Rana Sanaullah, the country’s interior minister, said on Saturday that the government would not be issuing a notification for the digital census and that the 2018 elections will be based on data collected in 2017.
When the CCI’s (Council for Shared Interests) term ends, that’s it. During a TV interview, he said that elections will be held using data from the last census and district boundaries if the new census was not announced by that date.
The administration has made the decision not to publicly announce the results of the most recent census. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) will be obligated to hold elections based on the previous census when the assemblies dissolve at the end of their tenure.
The minister of the interior said that the government would not announce the most recent census because of its “issues,” and that he had heard similar concerns from other parties.
A coalition partner of the central government, the MQM-P, he claimed, was worried about the upcoming digital census.
The minister was asked about MQM-P concerns on the 2017 census and claimed the party was also unsatisfied with the new digital census. As in, “They don’t [even] accept this new census.”
He mentioned that Balochistanis had similar complaints regarding the latest census.
Any hasty decision on the census, he warned, may create a “controversial situation” in the country, thus he urged caution.
