But will they be held on dates set by SC
The dates of the much-debated Local Bodies (LB) elections have at last been finalized, or handed down without the option. For some crooked reason the polls in Punjab were to be conducted on a non-party basis, but then the Lahore High Court made the provincial government’s best laid plans go awry by its verdict. On paper at least, the polls are to be held in Sindh on Nov 27 and in the Punjab and Balochistan on Dec 7, with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa the odd one out for obvious reasons. During the process, the current LB polls have managed to generate more heat so far than all the elections held in the times of our great dictators, the LB mode being the favourite shortcut of this hopefully now extinct species to achieve legitimacy. But while the inevitable announcement made by the ECP on Wednesday regarding these polls is welcome, in reality many obstacles still remain which can potentially create problems about the credibility and transparency of the exercise. The reason is the extremely short time frame and the number of institutions, or shall we say, cooks, who will have to toil and function like clockwork to come up with the satisfying finished broth.
The Supreme Court, considered a meddlesome busybody by some, has set the dates and hypothetically there can be no deviation from this line in the sand. The next directly in the line of fire is the ECP and the problems start from here onwards. The acting ECP head, the senior most sitting judge of the apex court, is likely to be elevated as the CJ next month. Also, the ECP had sufficient time, but it showed slackness in tying up early LB election dates with the respective provincial governments. Resultantly, delimitation and updating of LB laws was ignored. The major parties had agreed to hold these polls within 90 (there’s that figure again) days of their coming to power.
Now the ECP will have to go into panic mode to carry out its essential functions of getting the lumbering machine in top gear. Others who are in the picture include NADRA for providing voters’ lists, the Printing Corporation of Pakistan for printing 400 million ballot papers, the PCSIR for coming up with 2.2 million inkpads with the ‘damned spot’ time increased to nine hours from six at present, and finally the finance minister to release the funding. But we all know that we will lurch through in the end, provided there is no dramatic retrogression, internal or regional – including the Thursday’s last resort to the NA resolution in which all parties have decided to hang in together to seek delay to the polls.
