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Thursday March 28, 2024

Commission to collect evidence itself: PTI leader

ECP officials say defeated candidates exploiting Nadra’s inability to verify thumb impressions

By Ahmad Noorani
April 23, 2015
ISLAMABAD: On the expiry of second deadline to submit evidence before the Judicial Commission, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) says that it has not submitted any evidence even this time and has resubmitted a revised reply as per commission’s instructions along with an already issued 2,350-page white-paper.
“Evidence will be submitted when the Commission will ask us to do so,” Ishaq Khakwani, head of the PTI’s special committee on rigging, said while talking to The News and added, “Most the evidence will have to be collected by the Commission itself by ordering investigation agencies to probe certain rigging incidents.”
PTI leader Ishaq Khakwani was of the view that there is no problem of 45 days and according to terms of the Commission this period can be extended for the purpose of investigations. Khakwani said that during last hearing, the Commission had instructed that response submitted by the PTI was a general statement and that it should be revised, must be in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Commission, given in ordinance, must explain as to how conspiracy was hatched and executed as well as how the mandate was defected.
Khakwani explained that PTI has submitted white paper, along with a four pages covering letter, which complies commission orders. He added that four pages statement contains names of 12 witnesses, which, along with details, explains as to how conspiracy was hatched to rig the elections. Asked whether commission would be able to collect evidences through investigation by some organizations, he said that evidences submitted by NADA are sufficient to prove that May 11, 2013 polls were rigged.
The Election Commission and Nadra have also submitted reports before the Commission. Nadra submission contains authority’s 38 reports of thumb impressions verifications in 38 constituencies which have already been submitted before election tribunals. Tribunals ordered thumb impression verification after parties demand for it, but in none of the case these were considered as “evidence”.
Tribunals held that if rigging took place on poling day, there must be some evidence to this fact from the proceedings of that day. Not only this, the Supreme Court on March 25 held, while rejecting a petition, that Nadra could be ordered for thumb impression verification only if there is already some evidence of rigging from the happenings of polling process.
Nadra has officially stated more than once that manually captured impressions on paper cannot be verified from the digitally captured thumb impressions saved in Nadra record in all the cases.
Thus Nadra reports which were simply ignored by the tribunals were never considered as evidence. Experts say that Nadra verifications were an afterthought of losing parties only after knowing that verification process is impossible. They say that on election-day, no specific rigging pattern were explained while levelling rigging allegations by the losing parties, and they were only unhappy because of their defeat and were doubting as if they were defeated through some rigging. ECP officials say that now these parties are simply trying to exploit Nadra’s inability to verify all thumb impressions and want to destabilise whole system.
When The News contacted witnesses mentioned by PTI, including senior Journalist Hamid Mir, they said that they were never approached by anyone to appear as witness.
The PTI white paper also comprised of simple statements of unknown individuals stating that they witness rigging on polling day. This obviously could not be considered as evidence if the same was not “reported” on the polling day. These statements only came on record after about six months of election-day only at the time of publishing of PTI’s white paper. Some other points highlighted in PTI’s white paper were some typographical mistakes which were corrected accordingly.
The election results are written manually and in case of around 70,000 polling stations there can be great chances of calculation mistakes or writing errors, but even such errors were found in negligible number of cases having no impact on results.
There might have been some rigging as claimed by some parties but as a matter of fact, no party, including PTI, has so far been succeeded to submit any single credible evidence to this effect.