A most violent election A Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) unit office near the party’s headquarters Nine Zero was hit by two blasts in sequence, killing three people and injuring 35, including children. The two bombs exploded within 20 minutes of each other, a tactic the terrorists have been resorting to for some time. According to the government’s bomb experts, the second bomb was deliberately exploded with some delay to target rescuers and the public that usually rush to the site of explosions. Both bombs were reportedly detonated by remote control. The attack, the ninth in a series of attacks against electioneering mainly by the MQM and Awami National Party (ANP) in Karachi, came just one day after ANP National Assembly candidate Sadiq Zaman Khattak and his four-year-old son were gunned down by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in Karachi. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the country, a Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) candidate was targeted in Lower Orakzai Agency, but fortunately escaped, while an attack on a JI office in Peshawar injured two people. In the same city, a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf office was bombed, fortunately without loss of life as the office was empty at the time. This election is turning out to be one of the bloodiest in our history. Since January till the end of April this year, 2,674 people have been killed, according to a report by a think tank. Admittedly, the toll includes militants targeted by the security forces and drone strikes, as well as personnel of the security forces engaged in operations against the terrorists, and also casualties on both sides in the nationalist insurgency in Balochistan. However the bulk of the dead are citizens and political leaders and workers of the three secular-leaning mainstream parties, the PPP, MQM and ANP. The toll now includes the JI and PTI after the incidents referred to above. This is an intriguing development since it was widely considered that these parties were respectively pro-Taliban and harbouring a soft corner for the militants. If their ideological ‘friends’ are now turning on them, it merely reflects their naiveté in believing they would be spared the unwanted attentions of the terrorists or that the fanatics could be persuaded to cease terrorist actions and be peacefully integrated into the mainstream. For these parties and the widely acknowledged front runner in this election, Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N, this reality is, or will, bite sooner or later, much to their chagrin. Surprisingly, while former ANP information minister in the previous Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has rounded on the caretaker government and the Election Commission of Pakistan for their failure to provide security to his party and the other two parties hitherto being exclusively targeted by the terrorists, the caretaker federal cabinet, if Information Minister Arif Nizami is to be believed, seems to be living in cuckoo land. According to Mr Nizami, the cabinet believes law and order and security are satisfactory or at least improving. This sanguine head-in-the-sand attitude contrasts sharply with the everyday lived experience of most citizens and the political parties. The caretaker government needs a reality check, followed by some evidence it takes its responsibilities vis-à-vis security for the elections more seriously than has been in evidence so far. We have the strange conjuncture of arguably one of the bloodiest and most violent elections in our history and a seemingly toothless caretaker government attempting to paper over its manifest failure to discharge its primary duty – the holding of free, fair, transparent elections in an enabling secure environment where parties and voters are not cowed into submission, either during campaigning or on polling day. With five days to go for the exercise of the electorate’s right to freely express its will, the prospects for the situation on May 11 are grim and frightening.