Appointment of ECP members: credentials of govt’s picks

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan has initiated the process to appoint two members of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) just 15 days before the expiry of the constitutional deadline. However, the credentials of a couple of his nominees have evoked a great deal of interest.

Most important among the nominees is Faridullah Khan, a retired grade 22 officer of the Pakistan Administrative Service (PAS), belonging to the sixth common, who figures in the list of three nominees from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). He is the elder brother of the director general of the Intelligence Bureau. He was senior to Chief Election Commissioner Sikandar Sultan Raja Raja in the civil service.

Faridullah Khan is the current chairman of the KP Public Service Commission (KPPSC), a position that will raise questions on his eligibility for the post of ECP member.

Section 5 of the provincial law that governs the KPPSC says: “Ineligibility for further employment: On ceasing to hold office, a member shall not be eligible for further employment in the service of Pakistan. Section 2(d) says KPPSC member means a PSC member and includes its chairman.”

Faridullah’s wife, Meraj Hamayun, an educationist and politician, was first elected to the KP assembly on the Qaumi Watan Party (QWP) ticket. She later joined the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which also got her elected to the assembly.

According to a report in The News on May 24, 2018 and similar stories in other newspapers at the time, Meraj Humayun was accused of selling her vote in the Senate election both by her previous and new political party. Though she denied the accusation, her accusers remain unconvinced. Meraj Humayun, who belongs to Swabi, is also the only lawmaker [among a number of PTI lawmakers accused of vote selling] to have been served show-cause notice by two parties – the QWP that she quit and the PTI. Both accused her of selling her vote to candidates other than those fielded by them. She is now neither with the QWP nor with the PTI.

One report said it is unclear which party she will join next or where she will have any chances of getting elected as a member of the KP assembly again. Her predicament could be judged from her recent decision to attend a meeting of Awami National Party (ANP) dissidents in Swabi where two original party candidates, Shahnawaz Khan and Sarfaraz Khan Jadoon, gathered their supporters to decide their next course of action after the tickets given to them for contesting the coming election were withdrawn.

As an ex-lawmaker, Meraj Hamayun also penned ‘My Brief Political Romance: What I Saw, What I Did as an MPA and Chairperson Women Parliamentary Caucus, KP assembly’. It was dedicated to women in the hope that they would soon find their voice

Raja Amer Khan, a senior advocate, is another aspirant for the ECP. He has been proposed from Punjab by the prime minister. Some two decades ago, a relative of the candidate who preferred to remain anonymous, said he was a partner in the First Law Company of Fawad Chaudhry, the current federal information minister.

However, he said later Fawad Chaudhry came into politics during Pervez Musharraf’s time, and Raja Amer Khan practiced law independently after 2001. Raja Amer Khan, who is a Sialkot-based lawyer and is former information secretary of the Punjab chapter of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), had also headed the implementation tribunal for newspapers employees. He is the son-in-law of a retired police officer.

Dr Syed Pervaiz Abbas, another choice of the prime minister from Punjab, is a retired PAS bureaucrat and the batch mate of Imran Khan’s Principal Secretary Azam Khan. Before his superannuation, he briefly served as the economic affairs division secretary and the Senate secretary.

Of the names recommended by the premier, three are former bureaucrats, two are lawyers and one is a retired judge. As required, he has recommended three names each for every vacancy. The posts, vacated by the ECP members from Punjab and KP, are to be filled in the current process.

Ten days before the communication of the prime minister to leader of opposition Shehbaz Sharif, Speaker Asad Qaiser had written a letter to the opposition leader urging him to act to fill the two vacancies. The opposition said that the speaker has no constitutional right or power to involve himself in these appointments.

On the previous occasion, the selection of two ECP members from Sindh and Balochistan had taken nearly a year, generating immense controversy in 2019 when the government had unilaterally picked and notified the members. However, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) suspended them as the ECP declared before it that President Arif Alvi’s order appointing them was in violation of the relevant clauses of the Constitution. The IHC had asked the speaker to resolve the controversy as the prime minister and opposition leaders had refused to budge from their positions and reconcile. It urged him to evolve a consensus as such matters should be dealt with by the parliament.

On the face of it, the prime minister has short-circuited the procedure provided in the Constitution. In the first phase, an effort was to be made by the premier and opposition leader to hammer out an agreement on the ECP appointments. In case, there is no consensus, they would forward for consideration separate lists to the 12-member bipartisan parliamentary committee with equal representation of the treasury and opposition benches. The committee would then confirm any one name.

As per his time-tested approach, Imran Khan has shunned any direct consultation with Shehbaz Sharif and skipped the stage of working out a consensus on the ECP selections. Instead, he has suggested that his present list of nominees and those recommended by the opposition leader should be forwarded to the parliamentary committee separately for a final decision.