This is with reference to the article published in The Dawn dated 6th February regarding the Foreign Office statement in relation to the guidelines for foreign poll observers. Such guidelines, amongst other conditions, provide “that the observers can visit constituencies, two each on the election day, after making arrangements with relevant departments to address security concerns”. Wouldn’t that tantamount to be a restriction on the movement of the observers under the guise of providing security to them?
The total number of applications processed by the Foreign Office for the observers and foreign mission is 500 or so. The total number of seats including provincial and national assemblies is 700 according to the Election Commission of Pakistan. This clearly means that there will not be enough foreign observes. Sad, but only for those who are expecting to have free and fair elections.
Many international monitoring organisations are either not coming to Pakistan or have limited their number of observers due to security concerns, which again is a failure on part of our government (probably a deliberate failure) in order to keep down the foreign observers.
Another grievous act of the government is that they have disallowed foreign observes and monitoring agencies to conduct exit polls. Whereas such exit polls are largely indicators whether the results of the elections were fair or not. Now, even a child can tell why the government has disallowed to conduct exit polls.
The mechanism of the government (i.e. the nazim structure) is already predominantly political and favours PML (Q) and now imposing further restrictions on observers and monitoring agencies suggest only one thing that these elections are not going to be free and fair.
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