File photo, courtesy National Assembly of Pakistan
Both the National Assembly and Senate standing committees on finance on Thursday rejected a money bill seeking parliamentary approval for the release of Rs. 21 billion to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) for the conduct of elections in Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, further denting the prospect of polls in the provinces.
The meetings were convened after Finance Minister Ishaq Dar tabled the Charged Sums for General Election (Provincial Assemblies of the Punjab and the KP) Bill 2023 seeking the release of additional funds in compliance with Supreme Court instructions. During the meetings, Minister of State for Finance Aisha Ghaus Pasha informed the lawmakers that the government had allocated Rs. 5 billion in the ongoing fiscal year’s budget for election expenditures.
“We do not have funds and we cannot increase the fiscal deficit beyond committed limits. We are in an IMF program,” she said to queries raised by the committee members. Qaiser Shaikh, presiding over the NA committee, questioned why the money bill had been brought before them, noting it had never happened before.
The NA committee chairman then ruled that if the government was maintaining it had no funds, then the lawmakers had no option but to reject the money bill.
During the Senate meeting, Pasha stressed that the country had a limited amount of funds presently, adding that authorities were struggling to avert a possible default. However, PTI Senator Mohsin Aziz said the government should not have brought such a bill and instead should have provided funds for elections. “The intentions of the government are obvious—it wanted to delay elections at any cost,” he alleged.
Subsequently, the finance minister informed the National Assembly that the bill had been rejected by the committees, with the House dismissing the Charged Sums for General Election (Provincial Assemblies of the Punjab and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) Bill 2023 with a majority vote.
The bill was tabled on Monday in both the Senate and National Assembly, with Dar and Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar both informing lawmakers about the repercussions of holding election in Punjab prior to the rest of the country. In his speech, Dar had said general elections at this stage were not in the “national interest,” adding that polls should be held nationwide simultaneously. The Supreme Court on Friday took up the matter on financing after the ECP formally informed it that the government had not released the required funds.
Also on Thursday, the House adopted a resolution against the judiciary over attempts to “usurp the authority of the Parliament to legislate and interfere in its constitutional jurisdiction.” Condemning the chief justice of Pakistan’s act of constituting an eight-member bench “in haste” to take up the Supreme Court (Practice and Procedure) Bill 2023 even before it had become law, the resolution moved by Agha Rafiullah of the PPP stressed that Parliament had absolute authority and powers to frame the Constitution and enact legislation. It declared that there would be “no compromise on the supremacy of Parliament in the light of the Constitution.”
The resolution also lamented the “non-inclusion of two senior judges from smaller provinces”—Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa—and demanded the dissolution of the bench and for the case to be taken up only after the bill had become law.
This was the third resolution adopted by Parliament that criticized the judiciary for taking up the issue of elections in Punjab and KP through a suo motu notice.