• Chief statistician claims no difference in army, PBS data
• Senate body calls for re-survey of 1pc of census blocks

ISLAMABAD: Amid a chorus of objections from the provinces and opposition parties, Chief Statistician Asif Bajwa said on Tuesday that the final census report would not be compiled before April 2018.

But this was alarming for the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), which believes that such a delay in the release of final census data may render the next general elections illegal, since the Constitution mandates fresh delimitations after every census.

The ECP is worried that if the next elections are to be held in mid-2018, it will not have enough time to redefine constituencies, in line with the new election law, recently passed by the National Assembly.

In a briefing to the Senate Standing Committee on Privatisation and Statistics, Mr Bajwa said that even though 70 million people in the country did not possess CNICs, they had verified the CNICs of 20 per cent of the population through the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra).

Opposition parties, most notably the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Mutahidda Qaumi Movement (MQM), have been quite vocal with their concerns over the preliminary results of the national census, questioning the authenticity of the figures released by the statistics division.

Addressing one of the opposition’s main demands — that the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics should compare its data with the information collected by the army — Mr Bajwa said both institutions had similar records. The army was engaged in the census exercise to ensure that the process was transparent and acceptable to all, he added.

Explaining another major discrepancy in the census — the small margin of difference between the populations of Karachi and Lahore — the chief census commissioner said that the government had declared all of Lahore districts as urban, while there were still two districts in Karachi that were classified as rural.

However, this did not seem to placate opposition members, and lawmakers demanded a post-census survey of at least one per cent of the 168,943 blocks that were enumerated. The blocks to be surveyed would be chosen by the provincial governments, the Senate committee said.

Mr Bajwa also dismissed objections to the results in relation to the transgender community, saying that only those who identified themselves as ‘transgender’ were included in the category. “No one was counted as transgender based on their appearance,” he told the committee.

Overseas Pakistanis had not been included in the census either, he said.

Early results

In a letter to Law Secretary Karamat Hussain Niazi, seen by Dawn, ECP Secretary Babar Yaqoob Fateh Mohammad has asked that the government should publish the official results of census at the earliest, so the ECP could perform its constitutional obligation and carry out delimitation well in time for the next polls.

“May I invite your kind attention to the provisions of Article 51(5) of the Constitution, which provide that the seats in the National Assembly shall be allocated to each province, [Fata and Islamabad] on the basis of population in accordance with the last preceding census officially published,” the letter said.

According to the provisional results, the letter noted, tangible demographic changes have taken place in the federating units, which might necessitate the reallocation of seats in the National Assembly as well as provincial assemblies.

“In the event of such enhancement/reallocation of seats, ECP has to carry out delimitation in accordance with the provisions of Chapter-III of the Elections Act 2017 (as passed by the National Assembly on August 22, 2017). Needless to mention that section 17(2) [of the same law] requires the commission to delimit constituencies after every census officially published,” the letter warns.

The ECP secretary points out that given the volume of work involved and the time needed to complete different stages of the delimitation exercise, it would not be possible to do so if the official publication of census results is delayed.

A senior ECP official told Dawn that if the Statistics Division released the official results in April 2018, the next general elections would, in all probability, take place somewhere around the end of July the same year.

The new election law, he said, required the ECP to complete the delimitation exercise four months ahead of the next general elections.

If this was not done in time, it would “put a question mark on the legality of the whole electoral process”, which was not something the ECP could be blamed for.

However, the official admitted that amending the law to provide for the reallocation of seats and delimitation on the basis of provisional results could be a viable option in the given circumstances.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2017