This is apropos a letter to the Editor ‘Alvi snubbed by ECP’ carried by the newspaper in its yesterday’s issue. That President Arif Alvi is under immense pressure of his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is a fact.
For example, only a day before after his meeting with Imran Khan the PTI’s political partner Sheikh Rashid had warned him to either give the date for election or resign. Obviously, the president is under pressure, and that earns him the opposition’s comment that he has reduced himself into a spokesman for party chief Imran Khan.
Had the President taken a deeper look into the Constitution he could have staved off this dilemma. While he is fully entitled to give date of election for the National Assembly fixing date for provincial elections is beyond his power or privilege.
Under Article 105, the governor shall appoint a date for general elections to the assembly and appoint a caretaker cabinet. Once the date for elections is announced the ball would then be in the ECP’s (Election Commission of Pakistan’s) court to organise and conduct elections under Article 218(3).
The dates for provincial elections are now an issue before the court for interpretation of the constitutional take on the timing of elections. Apparently, President Alvi hasn’t learnt much from this imbroglio — justifying his action, he said he had called the chief election commissioner for consultations on provincial elections “because excuses were being made instead of announcements of the dates”.
In reality, however, he has nothing to do with provincial elections, and more importantly he should ignore threats like the one Sheikh Rashid had made.
Raja Ghazanfar (Islamabad)
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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