Local govt elections: Sanaullah predicts delay, Tehreek-i-Insaf says no way

‘The process of amending the Punjab Local Govt Act could take up to five months’.

LAHORE:

Law Minister Rana Sanaullah on Wednesday announced that amendments to the Punjab Local Government Act 2013 could take up to five months while the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf demanded local elections be held on time.

On Wednesday, the Lahore High Court had struck down Sections 8 and 9 of the PLGA ruling that the delimitation of wards and union councils in the Punjab should be conducted by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), not the government.

Sanaullah said the government was duty-bound to uphold the Lahore High Court’s ruling in letter and spirit. He said the government would not challenge the LHC’s decision in the Supreme Court as the matter lay in the ECP’s purview. The ECP was responsible for the conduct of local government elections not the government, said Sanaullah. The Supreme Court had earlier directed the ECP to conduct the local government elections on January 30, “the LHC’s ruling has now made that impossible”, he said.

The government will move desired amendments to the Punjab Local Government Act 2013, said Sanaullah. The bill incorporating the amendments will first be moved in the Provincial Assembly, then forwarded to a select standing committee and then presented in the House for debate and passage. “The process takes four to five months,” said Sanaullah.



The ECP will start delimitations after the amendments are passed and that could take six to eight months, he said. He mentioned that the National Assembly had recently passed a resolution stating that the local government elections be held after a fresh census. He said that could take two to three years.

Sanaullah said the government had made hectic efforts to help the ECP hold local government elections on January 30. “The LHC’s ruling means all our efforts have been in vain,” he said.

Holding the elections on January 30 would not be possible but the government will implement the LHC’s ruling. It was now up to the ECP to challenge the ruling in the Supreme Court if it thought fit, he said.

PTI Punjab president Ejaz Chaudhry, addressing a press conference, said the local government elections must be held on time even if it meant using the previous delimitations. “The PTI is willing to accept that rather than a delay in elections that should have been held five and a half years ago,” he said.

Chaudhry said the local government elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were going to introduce biometric identification of votes. The practice should be followed in the Punjab too so that the “rigging mafia is exposed”, he said.

Chaudhry also told the government not to make district coordination officers returning officers. The electoral process should be supervised by the judiciary, he said.

He said the government was only trying to buy time because it knew that it could never win the local government elections. The PTI, he said, would go to great lengths to make sure the local body elections were held on time.

If former president Pervaiz Musharaf was taken to court for violating Article 6 of the Constitution, why wasn’t the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government in the Punjab been taken to task for carrying out delimitations in contravention of the Constitution, he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 2^nd, 2014.