Under this article, a machinery has been set up for the election purposes. While it has been made independent of the executive for purposes of administration, clause (5) says that the staff required for election work may be borrowed from provinces. Herein lies the defect, which I said makes the scheme imperfect. If you want to make the scheme perfect, you should not borrow any staff from the provinces. Though during the period of election, the staff would be under control of the Commission, It will be only for a temporary period. They will be permanent people responsible to the executive and if the executive wants to play mischief, it can issue secret instructions to that staff to act according to their behests. The staff may feel that their permanent duty lay with the executive, that the work with the Commission was for a short period and they would thus carry out the fiat or behest of the permanent officials. Therefore, Sir, I would have preferred all the staff to be also recruited from outside but I considered myself as to what will be the effect of it. It will require an army of men. Those persons who have seen the elections being run and those who are interested in it know that do run the elections of the whole country they will have to recruit a number of men, a large army of men. It will be very expensive; therefore, although to that extent it is imperfect, I accept it for the reason that it is nearer to perfection. If we have to recruit a new staff it will be prohibitive as far as expenditure is concerned and it will be a new untrained staff and probably it will not be administratively as effective as we would expect it to be. Another provision is as regards the permanency of the Commission. It has been suggested why you incur so much expenditure in providing for a permanent Commissions. I have some experience of elections of the Karachi Municipal corporation both as the Mayor and Chairman of the Standing Committee. There is a provision in Karachi Municipal Act that there shall be a permanent staff and in accordance with that since ten years we have introduced this permanently and the elections have been fair and perfect although compared with Karachi the number of voters there being negligible but the impersonation and the false votes have been completely removed by that method which we have introduced. I am positive that with the permanent Commission that we are going to establish, we are going to remove all these defects and it is incorrect to state that this Commission will not have any work after the general election is over. We shall have now about 4,000 members in all the provinces and there will be bye-elections. Surely every month there will be two or three elections-some will die, some will be promoted to high offices-some will go here and there. In this Constituent Assembly during the short period we have had a number of bye-elections although we had nothing to do with them, but in the places from which they have come there have been a number of elections. There for, apart from the necessity and fairness, this Commission will have ample work. Apart from that if the Commission is permanent, what will it do? Periodically it will examine the electoral rolls and from the statistics of those provinces those who are dead they will remove those names and will bring the electoral rolls up to date as far as possible. An electoral rolls are prepared, 50 per cent. of them are defective. Some are dead and their names are intentionally put in by a particular party who wants to run the elections and wants to put in names of their own choice; I have heard people living in the cities trying to influence by mixing up with the executive. I can tell you that from my own personal experience and I feel that if we were to have a perfect electoral roll- and electoral roll is the principal thing in an election-I am sire we must have an independent Commission and if we establish a Permanent Commission we shall certainly have a permanent roll and a very good electoral roll. I have no doubt in my mind about that and therefore though you say that it will be an expensive thing and it is not a necessity, I strongly say from my experience that this Commission is very necessary under the circumstances that I have mentioned.
