Daily Times

“This is a deliberate attempt to defy court orders,” thundered Chief Justice of Pakistan Gulzar Ahmad as he brought Chief Secretary Punjab Kamran Ali Afzal and Local Government and Community Development Secretary Noorul Amin Mengal up to speed on just what would happen to them if the Supreme Court’s order of 25 March 2021 to revive local government institutions in the province was delayed any further. The CS was given a week to furnish a thorough reply, right after he was told by the bench that he was “playing with fire”, so PTI’s plans to get the bureaucratic machinery to delay restoration of local governments long enough for their term to expire on December 31, 2021, seem to have hit a brick wall in the SC.

Everybody knows that the CS’s reply will speak of committees that have been set up for a smooth transition, etc. But everybody also knows that such transfer of powers requires no such committees, just the willingness to do so, and also that it was the fact that Punjab’s local bodies comprised majority PML-N members that made the PTI government pull the plug on them. Even if the CS is now able to wriggle his way out of contempt of court proceedings, the Punjab government will still have to compensate local bodies for the time they had to spend in limbo just because of PTI’s whims. And you can be sure that it will do whatever the court decides rather quickly; considering this close shave.

It could be pointed out that it is very sad that something like this is happening when Imran Khan’s party rules the country and Punjab since he made such a big deal about the relevance and centrality of local governments all the many years he was in the opposition. But he has gone back on so many of his promises that such things don’t even raise too many eyebrows anymore. History, therefore, will remember PTI’s rule in Punjab as a time when the provincial government did what it could to frustrate the devolution of power to the grassroots. *