09.04.2013 Righting the wrongs: Disqualified candidates
AS the election process swings into the next phase, in which appeals against decisions on candidates’ nominations will be filed until April 10 and decided upon by April 17, it is time to fix some of the errors that have been made over the last week. At least two serious kinds of anomalies have appeared in the rejection of candidates’ applications to contest elections so far. First, even where some candidates have not been convicted by a court, returning officers have seen fit to disqualify them. Barring a conviction under the law that clearly disqualifies a candidate, the mere institution of a case, or even several cases, against an individual should not be used to deny him or her the right to contest elections. The right to contest, and for voters to elect representatives they see fit, has to be established as a more sacrosanct right than the desire to keep individuals out of the electoral process simply because they are deemed unfit to represent the public.
Second, in some very high-profile instances, different returning officers reached opposite conclusions on nomination forms of the same individual. The fact that an individual can stand from multiple seats is a quirk of the Pakistani system that eventually needs to be ironed out but in the here and now, the onus is on returning officers to apply the law uniformly. The case of former president and dictator Pervez Musharraf illustrates both problems. He has not been convicted by any court yet for any crime — no matter how obvious his crime in suspending the constitution twice may be — and yet returning officers in Karachi, Kasur and Islamabad have disqualified him. Meanwhile, a returning officer in Chitral correctly observed that with no conviction against Musharraf yet, his papers were otherwise in order. Nisar Ali Khan, the
PML-N leader from Rawalpindi, has an even more peculiar distinction: he was declared qualified to run and also disqualified to run for office by separate returning officers in adjoining constituencies in the same city.
These, and other, problems that manifested themselves during the initial scrutiny period are largely rooted in the lack of clear directions to the returning officers, and even contradictory advice from various institutions. One way to look at it is as the teething problems of a nascent democracy, while the less charitable view is that there was a deliberate attempt to queer the electoral pitch by anti-democratic forces. It is time for the appeals process to right the several wrongs committed.
Futility of violence: Pressuring Dawn
AFTER two days of violence that saw the burning of copies of Dawn and the manhandling of its hawkers in many parts of Sindh, the Jeay Sindh Muttahida Mahaz chose a saner path on Sunday, called off its campaign and offered to talk to us. We wish sanity had dawned on the party leadership earlier. The JSMM is not the only party to have chosen the path of violence to draw attention to its perceived grievances. Organisations and parties, rural and urban and perhaps more deadly than the JSMM, have organised ‘boycotts’ — a euphemism for brute force — but failed, because this paper cannot be so easily browbeaten. Even state power has stood frustrated in its attempts to have the paper submit to its demands. Denying the paper ads was often used as the weapon of choice, while at least one Dawn editor was thrown into prison — but the paper stood firm, refusing to compromise on its principles.
Virtually all political elements — from nationalist groups to mainstream political juggernauts — have often complained to us against what they believed to be lack of adequate coverage for them. We have always expressed our readiness to listen to them and, where necessary, rectify the inadvertent imbalance. We do not claim infallibility. We are human, and it is quite possible for us, like any newspaper in the world, to err in the choice of news and views in the limited space available. But still,
if any party feels it is not getting what it feels is proper coverage, it has every right to make its views heard — in a civilised way. We are not partial to any group or party, but we do admit we have one bias, and it is reflected in our unalloyed commitment to the freedom of the press. Dawn will not compro-mise on this fundamental principle of democracy, human rights and civilised existence, and will continue to regard pressure tactics as unacceptable and counterproductive.
Taj Muhammad Langah: A career on the periphery
WITH Taj Muhammad Langah’s passing on Sunday, the focus, even if fleetingly, is on those politicians who are committed to a cause but condemned forever to a political journey on the periphery. Langah championed the rights of the Seraiki-speaking people long before the banner was taken up by ‘mainstream’ political parties moved by their own power needs. Once the new harbingers of change arrived on the scene, it was almost a foregone conclusion that a politician like him, who had long been prevented from reaching the power circles which dictated and decided, would not find too many mainstream voices speaking of his pioneering contributions to the cause they now flaunted as their own. This is how the system works — it inevitably creates a parallel narrative to hail the victims of the mainstream’s apathy.
For those who have been following politics in Punjab for long, Taj Muhammad Langah was one prominent PPP leader who lost the 1970 elec-tion because Z.A. Bhutto couldn’t quite make the important trip to the area where Langah took on a deeply entrenched political heavyweight. The PPP swept the polls in Multan and Langah himself secured more than 50,000 votes but lost to a rival who was rooted in the system the PPP was trying to dismantle. The name of that landlord was Mumtaz Daultana, later dispatched by the PPP government to London as Pakistan’s high commissioner — one of the first signs of Bhutto’s new policy of making peace with the feudal in Pun-jab.
Langah drifted away and towards the PPP more than once, but the Daultana episode in which he had acted as the face of an anti-status quo PPP continues to be an important episode in the rehabilitation of the landlord after the pro-mising 1970 landslide in Punjab.