EDITORIAL: The Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP’s) refusal to allocate its fair share of reserved seats in the assemblies to the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) — which the PTI had adopted after it was denied its right to an electoral symbol in the February 8 general elections — comes as no surprise.
It is of apiece with several earlier moves to diminish the party. Using a mere technicality the electoral watchdog has justified its patently ‘defective’ decision for “having non-curable legal defects and violation of mandatory provision of submission of the party list for reserved seats.” It is a serious setback not only for the PTI but also the very spirit of democracy.
The ECP has justified its flawed verdict on a mere technicality, saying that although the SIC is a registered party, it did not participate in the election, hence, unable to submit its list for reserved seats at the time of electoral exercise, it had no standing to claim them now.
In so proclaiming it chose to ignore the 2019 precedent set in the case of the Balochistan Awami Party, which did not participate in elections and yet was allocated a reserved seat in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) assembly after the first post-merger elections in the erstwhile Fata.
Going all the way to deprive the SIC of its rights, the ECP has also decided to distribute the vacant seats among other parties in the national and provincial assemblies. Its potential beneficiaries, the two major parties, the PML-N and PPP, in utter disregard of the ethical principle involved, have already been demanding the same.
Creditably for him, however, in a dissenting note the ECP member from Punjab, Babar Hassan Bharwana, has said this cannot be done since Articles 51 (6-d) and 106 (3-c) of the Constitution clearly state that the reserved seats shall be allocated to political parties on the basis of their total number of general seats in the national and provincial assemblies. Further complicating the situation is KP assembly where the PTI-backed SIC has 92 general seats out of the total 115 while the PML-N has secured eight seats, JUI-F seven, and the PPP four.
Under the ECP’s scheme of things out of the 26 reserved seats for women and minorities, all three of them together can get just five, the rest of 21 seats will remain unrepresented. No surprise there if the case has landed in the Peshawar High Court (PHC).
Considering the constitutional position on the issue, the SIC is not so wrong in contending that the new assemblies are incomplete, also questioning the validity of the upcoming election for president and the 11 Senate seats that have fallen vacant.
Unwilling to accept what it has termed a stab in the heart of democracy, the PTI has approached the court. The Islamabad High Court has also been hearing a number of cases arising out of the ongoing political wrangling. Whilst the Supreme Court and the PHC are to settle the issue at hand in the light of facts and the law, they should also censure all concerned, advising them to resolve political issues in political forums rather than wasting the courts’ time and energy.
This is all the more important at a time they are struggling to clear a huge backlog of pendency.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
Comments
Comments are closed.