use of modern technology to ensure fair elections and on the consolidation of all electoral laws. Besides, the committee would revisit proposals made by the committees set up by parliament in the past. Clearly, the intention is only to introduce some cosmetic changes without affecting the essentials. Not surprisingly, the PML-N and the PPP, the two biggest status quo parties of the country, are in full agreement on stalling meaningful electoral reform despite their other differences. Their claim that they represent the ‘democratic forces’, that the PTI’s march on Islamabad threatens to derail democracy or that the military is waiting for an opportunity to step in, is a brazen distortion of the truth. By holding a mass rally in Islamabad on Independence Day, the PTI is only exercising its democratic right to hold peaceful demonstrations to press political demands. In March 2009, the PML-N itself joined in the march on Islamabad which led to the restoration of the Supreme Court chief justice. The government that the party heads cannot claim that what was justified and necessary then is wrong now. But even the PTI, which to its credit has brought the issue of electoral reform to the forefront of the political agenda, does not have a comprehensive or coherent programme. Imran’s political demands keep changing but in the area of electoral reform his focus is on the reconstitution of the ECP and changes in the procedure and criteria for selecting caretaker governments. This is a very modest agenda and does not go to the heart of the matter. We must do better than that. The people of Pakistan certainly deserve better. The real challenge is to introduce reforms in which the stranglehold of our parasitical ruling class on the legislatures is broken and replaced by a system in which all sections of the society are duly represented, the Senate is directly elected and the political parties are organised on a democratic not dynastic basis. This is not impossible to achieve and the time to start is now.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 05:09:02 +0000
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