The electoral reforms committee should complete its job

ISLAMABAD: The electoral reforms committee is dysfunctional for precisely three months now, after the resignation of Zahid Hamid as a federal minister following an order of the special court that is trying Pervez Musharraf for high treason, which declared him as a co-accused along with two others.
“The main forum had constituted an eleven-member sub-committee under the chairmanship of Zahid Hamid to go through all laws and prepare its recommendations to be presented to the principal forum,” former Law Minister and ex-Senate Chairman Farooq H Naek told The News when contacted.
According to him, since Zahid Hamid’s resignation in the last week of November, the sub-committee is non-operative as he is also staying away from it. It has not met since then.Naek said that it was not possible to prepare recommendations by the main committee because of its large strength. Therefore, an eleven-member sub-committee was constituted. No new head has so far beennominated, he said adding that the principal forum had broadly discussed threadbare the electoral reforms in nearly a dozen meetings.
When the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) were continuing their protests, the committee was moving fast to complete its job. But as the sit-ins were wrapped up for different reasons, the apparent pressure to accelerate the electoral reforms package also eased. The preparation of the reforms has been put on the backburner.
The multiparty committee also has three representatives of the PTI including Shafqat Mehmood, Dr Shireen Mazari and Dr Arif Alvi. But they only attended its first meeting and later abstained from it pressing their demand for formation of a judicial commission to investigate their poll rigging charges although the PTI is the only party that aggressively called for electoral reforms more than any other political force.
On June 10 last, Prime Minister Nawaz had written a letter to National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq asking him to form a committee comprising all parliamentary parties to prepare its findings within three months. Its mandate was not restricted to proposing mere electoral reforms, but also covered proposing amendments in the constitutional provisions relating to caretaker governments.
After consultations with all the parliamentary parties, the speaker nominated the committee with consensus with the PTI having consented to its inclusion in July last.As required by the prime minister in his letter, the committee also took benefit from the reports of a sub-committee of the National Assembly standing body on law on amendments in electoral laws of October, 2011 and the Senate special committee on election issues of February, 2013.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has seven members, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) four and the PTI and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) three each apart from other groups’ representation. One-thirds of the committee members came from the Senate while the rest from the National Assembly.
The committee received 1,283 proposals on revamping the electoral system, which were firmed up by a special team headed by its secretary Karamat Hussain Niazi. It was also provided a set of recommendations by some non-government organisations. All these proposals were handed over to the sub-committee to review and shortlist them.
Of them, 472 recommendations related to the Representation of Peoples Act (Ropa) and 19 pertained to the delimitation of constituencies. Similarly, 25 proposals were concerned with the electoral rolls; 49 suggestions about the 2002 election laws and 9 proposals were of general nature.
Although the blame is generally put on the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) for poll rigging, the outgoing parliament had blocked its critical bill, which was tabled in it in February 2013 but it was never given a serious thought. None of the political parties in the present parliament has bothered to take it up for consideration.
The bill, proposed by the ECP under the then Chief Election Commissioner Fakhruddin G Ebrahim, had mainly sought empowerment of the ECP to transfer or suspend any officer, including the chief secretary or the inspector general of police, in case such officer is found involved in meddling in election affairs or creating hurdles in holding of elections in a free, fair and independent manner.
The bill had further proposed 30-day scrutiny period but even this was not approved by the previous parliament. The ECP had cleared this scrutiny period for nomination papers of contesting candidates to ensure that fraudsters, fake degree holders, tax and utility bill defaulters and other cheats are barred from polls by cross-checking their credentials from concerned authorities.
The bill had also recommended that the returning contestants should get 50 percent of the total votes cast. Fines for violation of the code of conduct were proposed to be increased manifold.
For instance, a fine of Rs100,000 was recommended to be imposed on a voter casting a bogus vote. Those committing election forgery were to pay a fine of Rs100,000 and face up to five-year imprisonment.