Verifying the numbers

At a meeting of the Council of Common Interests chaired by Prime Minister Imran Khan earlier this month, it was reportedly decided to issue the final results of last year’s census – the first conducted in nearly two decades – without an audit. Should the government go ahead with this option, it would create a political firestorm. The interim census results were strongly protested by political parties in Karachi which felt the population figure of 14.9 million for the city undercounted its residents. The likely reason for this discrepancy is the fact that at least five million people who live in what is widely considered part of Karachi had actually been designated as rural areas by politicians who wanted to take advantage of lower property taxes in rural areas. Be that as it may, it is important that the census be accepted by all political parties. The interim results were allowed to be used for delimitation in this year’s general elections through special legislation but a final census – one that has the buy-in of all parties – will be needed for future elections.

The previous government had approved the reverification of the results in five percent of the country but it did not have time to carry this exercise out before its term expired. Doing so now will be difficult as in-country migration will create a lot of statistical noise that will be difficult to isolate. Carrying out a new census is both inconvenient and impractical and likely unconstitutional. There were some problems with the census, not so much in how it was conducted but in the classification of urban and rural areas. If verification is a practical impossibility, the government needs to invite all political parties to hear their objections and then ask for the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics to take these objections on board and issue recommendations for the path forward. The worst of all options would be to simply declare the census final without any further work. It would show that the government intends to rule without consensus and could fatally damage the legitimacy of the census. One of the reasons we had not conducted a census since 1998 is that it suited most political parties to maintain the status quo. To now exclude political parties from any input into the census would lead to further stasis and protest.