In Sindh party-cum-parochial needs override national interest
The way the mainstream parties are behaving indicates that Elections 2018 might be delayed. The PML-N would have been pressurized to hold the census much earlier by provinces ruled by other parties if Nawaz Sharif had been holding the CCI meetings regularly. The PML-N also did not care to get the census results confirmed from the CCI after the exercise was held at the eleventh hour. The Election Commission has told the government that elections would be delayed in case the National Assembly failed to pass the Delimitation of Constituencies Bill which is a constitutional requirement for holding the elections after a new census. According to the rules, the Bill can only be adopted with the support of a total of 228 votes in the house which the ruling coalition is unable to muster on its own.
What stops the PPP, MQM and PTI from voting for the bill are shortsighted party interests. The census reduces the representation from Punjab by as many as nine seats on account of relatively smaller increase in population compared to other provinces. This is understandable in view of greater acceptability of family planning measures in the province combined with larger out-migration. The relative population growth in Sindh has only shown marginal increase which is acceptable neither to PPP nor the MQM. As Khuhro put it, the figure of Sindh’s population had been reduced under a plan so that the portion of financial awards did not have to be increased. Farooq Sattar has rejected the census results claiming these had been “rigged”. He alleged that the population figure for Karachi had been marked down as “it cannot be less than 30 million.
Khursheed Shah is willing to accept holding the elections on the basis of the previous population census which would be unfair as it would give Punjab a greater weightage, which would be later used to condemn the province for enjoying more parliamentary representation than its share.
Highly interesting is the stand taken by the PTI. Despite having supported the bill in principle, the party’s information secretary maintains that the PTI would not vote for it at the cost of the opposition’s unity, something which ordinarily least matters to PTI.
