KARACHI: Election experts and observers say that the ECP’s initial delimitation report released on Wednesday doesn’t seem to have affected districts much, though there are still constituencies with unequal population, with there also being the opinion that the current process of delimitation needs to be less arbitrary.
PILDAT President Ahmed Bilal Mehboob tells The News that he is "relieved, rather pleased, that the ECP has delivered on its promise to publish preliminary delimitation of constituencies right on time."
Mehboob says that "As we anticipated, there are very few districts where the national or provincial assembly seats have either increased or decreased. There are only 10 districts out of a total of 107 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh where the number of NA seats have changed; seats increased in five districts and decreased in another five. Similarly, provincial assembly seats changed in only 26 districts of the three provinces. Balochistan’s case is a bit more complicated where districts have been regrouped”. In brief, he says, “there is not much delimitation involved in terms of districts affected”.
For Head of Geo’s Election Cell Nadia Malik, the ECP “seems to have followed the usual formula of distributing the constituencies. At first glance, it seems to be in line with the delimitation done in 2022 and only minor changes seem to have been made, which can only be understood after comparing maps and areas in detail.”
Malik says that she however finds some of the math “odd”, elaborating that “according to the formula each district’s population is divided by the quota value of that province and according to that seats are distributed. For example, Jacobabad with 1.28 and Kashmore with 1.35 both should get one National Assembly seat each, whereas Shikarpur with 1.51 should have gotten two National Assembly seats. But instead of giving them full seats, for some unknown reason, the ECP has merged the population of the three districts and jointly given them four seats, where Kashmore gets divided into two National Assembly, sharing one with Jacobabad and the other with Shikarpur. This way Jacobabad has been given one full and one partial seat, instead of just one and Shikapur one full and one partial seat instead of two. Similarly, Sanghar too should have gotten three seats according to the formula but has been given two only”.
This is not the only issue. A “very preliminary assessment” by Director Programs at the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) Muddassir Rizvi is that there “continue to be constituencies [even after the initial delimitation report] that are unequal in population. We were hoping that this new delimitation exercise would minimize the number of constituencies and the new constituencies would be delimited on the basis of equal population.....I am still looking at the data in the report but it does seem that there are still constituencies with unequal population numbers”.
Ahmed Bilal Mehboob says that the process that will be followed now is that “objections and comments [on the initial report] will be received within a month and then in the following month the ECP will hold hearings on those objections and give its verdict on each. So, by November 27, the process should be complete and the final delimitation announced latest by November 30. My guess is that almost immediately after that the ECP will give a specific polling date followed by a detailed programme a week later”. Mehboob says that “There will be open hearing of objections and people will get a chance to get redressal. It remains to be seen how many objections will be filed in the next one month and that will indicate the extent of objections.”
For Rizvi, another point to note is “the cumbersome process of objections”. He explains that “even if someone has to file an objection from Gwadar they have to come to Islamabad to do it. Then they go back and then they have to return for the hearing.” A solution to this, he says, could be that “the ECP goes to the different provinces for these hearings. And small matters such as missing documents etc should be told to those objecting at the time of submission of complaint not when they come for the hearing.”
There are some issues in the process of the delimitation exercise, says Executive Director Gallup Pakistan Bilal Gilani. For him, one of the key takeaways from the delimitation report is that “the size of constituencies has become bigger. How are all those people in one constituency going to be represented by one parliamentarian? Even if everything were fine, and we had politicians who were willing to work hard etc, it is really the size of the constituency that would make a representative dysfunctional.”
Gilani also finds a lot of the delimitation principles applied by the ECP “arbitrary” in that “some areas of a similar size have more than one seat, others seem to have more than two seats.” He says that “these issues may also be arising because we have decided to not increase the seats in the National Assembly but just the size of constituencies”.
The more complicated part of the exercise starts now, says Gilani: that of “actually carving out the boundaries of the constituencies”. This he says is also based on some arbitrary policies. According to Gilani, in some areas this could become a more explosive issue. For instance in “areas that are ethnically non-homogenous and where people live in enclaves -- if you break an enclave their vote gets diluted....In the past, breaking such enclaves has been used to rig the system in a way.”
Speaking about the objections process, Gilani raises the point that “constituency-level politicians unfortunately don’t raise systemic issues such as how many seats are given to a province. The usual challenge raised is that of boundary issues in constituencies.”
For him, this is not a democratic way to go about this process and in fact it seems “colonial in mindset that the ECP sets the boundaries etc and then the people’s representatives have to go to the ECP with their objections...I think the overarching issue remains how we can make the delimitation process more democratic and principle-based”.