By Nazish Brohi

University-level academic qualification should not be the only eligibility criteria for elected representatives from the working classes and men and women who are labourers.

Simultaneous prescriptions would be increasing the number of parliamentarians and significantly reducing the sizes of constituencies, which would allow such people to have a chance of rising up without the millions of prerequisite rupees. This will enable an alternative leadership from the poor and marginalised classes and groups to emerge.

Given that the elite have captured all mainstream political parties and institutions, that is not going to happen anytime in the foreseeable future. Arguably then, the least the ruling elites can be expected to do is to invest on their own education. But questioning the validity of demanding academic qualifications is a flawed framework for the current debate over the fake degrees of parliamentarians.

For that, the politicians should have besieged the Election Commission with dharnas (sit-ins), protested on the streets or refused to file nomination papers en-masse when the criterion was announced.

Or once the democratic dispensation was in place, they could have announced that this was a strategy and a filtering-process used to subvert politics by the military regime, apologised to the people for misleading them and given cover to those with fake degrees while reversing the change. However, they didn’t do any of this.

As things stand, it is a matter of using fraudulent means to get elected. On a moral compass, this point is no different from rigging ballot boxes. If anything, it is worse – because in the process they have indicted and made a mockery of the education system.

Notwithstanding that the education system is a mess in any case, but the act of forging degrees belittles the conventional wisdom that education offers us a way out of the morass of poverty, discrimination and disempowerment. The message received is that education makes no difference.

And according to news reports, the claim that forging degrees is not a big crime but a small mistake, was made by none other than our Federal Minister for Education Sardar Assef Ahmed Ali. By all ethical standards, he should be removed from his position, or to save himself the embarrassment, he should resign. Except that none of this is going to happen. I remember being stunned when staff members of public sector universities protested against the sacking of teachers on grounds of plagiarism, which for them was not a sound enough reason for dismissal. Now they have the consent of the federal ministry to ‘plagiarise’ the degrees themselves.

In defence of politicians, Sardar Assef said that these were the same people the electorate would vote for irrespective of their degrees. That much is true. Because political eligibility in practice lies not in academic qualification or areas of specialisation or public service experience, but instead in lineage and pedigree, land holdings and resources, and the number of votes the family name can procure.

He then went on to place all responsibility on the Election Commission that had failed to correctly scrutinise documents, in effect placing the fault on those gullible enough to fall for fraud.

The onus now lies on those who believe the word of politicians, on ECP’s naiveté in assuming they wouldn’t lie. Much like we can place fault with the voters for believing their political promises, not on the politicians for making them. Now there is discussion of offering some form of indemnity to fraudulently cleared nomination forms. Would the same be offered had Hindus, Christians, or the ‘constructed’ minority of Ahmadis conducted the ‘no-big-crime’ of declaring themselves Muslims on nomination forms and consequently winning the elections?

Alternatively, we could use the same sauce for the gander. Despite the low budget ratio outlay for education, government spending coupled with all financial aid that comes in for education touches a couple of billion rupees. Let’s wind it up. It will cost far less to forge degrees, not including the administrative costs of distributing mere paper, which are high as the Benazir Income Support Programme shows, but still significantly less. Let us work to declare 90 percent literacy in this way. Let us then forge and fudge numbers to fix the balance of payments and economic growth, and then our human rights records – they form the country’s resume, and why distinguish between individual and collective resumes? They are mere formalities anyway. It is what forgery enables us to do is what counts. Outcome over process, ends over means. Right, Sardar sahib?



Nazish Brohi is an independent researcher and analyst. She can be reached at nazishbrohi@hotmail.com