Apropos your editorial ‘Karachi operation’ (April 19), you rightly give the operation an overall positive review and make excellent suggestions for expanding its scope.

However, the editorial embodies a point with which I disagree. You state: “The operation is now at a very sensitive point, where the will of the political parties must be harnessed to reform the tools and system of governance in a way that chokes off the spaces where rackets have developed.”

In democracy, it is the will of the people that is and should be supreme, not the will of the political parties.

There are times when political parties become tools and properties of arrogant, egoistic and corrupt politicians, out of touch with the will of the people. This is exactly the cause of law and order nightmares that the people of Karachi have been facing and that the operation is trying to quash.

Now that the operation is ‘approaching an important turning point’, one can imagine the negative consequences if its managers start taking the ‘will of the political parties’ into consideration.

Political parties, not enforcers of the law, should take lead in lawmaking. It is the job of political parties to ‘reform the tools and system of governance’, not that of law enforcers. This must be an apolitical and non-partisan process. This is the distinction that a democracy must make.

Siddique Malik

Louisville, Kentucky, US

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2015

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