Reserved seats saga

In a continuation of this seemingly never-ending saga, now a three-member Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Mansoor Ali Shah has suspended the Peshawar High Court’s verdict on reserved seats denied to the Sunni Ittehad Council-PTI combine. In March, the PHC had dismissed the SIC’s petition against the Election Commission of Pakistan’s ruling pertaining to the reserved seats. During yesterday’s hearing, Justice Shah asked under which law the reserved seats that had not been granted to the SIC-PTI been given to other parties and maintained that the suspension of the verdict would only remain to the extent of additional seats. Barring the members, who have taken oath on the reserved seats, from casting their votes in legislation, the SC has said that it will hear the case on a daily basis from June 3. So, it seems the reserved seats saga will continue for some more time now after the SC’s decision yesterday. The government does not agree with this view for obvious reasons though most experts are agreed that this issue should be resolved once and for all.

There are two views at play here, depending which side of the political aisle one is standing on. One view is: how could the PTI go with a party [SIC] that had not even submitted a reserved seats list in the first place? This is the same reason PTI leaders had cited when going with the Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen (MWM): that it could create legal problems if no reserved seats list had been submitted by the party the PTI merged with. There are those who say that the PTI knew what problems it could have faced and yet it decided to go with a party that didn’t even contest the election let alone submit a reserved seats list. Could it be, ask some, that the PTI was so used to being favoured by the courts and other institutions alike that it thought it could get away with forming an alliance with a party like the SIC and still get reserved seats?

The other point of view sees the PHC decision as weak because it did not rule on the SIC giving its reserved seats list in time but instead created confusion on the issue of ‘parliamentary party’ and ‘political party’. Another thing legal experts point out is that reserved seats that would have fallen to one party cannot be distributed among other parties, because the Election Rules of 2017 explicitly mandate that reserved seats be allocated on the basis of proportionality per their total seats won in the national or provincial assemblies. The PTI-affiliated independent candidates announced they were joining the SIC on February 19 so as not to lose their share of the reserved seats in parliament. Now that the SC will continue hearing this case next month, it should make it clear what the law says exactly about a political party and if they give the reserved seats to PTI-SIC in the end, what does it say for the future of parties that do not submit their lists in time? Will the same law apply to all parties now regardless of their size – large or small, mainstream or regional? These things must be clarified by the top court.