After months of deadlock, a bipartisan parliamentary committee for appointments in the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Tuesday picked Sikandar Sultan Raja to become the new chief election commissioner.
Raja’s nomination has been approved by President Arif Alvi and he will take oath once the parliamentary committee issues the relevant notification.
The post of CEC has remained vacant since December 6, 2019, when Justice (retd) Sardar Muhammad Raza retired. Two ECP members, Abdul Ghaffar Soomro of Sindh and Justice (retd) Shakeel Baloch of Balochistan also retired at the end of their terms.
Raja emerged as an agreeable candidate for the post of CEC, while sources added that Nasir Durrani and Shah Mehmood Jatoi, will be ECP members from Sindh and Balochistan respectively after a meeting of the committee.
The Constitution mandates that when ECP positions fall vacant, they must be filled within 45 days by the government in consultation with the opposition, but the talks between the two sides remained deadlocked as they rejected each other’s nomination
Around a dozen meetings of the bipartisan panel have taken place but all remained fruitless.
Apparently, Monday’s meeting also ended without any result, but the sources said that the members had agreed to the new names and the formal announcement would be made on Tuesday (today).
Raja was nominated for the CEC post by Prime Minister Imran Khan, who withdrew his previous three names to break the impasse in the committee. Three more names on the table were from Opposition Leader in National Assembly Shehbaz Sharif.
Imran floated the names of retired bureaucrats, Jameel Ahmed, Fazal Abbas Maken and Sikandar Sultan Raja, in an effort to reach elusive consensus with the opposition. The opposition had refused to support his three earlier nominations — Babar Yaqoob Fateh, Arif Khan and Fazal Abbas Maken.
The opposition was pushing for its nominees for the CEC post, Nasir Mahmood Khosa, Jalil Abbas Jilani, and Akhlaq Ahmad Tarar – none of whom could win government’s endorsement. The PPP had proposed the name of former attorney general Irfan Qadir.
On August 22, President Arif Alvi appointed Khalid Mehmood Siddiqui as ECP member for Sindh and Munir Ahmed Kakar for Balochistan against the positions vacated by Soomro and Baloch, from the two provinces.
However, both of them were denied the oath. In November, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) suspended the notification of their appointment on a petition from PML-N MNAs Murtaza Javed Abbasi and Dr Nisar Cheema. Last week the court gave 10 days’ time to the government to finalise the appointments.
Last week, a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, chaired by Senator Pervaiz Rashid, was told that the government and the opposition had reached a consensus on the ECP appointments. Senator Dr Sikandar Mandhro, who is also a member of the parliamentary committee, said that the deadlock on the ECP appointments issue had been broken.
