In what seems politically motivated tit-for-tat arrests, Lahore city police has obtained non-bailable arrest warrants of 12 PML-N leaders in connection with the hooliganism witnessed during the Punjab chief minister’s election on Apr16. Since this comes on the heels of the controversial arrest of PTI chairperson Imran Khan’s chief of staff Dr Shahbaz Gill, and only weeks after PML-Q leader Chaudhary Pervez Elahi took over as CM, PML-N’s label of “revenge arrests” can’t really be ruled out straight away. Yet what can be said with a lot of certainty is that these steps will further poison the already toxic political environment of the country just when its economy is the weakest it’s been in more than seven decades. It almost beggars belief that something as straight forward as framing charges and trying people in accordance with the law has become so complicated and politically charged in what is after all a functioning democracy. If the courts must settle everything for the political elite, from who should vote and how to when and where they overstep constitutional boundaries, then let them also lay down clear principles of dealing with such every-day things. But this way legislators will have only themselves to blame when they ultimately discover how much their confrontational behaviour hurt representative government in this country. Surely this sort of schoolboy politics has gone on long enough. Everybody has come to realise that a lot of what the country’s top politicians say these days is pure lies because their obsession with winning the game of who throws more venom on the other gets the better of them all the time. Their attitudes have now also divided civil society like never before, and the social, economic and political indicators are all in steep decline. Sadly, we can’t count on our leaders to get us out of this mess, because they got us here in the first place and now they’re too busy keeping us here. *