LG elections

Forced by the apex court to come clean on the issue and give a clear timeframe for local government (LG) elections the Election Commission of Pakistan has announced election dates. The local government elections will be held early next year. Balochistan has already held the local governments polls and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will hold them in May or June this year. Article 140A of the Constitution, as amended by the 18th Amendment, mandates that elections to the local governments shall be held by the Election Commission of Pakistan. And that these are going to be on a party basis - yet another reason that may have obliged the governments of the two bigger provinces not to take the risk of putting on line its electoral popularity a year and a half down the road. The court was concerned that the constitutional imperatives of holding local government polls were not being fulfilled for no valid reasons. If Balochistan government with all its forbidding constraints of terrain and precarious security situation could hold LG polls why not the other provinces. The apex court expects the bigwigs of the governments not to run afoul of their constitutional oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the constitution; Article 140A is as much its part as Article 6.
For nearly a decade, the provincial governments have failed to put in place the required legal framework and effective machinery to devolve powers to the grass-root level, denying people their basic rights of having governance at their doorsteps. The court refused to accept the argument that delimitation of constituencies in Karachi was such a big issue that the government should have put off LG polls for so long. In Punjab, for quite some time the government was reluctant to hold LG elections on a party basis. These problems should have been resolved by now, but that was not done. With almost nine months to go when the Election Commission is expected to announce election schedule there is ample time to legislate relevant local government laws and to sort out delimitation issues. Maybe even at the end of the day an ideal situation for fair, free and impartial LG elections remains elusive, but there is no reason why the constitutional imperative should not be complied with. This is an age of decentralisation of state powers. People want services at their doorsteps, and if that doesn't happen they want accountability, which only the third-tier of government comprising elected local bodies can provide. In Pakistan, according to a PILDAT survey, 71 percent of the population said holding local government elections is very important.