Anti-ROs drive has taught judiciary never to supervise polls

ISLAMABAD: Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Justice (retd) Sardar Raza Khan told senior representatives of political parties that the superior judiciary has refused pointblank to allow its judicial officers to do election duty during the scheduled local council polls.
A participant told The News that the CEC made it clear to the political leaders that he has informally talked to the judiciary to spare its officers for the purpose but it flatly declined to do so as per the 2009 judicial policy.
Sardar Raza Khan said that the permission given to the subordinate judiciary in the previous elections was just one-time exemption from the judicial policy on the insistence of some political parties.
Another participant stressed that the political parties, which scandalized and maligned the subordinate judicial officers who worked as the District Returning Officers (DRs) and ROs in the 2013 parliamentary polls, should apologize to ROs for their nefarious campaign against them, dubbing the exercise as the “ROs’ election”.
He said that the judicial officers were the best option to oversee the elections whereas the deputy commissioners (DCs), assistant commissioners (ACs) and other personnel of the provincial administrative machinery, who would be assigned the task of the judicial officers, were mostly considered partisan, subservient to politicians.
The participant said that the judicial officers have the sufficient legal background to pass judicial orders in the matters raised by the contesting candidates before them while the members of the administration did not have such legal knowledge.
He said that there was every possibility that the elections supervised by the administrative officers would be controversial and questionable particularly in areas where the ruling parties were very strong and have the capacity to overcome and browbeat their rivals. However, the CEC told the political representatives that the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has no choice but to rely on the officers of the administration for the election duty when the judicial officials were not available.
According to the participant, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) delegates reiterated their demand to the CEC that the ECP members should resign as they have become controversial before and after the report of the three-member judicial commission, which looked into the charges of manipulation in the 2013 elections and rejected them.
However, the CEC categorically told them that those objecting to the ECP members have the option to go to the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) while some of them have already approached this forum and should wait for its determination.
The ECP members can’t be shunted out straightaway unless they volunteer their resignations. The SJC is the appropriate constitutional forum that can show them the door only after finding them guilty of the charges listed in article 209 of the Constitution.
However, the representatives of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) emphasized that the constitutional institutions should be trusted and should not be incapacitated or marginalized by demanding resignation of their key members.
The participant said that there was a passing reference made by the PTI and PPP leaders to seeking the resignation of the ECP members and there was no prolonged debate on it in the meeting that was primarily called to discuss the upcoming local polls. Elsewhere, they continue to demand the resignations of the ECP members.
On the eve of the 2013 elections, the PTI was in the forefront in urging that the polls should be supervised by the judiciary instead of the administration officers as it has no faith in the administrative machinery. In response, the then CEC, Justice (retd) Fakhruddin G Ebrahim, had made a lot of efforts and had also written a letter to Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry requesting that the judicial officers should be permitted to perform election duty. Finally, Iftikhar Chaudhry had agreed reluctantly.
However, after the PTI lost the elections, it started lambasting the judiciary, accusing it of rigging the polls in connivance with the PML-N. It ran a protracted campaign against it. The PPP also showered similar charges on the ROs but did not malign it as much as the PTI did.
The superior judiciary learnt a bitter lesson from this vicious drive and decided that in future it would never permit the judicial officers to act as DROs or ROs. Resultantly, all the by-elections held after the 2013 polls and the recent local elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were supervised by the administration officers after the judiciary snubbed the requests.