ISLAMABAD, March 4: The People's Party Parliamentarians MNA, Fauzia Wahab, has apprised the Inter Parliamentary Union secretary-general, Anders B. Johnsson, of the Pakistan government's biased attitude towards her party.
The PPP leader, in a letter addressed to Mr Johnsson, stated that the recent unseating of declared winners in three constituencies on account of possessing fake degrees confirmed the PPP's reservations about the highly-rigged election results of 2002.
She said it was shocking to know that the judiciary failed to observe uniformity in its judgments in the three cases. There are two distinct sets of rules: one for the king's party, the PML-Q, and one for the opposition party, the PPP, she added.
The MNA said two PPP ticket holders, Fida Hussain Dero of NA-236 and Shaukat Ali Rajper of PS-31, who lost by a slim margin, had filed petitions against the winners in their constituencies.
Both of the PPP candidates had contended that the winners' degrees were fake and that they were never enrolled in any university. Within a month of the elections, Sindh University publicly confirmed that the winners did not have any record of the given roll numbers of the degrees.
But it took the Election tribunals of Sindh more than a year to reach the conclusion of disqualifying the winners, she added.
Ms Wahab said the cases were taken up with the Supreme Court, where the full bench comprising Chief Justice Nizam Hussain Siddiqui, Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar and Justice Javed Iqbal upheld the judgment of the Sindh Election Tribunal. Later, the winners, Mohammed Khan Jonejo and Bashir Ahmad Bhabhan, were declared disqualified.
But in a similar case, the MNA said, where the petitioner, Haroon Akhter, brother of Commerce Minister Humayun Akhter, was declared the winner. The petitioner had contested in the elections on the PML-Q ticket.
Mr Akhter had filed a petition in the election tribunal of the Lahore High Court for unseating a PML-N MPA from Lahore, Sheikh Amjad Aziz. The PML-N member was accused of submitting a bogus BSc degree.
The tribunal summoned the university officials, who could not recognize their signatures on the slip, while the PML-N candidate failed to present his degree and the registration number issued by the Punjab University. Justice Mian Hamid Farooq, in the judgment, said all the findings rendered and evidence given on the election of Sheikh Amjad Aziz from PP-156 had established that he did not possess necessary qualification to contest.
Explaining the biased attitude of the authorities concerned, Ms Wahab said the judge set aside the October 20, 2002, notification of the Election Commission and declared Haroon Akhtar Khan as having validly been returned from the Lahore constituency.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court allowed Haroon Akhter to take oath as an MPA, saying that a constituency could not be left un represented, while in the case of the other two petitioner of the PPP, re-elections had been ordered.
