DNC questions RGOB sincerity for free and fair elections
Kathmandu, October 24: Druk National Congress (DNC) led by Rongthong kuenley Dorji has asked the government to immediately release those arrested and kept in Samdrup Jongkhar and Mongar if government plans to hold free and fair elections.
In a statement on Wednesday, DNC president R. K. Dorji said, “The government must recognize their right to freedom of expression.”
He further said, the government must come up with policies that ensure political inclusiveness and that people from all sections or strata of society must be made eligible to participate in politics, without bias and without stipulations that disqualify candidates unjustifiably since every citizen of suitable age has an inalienable right to contest for any public office, irrespective of race, caste, sex, language, religion or any other status.
Lack of mass representation and continuation of the present exclusive polices is bound to create dissatisfaction and turmoil in the future, he said.
DNC blamed two royalist parties, the People's Democratic Party (PDP) and the Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT), whom the election commissioned entertained to be registered, have been given unlimited access to conduct themselves in whatever they wish to fulfill their objectives.
But, genuine democrats are either excluded from the process or intimidated and threatened with imprisonment when they voice their opinions. “Under such circumstances, can the international community accept the Royal Government of Bhutan's democratization process and the parliamentary elections as a free and fair?” he questioned.
In such an environment, we believe that the Parliamentary elections going to take place in 2008 is total a total farce.
The DNC also questioned the role of the judiciary and the government machinery at a time common people are denied fundamental, civil and political rights as enshrined in draft Constitution.
Seventeen people, whose only ‘crime’ was to voice their political opinion, are still imprisoned in Samdrup Jongkhar and Mongar. They were arrested for assembling and freely expressing their opinion on the present politics. Most of them are relatives of democrats who participated in the 1997 demonstrations in eastern Bhutan against the government. Some of them are those who had been released after serving prison sentences for the 1997 uprising.
Both the Chief Justice of Bhutan and the caretaker prime minister are turning a blind eye to the present political situation Dorji said adding that aiding of the royalist parties by the judiciary and the administration has aroused fears that both establishments would brush aside the pleas of the general public even beyond 2008. Bhutan News Service