Every time it seems the circus in Punjab can’t possibly get any weirder, our political elite outdoes themselves and manages to deliver the implausible. PTI must take the prize for the mayhem that occurred on Friday. It’s not very often, after all, that a party petitions the high court over the legitimacy of the election of a chief minister, gets what it asked for, and then appeals that decision to the Supreme Court the next day. How much and how often the judiciary should be burdened with determining the legality, or otherwise, of parliamentary proceedings is a debate for another day, but for now, the courts couldn’t have done more to bring some semblance of sanity to a very chaotic situation. So now everything depends on the way the byelections scheduled for 17 July 2022 turn out, which is why all eyes are on that date. Then we’ll know who will win the election on 22 July 2022, and then, finally, the province can function without the kind of ridiculous hindrances that have gripped it since early April. Yet going by the twists and turns that led the case to the Supreme Court yesterday, and the utter confusion between some allies, especially between PTI and PML-Q, and also their lawyers, there are genuine fears that this confrontation will linger past these dates. That’s because, unless the byelections swing significantly towards PTI, Hamza has the required numbers in the bag. And that is PTI’s biggest problem at the moment. The trip to the top court, where the possibility of the province functioning without a sitting chief minister also came up, ought to have made these politicians give at least some thought to a lot of the people that need the system to run properly. It’s very unfortunate that the drama going on in Punjab is not really a battle over the rule of law and due processes, but a simple, old-fashioned, power grab in which nobody is willing to give an inch, regardless of its impact on the people. *