LG circus.

In Sindh, the local government election has verily become a big circus. The partisans have turned it into a huge farce in every manner. Of course, the ruling PPP in the province must take the blame. But other political players in the field too have no clean skirts to show. Variously, they also have had a hand in creating this ludicrous situation. To start with, the PPP was not the least interested in local government elections, as indeed were none of the political entities swaggering on the national political landscape, flaunting so deceptively and misleadingly their love for democracy.

After the 2008 election, it stayed enthroned in Sindh for five long years. Yet it never ever hinted even obliquely if elected local governments were in its plans at all. Not that the other hierarchs running the provincial governments were dying for giving the masses their elected governments at the grassroots. None was. The PML (N) nobility in Punjab, the ANP-led corrupt ruling flock in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the rapacious PPP-headed kleptocrats in Balochistan, they all had demonstrated conclusively that democracy was merely a mask they wore on their visages that were flooded underneath with fakery, hypocrisy and deceit. None ever broached the issue of local governments, leave alone holding elections to them.

To all intent and purposes, it was a taboo they would not even talk about. It was the apex court's ruling that pulled them all out of this calculated self-induced torpor. But when the court's order came, the others after making some diversionary acrobatics willy-nilly fell in line. Not the Sindh PPP ruling clan. It continued playing ducks and drakes with the issue of local bodies all through its power stint after the 2008 election. And it continues with this slyness post-2013 poll as well.

When the court's ruling came, the clan was in saddle in Sindh in coalition with the MQM. After some procrastination, it responded to the court's order with an enactment for local governments that clearly smacked of a shady power-sharing deal between the two at the grassroots level.

So blatantly conspiratorially skewed to their interests was this law that it sparked a groundswell of public outrage in the interior of the province. The people were aghast that the clan could play such a dangerous trick just to please a coalition ally, which could banefully enormously widen the urban-rural gulf in the province.

But the clan was least pushed. It hung on to the odious enactment, turning a deaf ear to the public outcry. But not even an eyebrow it blinked in taking an instant somersault on the derided enactment the moment it fell out with MQM and both took to separate ways. At once, it annulled the enactment and brought back a self-perpetuating garbled version of an earlier local government law, now a bone of contention between the clan and its opponents.

Had indeed the clan been sincere and honest, it would have taken all the political forces in the province on board in the first go and hammered out a consensus law for local governments. But it was not. It was then just for pleasing the MQM at any cost and keeping this habitual blackmailer in good humour for sustaining its government at the centre. After parting ways with the MQM, it went for a law that would keep maximally the local governments within its own domain. With its majority in the provincial assembly, it has now steamrollered this bad law through the house atrociously.

None the less is the opposition to blame. Not only for the walkout it staged from the house while the enactment was up for approval. It should have stayed back and penned down the clan for the deceit it was planning to play on the electorate in the deceptive garb of elected local governments. It should have insisted on making its say on the issue. A refusal by the clan-allied presiding officer would have won it high moral ground and the people's good graces. But for its zeal for the circus show of walkout, it just frittered away that opportunity.

In any case, with their overriding penchant for playing to the gallery and win some brownie points by raising noisily populist slogans, the clan's opponents have failed to impress the electorate any measurably. The people are just at a loss to make out what exactly they are opposed against in the enactment. They have voiced no arguments, no grounds or no reasons rationally, cogently, unambiguously and elaborately for the people to know. The street is hence the least amused.

And if the mass of the people is deeply incensed at the PPP clan's machinations to keep the local governments in its pocket, they are not any oblivious of its opponents' trickeries. They know that neither is any enamoured of any truly elected local governments. And both want not election but selection to go into these governments' formation. The opponents too would want an enactment that stands them in good stead politically as well as in perpetuating power ambitions.

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Publication:	Frontier Post (Peshawar, Pakistan)
Date:	Dec 22, 2013
Words:	839
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Topics:	Local government