Boundaries marked for assembly seats

ECP notifies delimitations after holding hearings into objections

ISLAMABAD : After marathon hearings into the objections against fresh delimitations, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Thursday notified final boundaries of the national and provincial assembly constituencies for the upcoming general elections.

Conducted in light of the 24th Amendment, new delimitations were the first such exercise after the 2002 elections. Through the amendment, parliament allowed the ECP to conduct delimitations on the basis of provisional results of last year’s population headcount.

Some political parties have reservations over the national population census preliminary results, though.



In the new delimitations, no change has been made in the total number of seats for the national and provisional assemblies.

However, the quota of the National Assembly seats for Punjab has been reduced from 148 to 141.

The seats deducted from Punjab have been allocated to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and ICT in proportion to the increase in their population.

The number of National Assembly constituencies for Sindh and Fata remained the same.

Other key aspect of new delimitations was making the population key criterion in marking boundaries of constituencies.

The ECP, on March 5, published the draft of delimitations for public scrutiny. It asked the general public to file objections, if they have any. By April 3, the top election supervisory body was deluged with 1,286 objections.

Of those, 689 objections came from Punjab, 284 from Sindh, 181 from K-P, 104 from Balochistan, 17 from Fata and 11 from ICT.

The ECP full bench, started marathon day-to-day hearings into the objections from April 4. On the conclusion of the hearings, the ECP has sent final copy of delimitations to Printing Corporation of Pakistan for official gazette notification and put the same on its official website.

The ECP claims it was the first-ever delimitation exercise carried out by using modern technology to minimise the chances of ‘gerrymandering’, a term used for making boundaries of the constituencies in a manipulated manner to benefit certain political groups.



However, some political parties, and election monitoring groups have been raising reservations against discrepancies in certain constituencies where there is a stark contrast in number of voters.

The ECP during the hearings accepted certain objections and made some changes in the boundaries where the petitioners would convince the bench.

Those not satisfied with the ECP decisions can still approach the Supreme Court.

Certain politicians including some from the ruling party had been critical of the way the delimitations were conducted.

National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq had constituted a committee headed by the deputy speaker to identify anomalies in the delimitation process.

The committee formed a sub-panel headed by the ruling party MNA Daniyal Aziz to make recommendations.

Aziz came up with a report, recommending scrapping fresh delimitations and holding polls with old delimitations. Its report is pending with the main committee headed by the deputy speaker.

With less than a month for the National Assembly to complete its term, it is unlikely that the sub-panel’s recommendations would get endorsement from parliament, especially from the opposition parties.

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