All eyes will be on the Election Commission of Pakistan, which must make sure that the next elections are held fairly and on time now that the nation is in election mode.
Due to the former PDM government’s last-minute notification of new census findings, which called for a new delineation of constituencies, the watchdog will be walking a fine line.
The general consensus is that the ECP won’t be able to finish the delimitation within the Constitutionally required window of time for elections. The space for potential legal manoeuvring has also been constrained by recent developments.
Recall that earlier this month, a three-judge panel of the Supreme Court criticised the ECP’s decision to postpone elections for the Punjab and KP assemblies as “unconstitutional” in a thorough ruling. The ECP had received a harsh reprimand in the aforementioned verdict for “failing to appreciate its constitutional authority” about its failure to hold elections on schedule.
A legislation allowing the ECP to request a review of that ruling was likewise overturned by the court a week later. A two-member bench of the court considered a 2018 petition on the subject, and it issued a ruling on the delineation of constituencies yesterday. The chief judge, who was on the bench, noted that the ECP must undertake the exercise in a transparent manner.
The ECP must deal with the difficulties of the task at hand while the legal noose closes around its neck. The delimitation effort would certainly wind up having an impact on dozens of districts at the provincial level, according to an analysis published in these pages.
The ECP may need to rearrange current seats among various districts within provinces since there is no National Assembly to simply increase the number of representatives in the provincial assemblies to reflect changes in the population. In order for portions of one district to share a constituency with portions of another, it might also be necessary to construct new constituencies.
Both of these have the potential to spark political unrest and several new legal disputes, endangering the timely completion of the A political commotion and numerous additional legal challenges could result from either of these, endangering the timely conclusion of the entire operation. The ECP must therefore embark on the difficult task of creating new constituencies amidst all of this.
Gerrymandering, which is the alteration of constituency boundaries to change their political makeup and so “control” election results, will continue to be a major issue, particularly given the prevalence of other pre-election engineering techniques.
Therefore, the ECP must involve all parties and guarantee complete openness in all aspects of its operations. It cannot allow outside circumstances to postpone the election process while the law is on its tail.
