Delimitation decisions

Realising the importance of conducting the next general elections on the basis of the new census, the federal government on Thursday approved the Delimitation of Constituencies Bill. The bill, which will now be placed before the National Assembly, will allow the Election Commission of Pakistan to use the provisional census data to draw up boundaries for constituencies in the National Assembly, the provisional assemblies and for local bodies elections. The legitimacy of the 2018 elections would have been hurt had it used the outdated 1998 census, which makes the passage of the bill necessary. But it is still at best a stopgap measure. The full census results are expected to be released by the end of April while the ECP had warned the government that it needed the information as soon as possible before it would become impossible to carry out the process of delimitation.   It has now told the government it needs to introduce the law within the next seven days so that the process of delimitation can begin. Right now, the law only allows the ECP to use the full census data — something it will not be able to do in time for the next elections. Without the breadth of detail that will be available in the full census, the ECP will be working half-blind.

Delimitation has always been a politically fraught process and the ECP will have to make some difficult decisions. The proportion of National Assembly seats allocated to each province will have to be adjusted to reflect the new statistics which will lead to Punjab having a smaller percentage of the total seats. This, needless to say, will not be welcomed by the government. We should expect protests from other political parties in the days ahead too. Both the MQM and the PPP rejected the initial census results, complaining that the government had deliberately undercounted people in Sindh. They have insisted that the full results be released before being used for delimitation. This had left the government in a bind since the ECP had warned that using the 1998 census could lead to the legality of the election being challenged. Neither party is going to be happy with the introduction of the Delimitation of Constituencies Bill and will likely be joined in protests by the PTI, which seems to be opposed to every government initiative on principle. Ultimately, though, the government was left with little choice. It will have to do the best it can with the imperfect hand it was dealt. There is no way to make everyone happy and the opposition parties will just have to trust that the ECP will be scrupulous in the drawing of boundaries for the next elections.