Omission and commission

That noxious odour wafting out from the ECP has much to do with electoral and institutional hygiene

That noxious odour wafting out from the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has much to do with electoral and institutional hygiene.

And so to this hygiene we turn now in a desperate bid to figure out why the most complicated of issues cannot be tackled by the simplest of methods: honesty. Yes, the same honesty that has been in serious short supply since the Result Transmission System (RTS) debacle on the election night. As a consequence, we have on our hands a controversy that refuses to die. But die it must before August 18 when Imran Khan takes oath as the prime minister of our Islamic republic.

RTS, we are told, was a powerful software developed by NADRA for the ECP to ensure speedy transmission of results from polling station to the headquarters in Islamabad. As per present folklore, tens of thousands of people on election duty were imparted training on how to use the software. Perhaps it was this ‘tech high’ that prompted ECP officials to boast that they would have all results with them by 2am on the election night.

Except that their best-laid plans went the way most best-laid plans go: awry. A bit before midnight that fateful night, the results stopped coming. Just like that. In our newsroom, and in all newsrooms of channels, there were a lot of perplexed journalists shouting at their correspondents — and the world at large — in their frustration to demystify this mysterious and unexpected turn of events. Before long, conspiracy theories started to swirl around the charged electoral atmosphere which, as it so happens, is always fertile for connecting dots which may or may not exist.

There was one place that could have provided answers. But that place was reverberating to the sounds of silence. That night the world got a glimpse of how this particular ECP operates — a glimpse that would in the coming days translate into a general feeling of dismay, and in some cases outright horror. It was this one night — one night only — that our universe revolved around the ECP, but that one night ECP acted as if the universe did not exist. Two weeks later when the chief justice of Pakistan remarked in his court that even he had tried that night to contact the Chief Election Commissioner, not once, not twice but thrice, but the CEC did not respond. The CJP wondered if the CEC was sleeping that one night — one night only — that he needed to stay awake.

Would it be unfair to say at this point that the CEC was not the only one sleeping that night?

For why else would the ECP drown itself in silence when the entire country was shouting itself hoarse over the mystery of the missing results? Why did the Secretary of the Commission take a few hours after the RTS developed problems before stepping outside his office to face the media? And why has his RTS story not withstood the test of time?

Two weeks later, the answers are still shrouded in mystery. Does the ECP have something to hide other than its scintillating incompetence? A number of factors are at play here but none more glaring than the negative attitude sported by the ECP leadership — an attitude that betrays a certain arrogance whose basis is impossible to find. If the ECP leadership had the right attitude, it would have realised that its most pressing responsibility was to bandage its leaking credibility and restore the trust of the public in this most vital election on which banked the sanctity of a people’s mandate.

ECP could have done this by:

1. Admitting the RTS problem, apologising for it (instead of spewing justifications) and spelling out the back-up plan immediately.

2. Keeping the nation in the loop constantly about the status of results while explaining in clear terms the reason for delay.

3. Conducting preliminary investigations into the RTS fiasco and providing a credible answer to the nation instead of asking for a bureaucratic inquiry which may or may not see the light of day.

4. Consulting NADRA about the reasons for the RTS failure instead of blaming it and shrugging off all responsibility from its own shoulders.

5. Taking its own initiative to investigate the complaint of many political parties that their polling agents were thrown out of polling stations. Instead the ECP flatly denied anything like this had happened even before ascertaining the facts from its field staff.

6. Providing a substantive answer to the allegations that Form 45 were not given out to polling agents of the parties as per requirement.

The ECP did no such thing. None of it. Instead it vacillated at every step, preferring wishy-washy answers instead of offering tangible information. If there is a valid explanation for all the questions — valid enough to quash all charges of irregularities once and for all — then why has the ECP not given it out in categorical terms?

At stake is a lot more than the reputations of the CEC and the members of ECP. For this transfer of power to not just be accepted but embraced by all, the shadows of doubt over the exercise that triggered this transfer of power must be removed. They can be removed if the ECP takes the responsibility to do so without any delay, without any conditions and without any malice. It has the powers, it has the resources and it has the systems to gather the information that can put to rest all doubts and convince the electorate that whatever happened was a result of incompetence and there were no malafide intentions involved.

The RTS is an albatross around the ECP’s neck. It will continue to dangle there unless removed by the force of transparency. But the noxious smell wafting out from the ECP suggests that transparency may have also gotten buried under the debris of the crashed RTS.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 12^th, 2018.

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