By: Dr. Emanuel Adil Ghouri
On October 13, the Punjab government passed the Punjab Local Government Act 2025 by a majority vote, disregarding both the objections of opposition lawmakers and the concerns of religious minorities. Once again, the voices of 2.6 million Christians in Punjab have been ignored in the name of majority rule.
Under this newly approved law, Christians will no longer have the right to elect their own representatives in local government elections. Instead, their representatives in each Union Council will be nominated by the nine Muslim members who are directly elected. This means that the Christian representative of every Union Council will be chosen—not by Christian voters—but by Muslim councillors.
In practice, this system will create 7,602 Christian “representatives” across Punjab who are not accountable to their own community but to the individuals who appointed them. These nominated members will be expected to serve as loyal supporters of the ruling majority rather than as genuine voices of their people.
This is not the first time that a Local Government Act has denied minorities their basic democratic rights. The laws enacted in 2013, 2021, and 2022 all contained similar provisions. Whenever such legislation has been drafted, minority representatives have been excluded from the committees responsible for preparing them. They have also failed to use their influence in the Assembly or within their political parties to advocate for minority voting rights.
Sadly, the very legislators who occupy reserved minority seats in the provincial assembly have repeatedly supported these discriminatory laws. Their loyalty appears to lie with their political parties rather than with the people whose rights they are meant to represent.
It is worth remembering that the Punjab Local Government Act 2019 did include a positive provision: it allowed minority voters to vote both for general seats and for their reserved seats. That right was quietly removed in the Acts of 2021, 2022, and now 2025.
A few months before the passage of this year’s bill, some Christian MPAs delivered fiery speeches in the Punjab Assembly, demanding that minorities be granted the right to elect their own representatives in all tiers of government. At that time, I cautioned that such rhetoric might gain attention on social media but would not bring real change. Time has proven that when the opportunity came, those same MPAs voted in favor of the bill they once criticized.
The Local Government Amendment Act 2025 is essentially a continuation of the 2022 Act, with seven new amendments tailored to the government’s convenience. It is thought-provoking that seven amendments could be added under the pretext of administrative necessity, an eighth amendment—one that respected the democratic aspirations of 2.6 million Christians—was considered unnecessary.
This failure to include a basic provision for minority voting rights reflects a deep-seated disregard for equality and representation. Once again, the selected representatives of the Christian community have failed to defend the interests of their own people.
Unless minorities are given the power to choose their own representatives, democracy in Pakistan will remain incomplete—a system that preaches equality in words but practices exclusion in governance.