The long-delayed constitutional amendment to allocate seats in the National Assembly for the next general elections on the basis of this year’s census ran into another unnecessary roadblock on Friday when less than half of Senate members were present at the time the bill was introduced. The National Assembly had finally passed the amendment with a comfortable majority a day earlier, leaving the Senate with no excuse for its dereliction of duty. That the Senate managed to pass the Elections Amendment Bill, 2017 on the same day it didn’t have the strength of numbers to pass the constitutional amendment shows just how little priority is being given to the delimitation process. The constitutional amendment is a simple one, only stating that the allocation of National Assembly seats will be allocated using the provisional results of the 2017 census. So there is no excuse for the Senate to not heed the warning of the Election Commission of Pakistan that it needs to start work on the delimitation of constituency boundaries immediately if it is to complete its work in time for the elections next August. The government has tried its hardest to build a consensus that the current, rather than the 1998’s, census should be used and has even secured the approval of the Council of Common Interests. When the Senate reconvenes on Monday, it must make it a priority to pass the constitutional amendment. The delimitation process is inherently contentious since there are always going to be some parties that are upset at how electoral boundaries have been drawn. For an election to be considered free and fair – and for it to have legitimacy in the eyes of the public – not only must delimitation be conducted in a transparent manner, it also needs the buy in of all political parties. Since the last time we conducted delimitation of constituencies for general elections was before the flawed 2002 elections, there will be even more pressure on the ECP to get it right. Before the last local elections, delimitation by the provinces was considered so unfair it required the intervention of the courts to order a do-over. In one particularly egregious case, one constituency in Balochistan had a hundred times as many voters as another in what was an obvious case of trying to disenfranchise a religious minority. Should any such problems crop up this time, time will be needed to identify and litigate against it. That time is fast running out because of parliament’s lethargy in passing this vital constitutional amendment.
