The direction of the Supreme Court to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to ensure the sanctity of the upcoming Senate election seems something of a statement of the obvious, for that is what the ECP is supposed to do: hold fair polls, which mean polls in which voters do not sell their vote. In Tuesday’s proceedings, the Supreme Court also got the ECP to admit that it had taken cognizance of the making public of a video purportedly showing KP MPAs selling their votes in the 2018 Senate elections. The members of the bench did not express any support for an open ballot by the Senate, and by asking the ECP to examine the matter; the Supreme Court had put up its guard against the government making it give it its seal of approval.
There seems an odd reluctance by both the government and the Supreme Court to deal firmly with the matter. The government seems to want to be able to shift the blame from itself, by promulgating an ordinance, as well as moving a reference before the Supreme Court, not so much for vote-selling by its MPAs, as for the inaction on its part. And if the Supreme Court was going to dump everything in the lap of the ECP, it could very well have done so in the beginning of the hearing, and ruled that it did not have jurisdiction until the ECP had not passed an order, and then only if an appeal was preferred against it.
The government should realize that it should not put the Supreme Court in the position it has, by bringing before it an essentially party matter. Since 2013, and thus for the 2015 and 2018 Senate elections, the PTI has been in the majority in the KP Assembly, which means that its stalwarts were voters in these elections, and any vote-selling should have been stopped by the PTI itself, and also by the ECP. For the former to make the Supreme Court get involved is not the best of strategies. It is for the Supreme Court to deliver a judgment which saves the credibility of the entire judiciary.
I read a comment some where that proceedings as they are going are similar to what PCO judges do after they have been convinced and retained by military dictators. The way chairman election commission was pressurised it sounded like judges wanted him to say what they wanted. It was acceptable to judges to close the case against PM just because he wrote a letter saying he has not ordered release of funds on other hand chairman election commission has been put under extreme pressure and humiliation because he was standby the constitutions, Are we writing new chapter of law of necessity?