Former President Asif Ali Zardari has felicitated all those who have won in the first phase of local bodies elections in Sindh and Punjab calling it as an important, indeed indispensable, step forward towards empowering the people at the grass root level.
"Particularly I wish to felicitate the PPP candidates who won the LB polls and demonstrating yet again that contrary to the predictions of gloom and doom by some self styled analysts the Party far from out and down is buoyant and resilient", he said in a statement today.
It is our hope that with the completion of next phases of LB polls in the two provinces power will be genuinely transferred to the elected representatives at the grass root level, as an essential ingredient of democracy, he said.
Spokesperson Senator Farhatullah Babar quoted the former President as saying that Local bodies' polls and empowering them is much more than merely transferring power to the representatives of the people. It also means creation of a vast body of new stake holders in the democratic system that will strengthen democracy itself. The larger the stake holders the stronger will be democracy and democratic institutions, he said.
Zardari also expressed profound shock and grief at the deaths of more than a dozen people in an armed clash between the supporters of rival candidates in Khairpur, Faisalabad and other parts of Punjab adding that given proper measures these unfortunate incidents of polls related violence could have been avoided. He said that concerned authorities should draw appropriate lessons from these incidents to ensure that the next phases of LB polls were incident free.
Zardari asked the Party cadres in Sindh and Punjab to gear themselves up for the second and third phases of LB polls.
Electoral contest lies at the heart of parliamentary democracy regardless of who wins and who loses because genuine elections throw up genuine representatives of the people and make the ordinary people as stake holders in the system, he said. The former President asked the newly elected local representatives to serve the masses who have elected them.-PR
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