Former Ambassador BA Malik on Tuesday said that free and fair elections were at the heart of parliamentary democracy. He appreciated the passage of the 20th amendment bill from the National Assembly with provisions of a neutral caretaker setup for elections and the strengthening of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).
He made these remarks at a discussion organised by the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS).
Malik said India was the only South Asian country with an uninterrupted and smooth constitutional democratic process. He said that Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, the three other major South Asian countries, have had problems with the smooth functioning of democracies in their countries. He called for uninterrupted democratic governance in Pakistan and hailed the fifth consecutive presidential address to the parliament by President Zardari.
He said for the parliament to be supreme and assertive, it would have to enhance its credibility among the public through effective performance. In this particular instance, he appreciated the unprecedented initiation of a debate on foreign policy in the parliament, and the work of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security (PCNS) on the subject.
IRS President Ashraf Azim also appreciated the role of PCNS in generating a public debate on critical national security and foreign policy issues as well as bringing those policy issues to the floor of the parliament.
Political Officer at the US Embassy in Islamabad Nicole Theriot, stressed the need for another round of discussion on Pak-US relations. Dr Mavara Inayat of the Department of International Relations at the Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) was of the opinion that there were still flaws in the functioning of democracy in Pakistan and that elections and voter behaviors were still largely manipulated, especially in the rural areas.
Dr Shabana Fayyaz of the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies (DSS) at the QAU mentioned low attendance in parliamentary sessions as another factor in adversely affecting its credibility. Dr ZA Qureshi, Head of the International Relations Department at the National University of Modern Languages (NUML) pointed out the lack of implementation of parliamentary resolutions by the executive as another factor impeding its supremacy.
Aarish U Khan, research analyst at IRS, was of the view that democracy needs to be viewed as a means to the end of empowerment of people and provision of social justice. In his view, the discontent among certain segments of the society with the parliamentary democracy of Pakistan emanated from lack of deliverance on the part of the democratic setup on those counts.
