Ensuring voting rights

Those Pakistanis who left the country should not be considered that important to have a say in our domestic affairs.

KARACHI: One is really astonished at the priorities of the election commission. For days and weeks now, we hear election commission officials worrying about devising a voting system for overseas Pakistanis, many of whom left Pakistan after completing their education and training for greener pastures abroad, creating a brain drain at home. Those Pakistanis, who left the country and are not experiencing ground realities of the country anymore, should not be considered that important to have a say in our domestic affairs. Since the world scenario has changed now and they are feeling insecure due to so-called Islamophobia, they want to be recognised in the motherland although many have taken an oath of allegiance to remain loyal to their new homelands. Whosoever they might be voting for, the outcome of the elections has to be borne by those living here and not by them. Their votes may bring the wrong set of candidates on top. We hear that expensive electronic voting devices are needed to enable overseas Pakistanis to vote. What is the need for all this?

On the other hand, millions of people living in the country are suffering from the fallout of the last government’s wrongdoing, its poor governance, negligence and corruption, but they will be deprived of their voting rights as much as they are deprived of other rights such as education, health care and so on because they have been living as internally displaced persons for the last many months, if not years. There are hundreds of thousands of people who fled their homes because of ongoing military operations in their areas, poor security situations or in the aftermath of the floods, which resulted in loss of property. These people have not been rehabilitated or registered for voting in their new, temporary places of residence.

The election commission has never even mentioned these people and instead of looking for ways to facilitate voting for outsiders, they should have taken care of the rights of Pakistanis living in Pakistan. There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from this: the understanding of equal rights for all citizens is quite underdeveloped even in the “highly educated” ranks of our officialdom.

Ali Ashraf Khan

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd, 2013.