Letter from Lahore: ID card issue may dominate poll

In the federal capital, Islamabad, where life in general proceeds along a calmer, more serene route than is the case in Lahore and most other cities in the country, most residents already possess the smart new identity cards being issued by Nadra (National Database and Registration Authority).

The fact that few people here know about the extremely efficient Nadra offices set up to issue new cards on an "urgent" basis adds to the problems. The failure by the press to convey to the public information about these centres in Lahore is one of the reasons for their under-utilisation.

With the older ID cards due to become obsolete within a few months as per the plan set in place by the Musharraf administration, an increased sense of panic seems to be taking hold in Lahore.

Here, tens of thousands of people have yet to receive their new cards, months after submitting the papers.

Nadra has conceded that the deadline for this, set for October 1, 2002, may not be met, and still more ominously that it has 'lost' at least 75,000 of the application forms submitted to it.

This news has done little to bolster public confidence in Nadra, with citizens now uncertain as to whether their applications have gone missing somewhere within the corridors of the bureaucratic set-up, or whether they can still hope, as the television advertisement promises, to receive a new card delivered by post.

More alarmingly, of course, the fact remains that a lack of proper identification documents could mean that tens of thousands of people are effectively barred from voting in the October elections.

There is now little hope that the task of issuing new ID cards can be completed before then, and already, questions about how this will have an impact on polling are being raised.

To answer such queries, Nadra has suggested that it may be possible to issue "temporary" cards, perhaps made out on ordinary paper and affixed with a stamp.

However, to those familiar with the working of the government in the country, this brings to mind images of still longer queues as people seek to collect such cards, more bureaucratic blunders and a complex process of persuading officials in various places to accept the documents given out.

Meanwhile, it is not yet clear what those who have no new cards are expected to do. Confusion surrounds the issue of how applications are to be submitted.

Many are certain that even if this process, involving the taking of photographs against a prescribed blue background of a particular shade, the attestation of papers by a government officer and the filling out of multiple forms, is completed, the cards are unlikely to be delivered for many months.

With political parties looking into this problem, it is expected that the matter of ID cards will gain increasing weight as the polls approach.