THERE are many examples of abject mismanagement and unexpected crises in the political history of this country. But few such episodes have been as thoroughly unnecessary and self-inflicted as the fiasco that was polling day for the Senate elections yesterday.

It is less the number of seats that became the subject of controversy — certainly, only a minority of the 48 seats contested on Thursday. It was the entire voting process that was tainted by the actions of a few.

As with every fiasco, there are culprits and this time it is the PML-N and, to a lesser extent, the PTI. Start with the PML-N. As the governing party, the PML-N is the chief custodian of the democratic project.

In addition to being in the electoral fray, it was the responsibility of the PML-N to keep the process itself as transparent, efficient and free from controversy as possible. In that regard, the PML-N has been a stunning failure — adding to its growing list of ineptitudes and difficult-to-understand mistakes.

In strictly procedural terms, ahead of the unruliness in Punjab and ugliness in KP, the failure to elect Fata senators is a wretched tale of an eleventh-hour intervention failing to address a problem that had been apparent from the very outset of this election process.

Presidential ordinances are an undesirable form of legislation to begin with, but can there even be a justification for a democratic government promulgating an ordinance in the middle of the night that changed the rules of an election to be held the following morning?

Whatever the problem that the ordinance sought to address — legitimate or not — surely the late-night change to the rules was always going to stoke controversy. If that were not enough of a scandal, there was a broader PML-N failure in three provinces: the inability to anticipate some thoroughly obvious problems and the unwillingness to offer pre-emptory solutions.

Nothing that happened in Balochistan, KP or Punjab was new or particularly challenging — but none of those problems could be dealt with without calm, organised and thoughtful political leadership.

Surely, in politically divided provinces such as Balochistan and KP and neglected houses such as the Punjab Assembly, MPAs were going to create trouble if left to their own, parochial devices.

Disastrous as the PML-N leadership was — a last-ditch effort to pass a constitutional amendment actually underlined the political and managerial failures of the government — the PTI in KP played its role in compounding the problems.

With a provincial leadership that appears to defy the central leadership more often than not and with PTI chief Imran Khan being his usual mercurial self, the PTI in KP appears to have become everything Mr Khan excoriates in status quo politics. Where are the principles, where is the discipline and where is the public interest in the PTI set-up in the province?

Published in Dawn, March 6th, 2015

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