KARACHI, Sept 1: After meeting scores of times and wasting hundreds of precious hours of its members, the core committee of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Pakistan People’s Party has failed to reach an agreement on what local government system Sindh should have, it emerged on Saturday.

The core committee is composed of the PPP’s Pir Mazhar-ul-Haq, Agha Siraj Durrani, Syed Murad Ali Shah, Ayaz Soomro and Rafique Engineer, and the MQM’s Dr Farooq Sattar, Syed Sardar Ahmed, Dr Sagheer Ahmed, Wasay Jalil and Kanwar Naveed Jamil.

The crux of the problem between the PPP and MQM, close allies both in the central and provincial governments, is that the former favours the 1979 local bodies system introduced by the Gen Zia regime while the latter insists on the Musharraf-era district government system.

The MQM wants transfer of such departments as the police, revenue, education and health to the local governments. It argues that local government is the third tier of a government and until powers are devolved at the grassroots level, the government cannot deliver the goods to the people.

The PPP point of view, according to insiders, is that if the departments are transferred to the local government, the provincial government will be left with little.

When a senior member of the MQM side of the core committee, Syed Sardar Ahmed, was asked if negotiations had stalemated, he did not deny it. He said that during the meetings the core committee had failed to sort out differences on many basic issues.

“Until the basic issues are resolved, the question of any progress on the new local government bill does not arise,” he said.

Mr Ahmad said he knew nothing about any scheduled meeting when his attention was drawn towards a statement of local government minister Agha Siraj Durrani that a meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari was also planned to apprise him of the situation.

Mr Durrani could not be reached by the phone to find out if any such meeting was scheduled in the near future or the LG elections were being put on the back burner.

On Friday, health minister Dr Ahmed of the MQM told newsmen in Hyderabad that core committee meetings had been discontinued because of a lack of consensus over the new LG law and MQM leader Dr Farooq Sattar had sought the intervention of President Zardari over the issue.

Be that as it may, later in the evening, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah chaired a meeting of the core committee here at the CM House. An APP news report said that the leaders of both parties held a detailed discussion on various matters pertaining to the proposed local government system and agreed on most aspects of the proposed Sindh Local Government Act, 2012.

Earlier federal minister Syed Khurshid Shah had said: “LG polls cannot be held before a general election as holding two elections is not financially viable.”

Prior to the federal minister’s remarks, in response to the deadline given by the Sindh High Court to hold LG polls in October or November, chief secretary Raja Mohammad Abbas had submitted in court that the government was unable to hold elections within 90 days as ordered by the high court because the National Database Registration Authority’s voters lists were flawed and needed to be rectified and also because of the bad law and order situation.

Even if the statement made by Federal Minister Syed Khurshid Shah and the plea taken by the Sindh chief secretary in the high court were taken as diplomacy, now open talks by major stakeholders on the formation of a caretaker set-up for holding fair elections in the country after remaining engaged for a few months in back channel negotiations showed that a general election is around the corner.

It clearly shows that LG polls cannot be held during the tenure of the present PPP-led coalition government which will end in March next year.

Federal Information Minister Kaira on the occasion of appearing of Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf in the Supreme Court had said that “there is no harm in discussing early elections if the opposition insists on it”.

If his statement is taken at its face value coupled with that of leader of the opposition in the National Assembly Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan about short-listing of names for caretaker prime minister, it may be concluded that local bodies elections will be held by a new government.