Local polls before general polls

PPP had made some trivial-looking changes in 20th amendment to please the MQM.

Throughout the most of this Tuesday, Syed Khurshid Shah remained on his toes and kept punching various numbers on his cell phone, almost frantically. His task was to ensure the presence of maximum number of MNAs in the house who belong to the ruling party and its allies. After many days of tough negotiations with the opposition, the final draft of the 20th amendment in the constitution was now ready and the PML-N had committed to vote for it without much ado.

Ostensibly, the proposed amendment was merely required to validate membership of 28 persons, who had been elected to various legislative houses through bye-elections held under an Election Commission that the Supreme Court later found was ‘incomplete.’ The validation could have been furnished by inserting one or two sentences in the Constitution. The ruling alliance was not sure of its numbers, however, and it decided to take the PML-N on board to doubly ensure the support of the 2/3rd majority.

Its leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, opted to act hard to get when approached for votes and instead of providing validation to already elected persons, he focused more to extract constitutional guarantees for ensuring holding of the next election by an unquestionably neutral caretaker government and a genuinely independent election commission.

Eventually, he did appear to have reached almost too close to his goal by Monday afternoon. It is a different matter that veteran observers of our vicious power games still suspect that in spite of getting the wordings of his exclusive liking in final draft of the 20th amendment, Nisar had laid more booby traps on the path to free, fair and impartial elections.

I was not too keen to bear with long lectures to find out specific details of the imagined traps. For the selfish reason of meeting deadline for this column, one rather felt more agitated over the fact that despite the widely accepted stories that claimed the finalisation of a deal between the PPP and PML-N over wording of the 20th amendment, the National Assembly did not appear in any hurry to begin its sitting Tuesday evening.

The excruciating delay in holding of the assembly sitting forced one to take those whispers seriously which claimed that Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan was not happy with some last-minute changes in the agreed draft of the 20th amendment. Presumably, the PPP had made some trivial-looking changes in it to please the MQM. Staying put in the Speaker’s office, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan was reported to have been adamantly demanding that the government must but present the original draft that was finalised with him. He could not be appeased in the end became obvious, when the assembly was adjourned again for a few minutes in the name of seeking consensus, immediately after tabling of the 20th amendment before a house that had met two hours behind the schedule. Despite the last-minute bickering and hiccups, however, most reporters remained confident that the government had finally reached a stage where the passage of 20th amendment appeared imminent.

Most of the active reporters were also not questioning the PPP-sponsored claims that after many weeks of hard bargaining, Zardari-Gilani government had developed some deep working understanding with the PML-N. The near-unanimous looking election of Ishaq Dar and Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan on the seats allocated to technocrats from the Punjab in the Senate provides solid content to such claims. Their election rather compels one to predict with some confidence that the PML-N would prefer that the PPP should present the budget in May, instead of pressurising holding of early elections. September/October 2012 are the months, when most legislators expect the next election to take place. I am not so confident on that count, though. Increasingly, strong signals are coming from sources known for maintaining an active contact with game-setters of the Zardari-Gilani government. They clearly suggest that instead of rushing to next general elections after passage of the next budget, the PPP would do everything to first hold local bodies’ polls, at least in the provinces it rules or where it sits in the coalition government.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2012.