K AR ACH I: It is certainly not the floods the only reason cited by the Election Commission of Pakistan for the inclusion of 13 districts of Sindh in the first phase of the local government elections planned for Oct 12 that caused Karachi`s omission from the local vote, but the ongoing targeted operations for which the authorities need more time to complete, it emerged on Thursday.

Sindh government officials said the ECP plan for holding the LG polls in Sindh and Punjab in three phases was not without precedent as elections had been organised inphases in the past.

Besides, they said, the bitter experience of holding the LG polls simultaneously across KhyberPakhtunkhwa had triggered controversies that taught the ECP as well as the provincial governments to stay away from the repeat of the exercise.

The ECP officials in Sindh, however, said it was the provincial government`s prerogative to suggest the districts where it deemed the conditions were better to hold local elections.

In Sindh, the LG elections in the first phase will be held in the 13 districts namely Matiari, Tando Allahyar, Tando Mohammad Khan, Thatta, Sujawal, Badin,Hyderabad, Dadu, Jamshoro, Khairpur, Larl(ana, Shilcarpur and Qambar Shahdadkot.

Although the floods caused far less damage to Sindh this year than what it had caused during the previous years, the district of Khairpur this time around saw more life and propertylossesthanthe restofthe province.

Yet Khairpur is among the districts that the Sindh government recommended for the first phase of LG elections in contrast with the ECP`s notion that it picked the districts which were neither affected nor faced any threat of flooding this year.

Sources in the Sindh government said the LG elections in the city had been planned for the third andlast phase as the authorities hoped that the law enforcement agencies with the ongoing targeted operations would have improved the city`s security situation by then.

In the second phase, which is to be announced later by the ECP, LG elections would be held in 10 more districts of Sindh, while the third phase has solely been planned for Karachi, said an official.

`Karachi is not as stable as the authorities want it to be and since it is gigantic in itself encompassing six large districts, it merits to be given a special treatment in the whole exercise,` said the official.

He said the same was the case with Lahore in Punjab, which too had not been included in the firstphase of local elections in the most populous province of the country.

Another official said the election commission should have cited security reasons in its scheme of local elections along with the flood situation to make the whole exercise transparent.

An official in the provincial election commission said the decision of the first phase was made by the top hierarchy of the ECP, which had devised the whole plan in coordination with the provincial government.

Earlier, the ECP had made an educated guess that the whole electoral exercise would be completed in Sindh and Punjab before the year end.