Judging candidates

Disqualifying people for character issues and past transgressions will take the politics out of democracy.

Who gets to cast moral judgment in an election? Ideally, it should be the voters. An election, after all, is meant to give people a choice to sift the good from the bad, the well-meaning from the shifty liars. When the election is preceded by a committee deciding who is worthy enough to be part of the democratic enterprise, you end up with a selection, not an election.

By now, we are all aware of the few returning officers (ROs) who followed the Constitution down to the letter and decided to impose a religious test for office. Articles 62 and 63 are best observed only in the breach so the disqualifications are thankfully, and somewhat predictably, being overturned on appeal. There are many who wondered how the ROs could disqualify candidates for their inability to recite religious verses while waving through tax cheats and loan defaulters.

That question is an incorrect one to ask. The underlying premise is that it is okay for a group of men (it’s always men) to judge fitness for office; the only issue is how to set the parameters for disqualification. This is a profoundly anti-democratic sentiment. We have an election to decide if someone is qualified to be a parliamentarian so I can’t quite understand why we need a pre-election. The Constitution should be amended so that we have no bar on who can run other than basic limits like a minimum age. Convicts, tax evaders and the corrupt would all be welcome to run. Hopefully, they would be defeated at the ballot box but even if they aren’t, at least we will get the representatives we deserve.

The current system is horribly flawed not just because it undermines the principle that anyone should be able to stand for election in a democracy but also because of how capriciously and randomly it is used. There may be 10 people who have not filed tax returns for the last three years but maybe four will end up having their nomination papers rejected while the other six will be cleared to run. The ideal of innocent until proven guilty is also turned on its head when candidates are rejected simply for being accused of corruption in a court of law. Apparently, an accusation alone is now enough to decide your name is not worthy enough to be printed on a ballot paper.

Even if this is not the intent, disqualifying people for character issues and past transgressions will have the effect of taking the politics out of democracy. Much as General (retd) Pervez Musharraf tried to do away with a lot of politicians by introducing his graduate condition, the RO witch-hunt ended up targeting politicians who have been around a while. You can only judge the actions of a politician if he has previously been in office. So, all the new candidates were waved through while many experienced politicians had to answer for their record, not at the hustings or the ballot box, but in front of the ROs. Whether it is the military, the bureaucracy or the judiciary, all these institutions are filled with unelected people who do not appreciate or understand the compromises that need to be made to win an election.

Democracy is a messy process that involves deals, patronage and lots of compromises. Experience has shown that when a group of technocrats are inserted into power, we may have people whose records are clean but the outcomes for the country are much worse. This is why we let the people decide.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 12^th, 2013.