Delimitations: an onerous task

Last month when the Election Commission of Pakistan invited citizens to file their objections, if any, to fresh delimitations by April 3, it had not expected to be inundated by as many as 1,285 petitions. By April 4 the ECP started hearing those pleas and is scheduled to dispose of all petitions by May 2nd in order to notify new delimitations on May 3rd. This will be a gruelling task ahead as it has to hear 40 to 50 petitions every day for close to a month. And if it has to finish all those, it will have to hear these cases on Saturdays as well. Even when the ECP completes the task and issues its final notification next month, the process will be far from over. Those who contest the ECP’s decisions can still approach the Supreme Court.

This would be happening when general elections are less than two and half months away. Ideally, the process of delimitations should have wound up at least six months before the scheduled election. This would have given election authorities ample time to reconcile electoral lists accordingly. The marking of boundaries of constituencies is a tricky exercise. A minor change in the boundary can have a negative or positive impact on the vote-bank of a party or candidate.

Never in the electoral history of the country, so many people have filed petitions against draft delimitations. Not a single petition had come against delimitations for provincial assembly constituencies from Punjab when these boundaries were marked before the 2002 general elections. The number of representations filed this time shows that political parties and voters realise the importance of delimitations. In anticipation of the final results of the headcount, parliament passed the 24th amendment allowing election authorities to mark boundaries of constituencies on the basis of provisional results of the 2017 census.

The relevant law governing delimitation stipulates that besides other geographical factors, like geographical continuity, communication infrastructure, administrative boundaries, population size will be the main factor for marking boundaries. The ECP has made population the main criterion as per the spirit of the Constitution which allocates National Assembly seats to provinces proportionate to their population sizes. This was a deviation from the previous practice where other factors were given priority.

Soon after new draft of new delimitations was made public many lawmakers in the National Assembly voiced their concerns. The house speaker constituted a bipartisan panel headed by the deputy speaker to look into the matter. The panel created a smaller sub-panel headed by the PML-N’s firebrand Daniyal Aziz. After six meetings of his sub-committee, Aziz last week came up with a hard-hitting statement against the new delimitations.

He not only rejected these delimitations but claimed that his panel had recommended the main committee scrap the 24th amendment and bring a new amendment in the constitution to pave way for elections to be held on the basis of existing delimitations. Some sub-panel members such as PPP’s Dr Nafisa Shah disowned his remarks and claimed that no such agreement was reached in the meetings of their group as was being claimed by Aziz. Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal of the PML-N also called it a conspiracy to delay the elections.

Had successive governments not delayed the census, such issues would not have propped up. By now the focus would have been on other election arrangement and measures that can guarantee free and fair polls. Since there is so little time, all political parties should cooperate with the ECP to ensure timely holding of polls and avoid creating any unnecessary impediments.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 9^th, 2018.

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