LB polls postponed beyond reasonable limits

ISLAMABAD: Holding of local council elections has been scattered beyond reasonable limits as the polls in Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) will be organised in different months till March next year if all goes well.
Balochistan took lead long time ago and the election of the municipal bodies’ heads was also held last week, completing the exercise.The KP will be ahead of Punjab and Sindh in holding the local elections as the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) will arrange the polls in coming May.
The provincial government has shown readiness for the process. “We have to depend on the preparations of the provincial governments to arrange the elections because they have to do a lot, providing the environment for the electoral exercise,” an ECP official told The News.
The ECP is holding the local government elections for the first time. Also, it is the first time that these polls are being arranged on party-basis.
The official said an advantage that the KP government has is that the delimitation of wards has been held valid by the Supreme Court (SC). This is a mandatory prerequisite, which has been fulfilled.
While it is almost sure that the polls in the KP will be held in May, it is still not certain that the elections will be organised in Punjab in coming November and in Sindh in March next year as the two provincial governments has indicated to the ECP.
Unless the fresh delimitation of wards will be done in Punjab and Sindh, the polls can’t be held. The previous delimitations were rejected by the 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 holding these polls at the same time.
For quite some time, the SC has been pushing the provinces to hold the local 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 local polls. The unique mess created and complicated by different factors specifically the policy of the provincial governments had made it impossible to arrange the polls.
The ECP has also been confused and indeterminate about holding the elections. The provincial governments kept committing to the court different polling dates but at the same time persisted with backing out after some time.
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 somewhat to very important. Only 27 % believed that holding these polls is not very important. 65% 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.
In the context of the need for reforms and changes in the ECP, 30% deponents said that the next elections will be conducted in a much better fashion by the ECP. However, 26% deponents have serious doubts about the ECP and believed that it will be worse in the next polls. 37% of all Pakistanis believed that the ECP’s performance in holding free and fair polls will be no different in future.