PESHAWAR, July 22: Participants of a consultative meeting here on Monday recommended to the government to fill the seats reserved for women through direct elections in the forthcoming elections.

The participants, including women councillors, members of NGOs, journalists, and others, discussed different options available for filling women’s seats.

The consultative meeting on the options given in the constitutional packages for filling women’s seats in the parliament and provincial assemblies was arranged by the Citizens’ Commission for Human Development (CCHD), an organization which has launched a political education programme in six districts of the NWFP.

Zahidul Islam and Farah Saleh of CCHD elaborated different modes through which these seats could be filled. Mr Islam said in the proposed constitutional packages three options had been offered by the government. The first two options, he said, were elections on the basis of proportional representation, which was an indirect form of election.

Mr Islam said according to those options political parties were required to provide open lists of women candidates who would be elected on the reserved seats on the basis of proportional representation in accordance with the percentage of votes obtained by a party or number of general seats won by a party in the province respectively.

He said through the third option direct elections would be held among women candidates in all the constituencies and a list of women candidates elected in those constituencies in the province would be prepared.

Zahid Islam stated that in that list those women who obtained highest votes would be declared elected.

He also explained the three methods for filling women’s seats given by the Inquiry Commission on the Status of Women in its report in 1997. “In all the methods there are certain drawbacks and the government should adopt such a procedure in which these drawbacks could be minimized,” Mr Islam said.

The participants stated that the main philosophy behind reserving seats was to bring women to the mainstream politics, and through indirect elections that objective was hard to achieve.

A number of women councillors said they contested polls and were elected to different local councils, but they had not been given their due rights. “When the election of women as councillors fails to change their fate and we are not given our rights during sessions of district councils than why seats should be reserved for us in the parliament and provincial assemblies,” said Shazia Tehmas, a woman councillor.