Willy-nilly Punjab, Sindh to hold LB elections this year

ISLAMABAD: The Punjab and Sindh governments are unlikely to escape from holding the long-delayed local council elections this time as the Supreme Court has pushed them once again to conduct the exercise as per the dates to be given by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).
The local polls, which are expected to be held in Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) during the current year, will restore the grassroots democracy, suspended since long.The apex court has ordered the ECP to provide it by Friday with the dates for the constitutionally mandated local elections in the three provinces. It urged the Punjab, Sindh and KP governments to furnish it written assurance that the polls will be held on the dates spelt out by the ECP.
However, the local elections will be scattered beyond reasonable limits as the polls in Punjab, Sindh and KP will be organised in different months till March next year if all goes well.Balochistan took the lead long time ago by holding the elections. The KP will be ahead of Punjab and Sindh as the ECP is expected to arrange the polls in coming April. The provincial government has shown readiness for it.
“We have to depend on the preparations of the provincial governments to organise the elections because they have to do a lot, providing the environment for the exercise,” an ECP official told The News.
It is the first time that the ECP is holding the local government elections and on party-basis. An advantage that the KP government has is that the delimitation of wards done by it has been declared valid by the Supreme Court. This is a mandatory prerequisite, which has been fulfilled.
While it is almost sure that the polls in the KP will be held in April, it is still not certain that the elections will be organised in Punjab in coming November and in Sindh in March next year.Unless the fresh delimitation of constituencies are done in Punjab and Sindh, the polls can’t be held. The previous delimitations were rejected by the apex court. But the real factor, which hampered the holding of the polls in these two provinces, was the disinclination of their governments for their own reasons.
Never before were the local elections comprehensively spread as they have now been. In the past, they were simultaneously held. The interests of the political parties, ruling different provinces, have not converged on arranging these polls at the same time.
Since long, the Supreme Court has been urging the provinces to hold the elections but they have been vacillating on one pretext or the other.While disagreeing on most issues, the ruling political parties have been unanimous in dodging judicial orders for early polls. The unique mess created and complicated by different factors specifically the policy of the provincial governments had made it impossible to hold the polls.
The Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development & Transparency (Pildat) said in its recent public opinion on quality of democracy in Pakistan covering the first year of federal & provincial governments June 2013-May 2014 that 71 % of the population stated that holding local government elections is very important. Only 27 % believed that holding these polls is not very important.
Sixty-five per cent deponents said that a locally elected government is somewhat to very important in solving the problems faced by ordinary Pakistanis. Only 32 % of the population asserted that local governments are not important in solving the problems faced by the common people.The overwhelming majority, 85 %, believed that it was critical that the ECP’s functions need to be reformed and reconfigured while only 10 % did not consider these changes necessary.