Pakistan: A despicable joke

What kind of a dirty joke is this? Why have the political establishment and the state election authority teamed up in playing this fun game on the nation so churlishly? When indeed will the electorate know for sure if at all the local government polls are on? Except for Balochistan, this it knows not as yet, although months have passed since the Supreme Court had ordered the holding of these elections that actually should have been held years ago but had been not. Disdainfully, while the governments of Punjab and Sindh are just keeping the electorate utterly confused with their ever-changing stances, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa's has not even still shown its first card, even as the province's ruling hierarchy is being led by a party that at the hustings had promised to be the first in giving the people their elected local bodies.

And no less is the election authority keeping the electorate befuddled with its own shifting positions, assuring one day that elections would go ahead on a given date but taking a reverse plunge the very next day that these would not. Until yesterday, voices from the authority's quarters were coming out that polls in Punjab and Sindh might have to be deferred to March or April. Even strong vibes were emanating from there that the polls in both the provinces might be postponed indefinitely. But now the authority says these would go ahead, as scheduled earlier, in January. What is all this? Why is so much of this dished-up uncertainty about these polls? Why is so much of dithering and foot-dragging on the official planes to carry out this task, which in any case is an obligatory constitutional requirement? Of course, it is not any hard to fathom the undeniably innate antipathy of the entrenched political class to the elected local government system. It does pose a potent threat to its ages-long hegemony on the nation's all politics and its stranglehold on the sinews of power. And that revealingly should explain why no civilian government has ever earned the distinction of holding elections to the local bodies.

Factually, it indeed is the military rulers who have had this distinction, though invariably earning the opprobrium from the political elite and the thinking class that they raise up elected local bodies to essentially lend spurious democratic façade to their dictatorial dispensations for acceptability of their forced rules nationally as well as internationally. Yes, no question about that. But when was it when we have been a democracy truly? Isn't it that after the praetorian adventurists walk out with their pack, walk in the oligarchs of the entrenched political class to foist their own civilian authoritarianism in place of the military dictatorship? Hasn't the so-styled democratic rule in the country always been a rule of the elite, by the elite and for the elite, and not a rule of the people, by the people and for the people, which in reality makes for a democracy? So how could one even imagine if this entrenched class would acquiesce into something that threatens its political domination, whereas a vibrant local government system unarguably makes up a formidable challenge to its hegemony? Just recall the local government system that Pervez Musharraf introduced. That system threw up nazims and other functionaries who caught the public fancy for their tremendous public services. A mayor of Karachi created waves at home and abroad with his monumental accomplishments and won a recognition that would be his own political clan's cherished envy.

The union councils, in the remoter countryside particularly, came up to be acclaimed widely for serving their electorates immensely gratifyingly. No exaggeration indeed, a silent civilian coup was in the making to eventually unseat the deeply-dug political class from its berth of eminence. Definitely, a new crop of leaders with roots in the masses and with hearts beating with the people was coming up. But then the entrenched political nobility hit back, at once vindictively and vengefully. Musharraf's own caboodle of the king's party set out to emasculate the system, a hatchet job that they did with a lot of success. The successors were a lot more destructive. With just one stroke, they flamboyantly threw the entire system into the dustbin, blaring that a dictator's work couldn't hold in a democratic order. And then for five long years they just forgot all about the local government system practically, confining themselves to prattling about it sporadically just perfunctorily and acting about it deceptively. And it is now for the apex court's decree that they are moving about, wobblingly, with no heart whatsoever in the enterprise. And in all probability they would go round the exercise ritualistically, but ensuring with the feats of gerrymandering and devious administrative devices to keep the local governments firmly under the entrenched political gentry's thumb, beyond the outsiders' reach. But the election authority has not necessarily to play ball with this overbearing nobility. Unflinchingly, it must stay firm to its resolve to get over the job of local government elections by February countrywide. And that, incidentally, includes KP's Provincially-Administered Tribal Areas (PATA), but not the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Will then someone in the Islamabad establishment or the election authority tell what cardinal sin have the FATA residents committed that they have still been found unfit for elected local governments and what have they to do to be deemed fit for it?