RAWALPINDI: Station Commander Brigadier Rana Zahid, on Thursday, administered oath to the 12 elected members of the Rawalpindi Cantonment Board (RCB).
Following the oath taking ceremony, the board members unanimously elected Raja Jehandad as vice president. The elected vice president will take oath on Friday (today).
A total of 10 members were elected for the general seats in 10 wards and two members were elected for minority and peasant seats. The oath taking ceremony was originally scheduled for Wednesday, but had to be postponed because of flooding in the cantonment areas.
The ceremony took place in a meeting hall at the RCB Offices with the station commander, who is also the president of Rawalpindi and Chaklala Cantonment Boards administering the oath in uniform while the elected board members wore shalwar kameez and waistcoats.
PML-N’s Raja Jehandad elected vice president unopposed.
And in military fashion, before the beginning of the ceremony, directives arrived from the station commander on plain chits, stating “The ceremony will be held for oath taking and there will be no questions in the meeting.”
Elected members of the board entered the meeting hall after a gap of 18 years, with the last elected board meeting taking place in this hall in 1999 with Chaudhry Tanveer Ahmed Khan as vice president.
The board was suspended after the military coup by General Pervez Musharraf, following which cantonment boards across the country were run by mini-boards comprising of the station commander and cantonment executive officers.
In 1999, the Rawalpindi Cantonment Board (RCB) included Chaklala Cantonment in its domain but in 2003, the RCB bifurcated into boards-Rawalpindi and Chaklala.
This year on April 25, for the first time in the history of the country, party-based elections took place in cantonment areas. The ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) won all 10 seats of the RCB and nine seats of the Chaklala Cantonment Board (CCB).
In the coming days, the cantonment board will work under elected leadership but will not have a single member of an opposition party on the board.
However, opposition parties said that although they were not members of the board, they will continue to keep an eye on the performance of the elected members. “The ruling party will not be given a free hand and if it does not perform well, political workers will express their dissent on the streets,” said PTI leader Zahid Kazmi.
He said a large number of PTI voters live in cantonment areas and they would not allow the PML-N to only develop their own constituencies.
Following the ceremony, Elected Vice President Raja Jehanded Khan told Dawn that he would improve civic facilities in the areas which have been neglected over the last 18 years and resolve the issues of potable water, drainage, roads and taxes in the cantonment areas.
He said he is impressed by Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and his style of corruption free politics and the civilian population of the garrison city would see a difference in the coming days.
Meanwhile, the military bureaucracy did not announce the names of the official members of the cantonment board, despite the passage of 74 days since the elections.
Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2015
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