ISLAMABAD: Days after the Punjab government restored, albeit reluctantly, the local government apparatus to comply with a March Supreme Court order, the top court Wednesday ordered a probe to find out what took the province seven months to implement the verdict.
The government of Chief Minister Usman Buzdar had dissolved the local bodies — constituted under the Punjab Local Government Act, 2013 — in May 2019.
In March last, however, the Supreme Court declared the dissolution of the institutions as unconstitutional and ordered the government to restore them.
After delaying implementation of the court order on the pretext that it was waiting for the detailed judgement, the Punjab government later said it had filed a review petition after the detailed verdict was issued in July.
During the hearing on Wednesday, a counsel for the Punjab government presented the notification announcing the restoration of local government institutions to the bench headed by Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed.
“The province says it has restored the institutions when, in fact, it has not even drafted the notification correctly,” the chief justice observed.
The counsel for the petitioner contended the Punjab government had maintained in the Lahore High Court (LHC) that it cannot implement the top court’s order on restoring local government regime.
At this, the Supreme Court sought all the records of the proceedings in the high court of the matter, saying it will get to the bottom of the matter through an inquiry.
Justice Mazhar Alam Miankhel said the written response by the Punjab law secretary speaks of a summary sent to the chief minister on the restoration of LG institutions.
The chief justice said that whoever is responsible for the delay will be held accountable for it.
Adjourning the hearing, the court sought certified copies of the LHC ruling on the matter.
CASE HISTORY
The case came up for a hearing when on March 15, Justice Qazi Faez Isa, while hearing a case of local government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, ordered the court registrar to immediately solicit the order of the chief justice to have it fixed for hearing either before the bench headed by Justice Mushir Alam, which heard the matter earlier, or as directed by the chief justice.
Justice Isa then also noted that Section 3(2) of the PLGA, 2019 stipulated fresh local government elections within one year — the period which was later extended to 21 months by PLGA 2020.
Thus one year expired on May 3, 2020, and the extended 21 months on February 3, 2021, which suggested that the Act, whereby elected representatives of the people were sent home, was itself violated by not holding fresh elections, thus amounting to mala fide on the part of the government of Punjab, Justice Isa had held.
Justice Isa had also held that the present petition was very critical because it had disenfranchised the people as a result of which 56,000 elected representatives were sent home and were substituted by bureaucrats.
