Breathing life into the ECP

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) is a vital constitutional body and it has been moribund for over a month as the wrangling between politicians as to its apex membership continued. A sort-of deal now appears to have been done, but whether it will prove durable under the pressures of life beyond a paper proposal is uncertain. Four names have been advanced, three former judges and a retired bureaucrat, with the headline event being that for the first time one of the nominees is a woman.

Two of the opposition groups are less than happy and have accused the government of cutting some sort of deal with the PPP. Having failed to reach a consensus, the parties forwarded 12 names each to the bipartisan parliamentary committee for consideration. The dissenting voices in the final selection were the ANP and the PTI, which both abstained from voting because they were unhappy with the choice of ECP members from Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. These two parties accused the government of making a “muk muka” or underhand deal with the PPP for reasons not unconnected to the brouhaha about the Panama Papers, which make an appearance because the PTI and the PPP have filed petitions with the ECP calling for the disqualification of the PM because of what the papers reveal. Who eventually sits on the ECP which is in theory politically neutral will determine the outcome of those petitions, and the ANP and the PTI feel that their proposed candidates have been overlooked to the detriment of a — for them — satisfactory outcome. Given the ethical poverty of politics nationally, it is entirely possible that the government cooked the selection to suit its own objectives downstream. This matters because unless there is unanimity over the apex membership of the ECP, there will be doubts cast as to its impartiality by all and sundry who sniff yet another tedious bout of rigging accusations on the near horizon. Whilst we welcome a woman to the ECP, we deplore the jiggery-pokery that surrounds her appointment.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 27^th, 2016.

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