KARACHI, July 31: The Secretary General of the Pakistan Peoples Party – Sindh, Nafees Siddiqui, has expressed his concern over the transparency of the local bodies’ elections as reports suggested that results had already been fixed to the level of union councils much before the polling day.

In a statement issued on Sunday, Mr Siddiqui said the PPP’s supporters were victims of state intimidation and repression about which the media has been warned not to report.

Subjecting party workers to such large-scale victimization during the elections has created doubts about General Musharraf’s so-called crackdown against extremists, he said.

The liberal political workers were a major prey of the state machinery’s onslaught against civil society, said Siddiqui, adding that the brute joke of “Enlightened Moderation” at the hands of people picked up by proponents of the new phrase in Sindh and Punjab was worth making a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Thus enlightened moderation had ended up as the headline of a joke played with the people of Pakistan in the same way as the ‘Pakistan First’ and ‘Vision of Quaid-i-Azam’, adding that the ‘Pakistan First’ slogan had turned out to be a ‘Musharraf First’ slogan and the latter had become ‘bye bye Quaid-i-Azam’, he said.

Mr Siddiqui said the PPP had fought with three dictatorships and its valiant workers had offered great sacrifices for the party’s struggle for restoration of democracy.

He said despite being subjected to the worst kind of victimization, the PPP remained the country’s largest and a well-organized liberal party.

In the 2001 local bodies’ elections and in the 2002 General Elections, the PPP bagged the largest number of votes as was evident from election records, but its majority was dented through the carrot-and-stick policy of the military government.