GIVEN how much noise was made about conducting the census and the acrimony that followed its results, it is strange to witness the near-complete silence with which the decision to cancel the validation exercise has been received. Two political parties expressed their anger over the results. The MQM claimed that “half of Karachi’s population has not been counted”, rejected the results, and tried to move the Sindh Assembly in a resolution against them. The PPP initially rejected the results as well, only agreeing to withdraw its reservations against a commitment to conduct a larger-than-normal validation exercise. Even when the census had gotten under way, the PPP took the matter to the Sindh High Court, asking for more transparency in the exercise. By August, it had teamed up with the MQM to air strong reservations. PPP leader Khurshid Shah demanded tallying the counts gathered by the army with those of the Statistics Division as the provisional results were announced. Later, the Sindh chief minister joined in as well, and in a long and tumultuous session of the provincial assembly, several ‘anomalies’ were pointed out in the provisional results. The federal government tried to engage with these parties, but by December, the PPP was threatening street protests if the census data were not corrected before the delimitation of the constituencies took place.

It was in mid-December that an agreement was reached to validate the results through a second round of data gathering in 5pc of the census blocks. Just as that process was set to move forward, the PPP again intervened and claimed that the ‘third party’ that is supposed to conduct the validation was the Senate. With that demand, the process stopped altogether. The delimitation of electoral constituencies has been carried out based on the provisional census data, and since most of the important constituencies of those holding high party office have not been impacted in a way that undermines their prospects, there is silence on the issue now.

It is evident that there will be no third-party validation of the census results, which is a big mistake because the reservations raised were considerable, and it will leave a big question mark over the results for all times. It is also clear that the parties airing their grievances, especially the PPP, were disingenuous in invoking the enormous policy implications of the census to push their point. All through the process we were told how the results would impact resource sharing, and how Sindh would fight for its fair share. Now, with the validation exercise no longer in the works, the sheer lack of interest on the part of all parties to the dispute shows clearly that they were in it for only one thing: the preservation of their constituencies. All else, it seems, was hot air.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2018