Uncertainties about LG polls
Despite orders by the Supreme Court to hold the Local government polls by mid-September, nobody knows when these are likely to take place. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) finds itself helpless as the provinces have yet to pass the legal framework determining the nature, powers and functions of the local governments. A meeting of the ECP held on Monday agreed that it would require at least 90 days for holding the polls after the required bills have been passed by the assemblies. The Chief Minister Sindh Qaim Ali Shah has said his province needs at least six months to hold the elections. Leader of the opposition in National Assembly Syed Khursheed Shah says, Sindh would be ready to hold the exercise by December.
While military rulers have shown keenness to hold local government polls, the elected administrations have generally been reluctant to allow the grassroots bodies to function despite the fact that they matter a lot to the common man. There are many who think that the absence of these bodies is causing serious problems. Had the local government been in place, they would have helped in fighting terrorism and dealing with emergencies like rains and floods and their after-effects. The military rulers who replaced political governments needed alternate grassroots support base. They used the local government to raise nurseries of new politicians loyal to them. The political parties on the other hand treated local government leaders as their potential rivals. The legislators who mostly depended on influence pedaling considered the development funds and government jobs as their exclusive privilege. They resented devolution of power to the elected bodies at the grassroots. Thus the first preference of every political government was to delay the LG elections as long as it could. Whenever forced to hold the elections, its preference always were powerless LG bodies.
The PPP and the PML-N had bound themselves in the Charter of Democracy to hold local government elections within three months of the general elections. What is more, the CoD required these elections to be party based. After 2008, both the PPP and PML-N failed to hold the exercise on one excuse or another. Even now the issue of the polls being party based remains controversial. One of the reasons behind double mindedness is a fear that party based polls might lead to divisions within the political parties or cause them embarrassment in case of the opposition getting scoring better. One had expected that the federal government would take up in the CCI the issue of the legal framework of the local bodies and the election dates to create a consensus. By failing to do this the federal government has itself surrendered what constituted its turf to the Supreme Court.