For the last few years, every general election in a South Asian country has seen a group of individuals from the region fly off to monitor the polls. The South Asian monitors, who are mainly academics, former ambassadors, retired civil servants, society women, journalists, politicians, various kinds of retired folks, and relatives of various VIPs, have so far been hosted by Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan. Similar monitoring groups also parachute down with predictable regularity from overseas: they come from the European Commission, from assorted North American think tanks, and the Commonwealth. They come with a pious mission of civilising and democraticing the natives, flying in on the penultimate days before polling and leaving as soon as the counting is done. The high points are the meetings with the head of state, the prime minister (interim or otherwise), leaders of the political opposition, and so on. It is also enjoyable to don the photo IDs and go around booth-hopping with local liaisons and—best of all—appearing on television to declare that the polls were "generally free and fair".
As soon as the Pakistan elections were announced last November by President Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari, the monitor organisations were once again scrambling to arrange the next election tourism package. As far as the SAARC region was concerned, more or less the same categories as mentioned above were put together. In and around the 3 February elections, the regional monitors spent 12 days or so in Pakistan monitoring elections, writing reports and issuing press releases.
The fact that what the SAARC monitors had to say hardly made it into the Pakistani press is a separate matter. The main reason seems to have been the presence of another monitoring group, of the Commonwealth and led by former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. The status of the Commonwealth group, representing among them the colonial forebears of South Asia, seems to have helped overshadow what the SAARC group had to say, even though possibly more important.
Civil Society Initative
What does all this monitoring mean in real terms? Funding for these activities come from sources outside South Asia and are channelled through various NGOs in the respective South Asian countries. All monitors get an all expenses paid, reasonably comfortable travel in a neighbouring country with a chance to visit far-flung places which would ordinarily form no part in an average traveller´s itinerary. There is also some spare cash to buy a few curios from the local bazaars. Usually, a "comprehensive" report may get written, as was the partial outcome of observing the last Pakistani elections in 1993, or the Bangladesh polls of June 1996. So far so good.