LAHORE, Aug 21: General elections will be a futile exercise if Gen Pervez Musharraf gets himself re-elected in uniform from the current assemblies.

Noted journalist and human rights activist I.A. Rehman said this on Tuesday at an inter-active dialogue on ‘Free and fair elections: A prerequisite for a democratic Pakistan’.

Mr Rehman urged the public to boycott such elections as, according to him, these rigged elections would only legitimise an illegitimate regime.

Dr Charles Amjad Ali, a Pakistani origin professor of philosophy in the US, also said civil society must carefully draft its policy on elections as they had been used in the past to legitimise illegal regimes and their acts. Elections, if held, were not expected to be any exception to the rule unless they were “free and fair” in true sense and spirit of the words, he said.

He added elections in Pakistan were not held to take mandate from the people, but to indemnify wrongdoings of “usurpers” and lend some kind of credibility and legitimacy to them.

Mr Rehman said word “free” in electoral terms meant that every voter was free to cast his or her vote, and “fair” means that every one had equal opportunity to cast vote and get elected. The current pre-elections exercise smacked of illegal steps on both standards. A bid to de-franchise three million votes, until checked by the Supreme Court, hardly lent credibility to official pre-polls plans and so did the restriction of graduation on candidates.

He said the elections under the current scheme of things would not meet standards of free and fair elections. No one would accept results of such elections and such polls would create more controversies than removing them, he said.

Mr Rehman said the first elections in the sub-continent were held in 1909.

“We are still to learn holding them fair and free. The very first elections were rigged through different means: de-franchising illiterates, non-tax payers or landless voters. Only matriculates were allowed to vote in Sindh, middle pass in the NWFP and primary pass in the then Punjab. Rural-urban divide and rigged de-limitation were a few other rigging methods.”

Since then, things had hardly changed. After granting adult franchise in 1951, Pakistan had become more innovative in rigging methods. In 1956, it adopted a constitution, which negated one-man-one-vote rule and put both wings of the country on parity. We refused to accept results of the 1970 elections that led to separation of East Pakistan. Since then, no civilian government had been allowed to complete its tenure. With such a history of rigging polls and then refusing to accept results, no one believed that things would be any different this time, he said.