Provincial governments should announce schedule for polls soon
When the critics of the Supreme Court (SC) ask why it interferes in the matters of the executive, it can legitimately point to the delay in the local body elections by the provincial governments as an indication of how the executive refuses to function without the stick of the SC. Five years have passed after the 18th amendment mandated provincial governments with holding local body elections but provincial governments are nowhere near announcing the election schedule – let alone holding the elections. The stand-offs in Sindh and Punjab are well known while even the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI)-led Khyber Pakthunkhwa (KP), with the party elected on the rhetoric of devolving power, has not moved a single step towards implementing a functional local bodies system.
While the cantonment boards have been given a September 15 schedule, the SC in the last hearing of the case told the provincial governments to give a fixed and final date for the purpose. Similar notices were issued to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) while one of the judges asked “whether the government would give a date for holding these elections or the court should issue a date instead.” The SC appears to prefer that the local bodies elections are held together with the cantonment board elections but this appears unlikely. The current set of political parties fear that the power their MPAs and MNAs possess under the existing system shall be lost. This is why the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)-led Punjab government proposed to hold non-party local bodies polls and the Sindhi nationalists came into conflict with the provincial government when they attempted to pass a local bodies ordinance.
Nonetheless, regardless of the preferences of the politicians, the Supreme Court is going to keep pressuring the government to hold local government election. The pressure also exists on the ground from former union council nazims and people who want governance to be accessible to them. Political parties have also been weary of the affiliation of local bodies with military governments with both Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf having used it to their advantage but it is high time elected government use local bodies to their advantage. There is no necessary conflict between LBs and the assemblies and the apparent conflict is merely created by lawmakers reluctant to focus on law-making and leaving local level governance issues to local bodies. For now, the four provincial governments still have the opportunity to hold polls without the Supreme Court resolving the issue, but if the impasse continues the SC will encroach upon their turf – and then politicians will continue to complain against their own inaction.