The demons of our ugly political past - not that political present is any better - keep visiting us, reviving painful memories. Their latest visit has taken place in the form of a list of names, resubmitted before the Supreme Court by Advocate Wahabul Khairi, which contains names of about a score of political stalwarts whose participation in the 1990 general election was bankrolled by the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
This is not a new list; it forms part of the petition filed by veteran politician Asghar Khan, but has been in the public domain since 1996. It is authentic in that it was made public by the then chief of the ISI, General Asad Durrani (Retd.), and has not been challenged. Wahabul Khairi's contention against the 18th Amendment, before the Full Bench of the Supreme Court, is that "elections were always rigged in Pakistan as it was confirmed that ISI had been quietly distributing money... When elections were always managed by the ISI, how could one make tall claims of real democracy in the country?"
How the Supreme Court would take this argument, we are not going to offer any opinion. But we do feel that the saga of the intelligence agency, seeking election results of its liking, to be of great public interest, we obtain a national debate on the eligibility of the candidates and the quality of elections conducted by the Election Commission of Pakistan.
Of course, the constitutional provisions dealing with the Election Commission of Pakistan have been drastically revised by the 18th Amendment, mainly by cutting out the president's 'discretion' in the appointment of the Chief Election Commissioner, transferring the chief commissioners' powers to the Commission as a whole and mandating that the members of the Commission should be from the judiciary.
In fact, between the lines, the amended constitutional position tends to suggest that the Commission is more an issue of equally distributing its authority and influence between the provinces than to create a monolithic power centre. Will such a rearranged Election Commission of Pakistan succeed in securing transparent, fair and free elections we don't know?
But we may present, for public discussion, the composition of India's election commission, which conducts the largest electoral exercise in the world with a fair degree of public acceptance - and is headed by a bureaucrat who keeps his position until retirement from his service.
In fact, it is neither the nature of an election commission's composition, nor how it comes into being, but the quality of its membership that vindicates (or not) the ideal of an institution committed to presenting the authentic picture of an electorate's democratic choice. Given our massive propensity to rig elections by any means, including gerrymandering, spurious electoral lists and bogus voting, the Election Commission of Pakistan is always confronted with serious challenges.
And, unfortunately, the government of the day would never desist from exploiting its incumbency in myriad ways. That the commission was made to hold recent by-elections, in stark violation of the 18th Amendment, or it had failed to firm up its position on the forged and invalid degrees of law-makers - clearly much has yet to happen to ensure free and fair elections in future.
However, no less important is to insulate the Election Commission of Pakistan against meddling by the agencies. Those 'angel-like' politicians were the illegal beneficiaries of the intelligence agency, one is saddened to know. Hopefully, by now, they must have realised that only a strong electoral culture can underwrite the viability of a democratic process in Pakistan.