Govt servants unlikely to back PTI’s rigging charge

ISLAMABAD: Only one of 14 witnesses summoned by the judicial commission on the request of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) will certainly back Imran Khan’s side of the story about the 2013 general elections rigging, but his version will also be limited to just one constituency of Karachi.
Out of the remaining 13 witnesses, 10 are government servants, serving or retired, who are unlikely to buy the PTI charges in any way.Of the rest of three summoned deponents, Najam Sethi, who was caretaker chief minister of Punjab, has been extremely anxious since long to record his statement before the judicial commission or any other forum to come clean on the allegations of ’35 punctures’ and other levelled against him by the PTI. He has often vented out his frustration and anger over the repetition of the allegations despite his consistent denials.
As the judicial commission was constituted, he filed a plea with it with the request to call him so that he could state the facts about the accusations and clear his name. He is thrilled over the PTI’s request to the commission to also summon him and the subsequent call of the forum to appear before it.
Sethi, who was in reality the nominee of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and PTI for the caretaker slot, had no love lost for the PML-N, which had not supported him or proposed his name for the office. He admitted this many times during his Geo programme and stated that he, in fact, had given ‘ragra’ to the PML-N to ensure fair and free elections.
The depositions of the two other private witnesses–noted Geo anchorperson Hamid Mir and an election monitoring NGO head Muddassir Rizvi–are unlikely to be much of help to the PTI. What the two have to say, they documented it in black and white or TV programmes on different occasions. They have nothing new to do to this.
Only Nabeel Gabol, who had contested NA-246 Karachi seat on the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) ticket, won and later stepped down, will share the PTI’s view on poll rigging, but his claims will be restricted to only one constituency. “I myself was an eyewitness to fake ballot papers being stamped in NA-246. Not only were the polls rigged in Azizabad Karachi constituency, various other seats of the mega city and Punjab also saw rigging,” he alleged after his resignation.
The names of the then Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, Justice (R) Khalilur Rehman, Military Intelligence Brigadier and others, who had been ceaselessly attacked by the PTI for being part of the ‘conspiracy’ of rigging in favour of the PML-N and against the PTI, do not figure in the list of PTI’s witnesses.
Some other witnesses include the four Managing Directors (MDs) of the Pakistan Printing Corporation and Security Printing Corporation Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad.Besides, the then Punjab Chief Secretary (CS), Javed Iqbal and his deputy Additional CS Rao Iftikhar are included in the list apart from the then provincial election commissioners (PECs) of Punjab (Mehboob Anwar) and Sindh (SM Tariq Qadri). Both Javed Iqbal and Rao Iftikhar have since retired.
Javed Iqbal hailing from Khyer Pakhtunkhwa (KP) was appointed as the Punjab CS on the recommendation of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), which was approved by the PTI, after Imran Khan had rejected the nomination of Qamar Zaman (now National Accountability Bureau chairman) on the ground that the bureaucrat was a loyalist of the Sharif brothers. The news CS had brought a known anti-Sharifs bureaucrat, Rao Iftikhar, as his deputy, who had solid connections with the Chaudhrys of Gujrat.
The new bureaucratic arrangement, headed by Sethi, had unprecedentedly uprooted dozens of senior officials, who, it claimed, were close to the Sharif brothers and could influence the elections in the PML-N’s favour. But there were four exceptions – Home Secretary Shahid Khan (who is currently serving as the interior secretary), Health Secretary Arif Nadim (brother of Dr Yasmin Rashed, who contested election against Nawaz Sharif from Gowalmandi, Lahore), Finance Secretary Tariq Bajwa, currently Federal Board of Revenue Chairman, who is son-in-law of Col (R) Ghulam Sarwar, affiliated with the PTI, who could not get its ticket due to his death, and Education Secretary Aslam Kamboh, who had been allowed to remain in their positions.After surrendering to the federal government or sidelining a large number of senior officials, Sethi had brought in officers, who were the previous PML-Q chief minister’s favourite.
Sethi is likely to talk about the massive measures, particularly the unparalleled bureaucratic changes he had introduced with the objective of making the elections transparent, doing away with any clout of the Sharif brothers. He was also expected to tell the commission that his decisions had deeply annoyed the Sharif brothers.
After the elections, the KP government got some officers, who had served in Punjab during the caretaker setup. They included Ali Raza and Afzal Latif. The third one, Aslam Kaboh, has now been made Additional CS secretary of KP.
Interestingly, no bureaucratic changes whatsoever were introduced in the other three provinces by the caretaker governments. Punjab was the exception for this upheaval despite the ECP order for all the provinces to the contrary.
Punjab PEC Mehboob Anwar, an official of the ECP, who was replaced by new Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sardar Raza Khan with another ECP officer Zafar Iqbal in December last, and Sindh PEC SM Tariq Qadri, who is still serving in this position, had separately denied the allegations of the PTI when these were levelled for a number of times last year. They are expected to repeat their assertions before the judicial commission.The chairman of the National Database & Registration Authority (Nadra) and the four MDs of printing corporations are unexpected to extend any helping hand to the PTI.