KARACHI: The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) has informed the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) that it will commit an unconstitutional step if it goes ahead with its plan to do fresh delimitation and conduct new local government elections in Sindh on the basis of the provisional results of, what it said, the controversial exercise of the last population census in the country.
Speaking at a press conference here on Wednesday, PPP Sindh chapter president said that he had written a letter to the chief election commissioner to this effect to convey his party’s reservations about the ECP decision to do fresh delimitation and conduct the new local government elections on the basis of last census.
Nisar Khuhro said that the population of Sindh had been counted less than the actual count in the last population census drive in the country in 2017 and the province did have objections in this regard.
He said that all the concerned political parties had shown consent only to the conduct of the last general elections in the country in 2018 on the basis of the 2017 census drive. He said that the conduct of new local government elections and fresh delimitation exercise for the purpose without finalizing the results of the population census would be an unconstitutional act. "After the conduct of the last general elections, all fresh polls should be conducted in the country on the basis of the final results of the population census. So far, verification of the results of the five per cent census blocks was not carried out against the consensus earlier developed on this issue to re-check the results of the last census before their finalization."
Nisar Khuhro said that they had objection to the announcement of the ECP to conduct new local government elections in the province without completing the constitutional formalities. He said that the Election Commission would take an unconstitutional step if it went ahead with its plan to conduct the local government elections in Sindh without finalizing the census results. He demanded that the ECP should fulfill all the constitutional requirements in this regard while the statistics of the census drive should also be rectified. He said that share of the province of Sindh in the National Finance Commission’s Award would decrease if its population was not counted properly as part of the census campaign.
The PPP Sindh president said that nobody should remain under the impression that the ruling party in the province was using delaying tactics regarding the conduct of new local government polls as Sindh was the only province where elected local government leadership had completed its four-year lawful tenure.
