GILGIT-BALTISTAN (GB) is going to the polls next year. The announcement by the GB chief election commissioner was not only about general elections, it also notified the holding of the much-awaited local bodies elections. The region, with its unique civic challenges and marred by development issues, has been governed without local bodies for two decades.

This has put enormous strain on successive elected governments as people — desperate for their daily civic needs such as electricity, water, sanitation, road repairs etc — look towards their elected representatives in the GB Assembly.

As the region is governed primarily through the federal government, GB’s reliance upon the centre and the budget granted to it has increased over time. Although GB has a legislative assembly of its own, the key decisions rest with the centre and its powerful bureaucracy.

This reliance is one of the reasons why the candidates and the voters in some cases look towards the ruling party in the centre before elections. This results in political defections in GB which have become a norm and are neither considered unethical nor immoral. While the defections generally occur before elections (as is currently happening) the outgoing government faced them within three years of coming into power. As the wind changed in the centre due to the no-confidence vote, the fate of the then-ruling PTI in GB was also sealed.

The then-GB CM and PTI’s regional president Khalid Khursheed Khan was disqualified by the GB Chief Court on the basis of........

© Dawn