Some voters waited in line for up to eight hours to cast their ballots on May 11. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

Flanked by loyalists, friends, journalists and excited family members, former Pakistani premier Mian Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), seemed relaxed on the night of the May 11 general elections.

With a remote control in his hand, he sat back on a soft leather sofa in the heavily guarded executive room of the party’s headquarters in Model Town, Lahore, and scanned TV channels to find the most current results.

Outside, hundreds of raucous PML-N supporters, crowded around giant screens erected for the public, cheered loudly every time a favourable result was announced.

The party and its loyalists had good reason to celebrate. Before the night was over, it was clear that the PML-N had won an overwhelming number of votes in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, which accounts for 148 out of 272 National Assembly seats.

By Monday morning, though several provinces’ votes had yet to be counted, congratulations for the prime minister-in-waiting had already come in from neighbouring India, and from Pakistan’s closest western ally, the United States.

Watershed moment

This past weekend’s elections marked a watershed moment in Pakistan’s history. Accustomed to long periods of military rule, generally imposed via coup d’état, the country has not experienced a proper democratic transition since 1962.

This year, fears were running high that the Taliban would follow through on its May 1 warning that it would bomb all the polling stations to prove its disdain for the “system of infidels, which is called democracy.”

The lead-up to Election Day was marred by violence, with 121 people lying dead by the time campaigning closed 48 hours ahead of voting.

In Karachi, tensions between rival groups like the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), led by former cricket legend Imran Khan, hung thick in the air, with analysts predicting bloody skirmishes at polling stations.

The caretaker government, meanwhile, dispatched over 70,000 troops onto the streets to ensure that peace and order prevailed.

The day began with a bomb blast in eastern Karachi’s Landhi area, killing 11 and injuring over 40. Despite this initial tragedy, it quickly became clear that the mood among the people was not one of violence and terror, but of enthusiasm and camaraderie.

Defying all threats by the Taliban and intimidation by armed political activists, voters came out in droves, determined to cast their ballots.

The Election Commission of Pakistan reported a voter turnout of 62 to 70 percent, the highest ever in this country of over 170 million.

Heartening sights such as a man being carried into a polling booth on a stretcher caused people to “burst out in applause,” tweeted Kamal Siddiqi, editor of the English daily ‘Express Tribune’.

Indeed, many of those out on the streets said they were casting the vote for the very first time. “I had never bothered before; but this time I am completely mobilised,” a woman in her early fifties, waiting patiently in a long queue in a school-turned-polling station in the affluent Clifton area, told IPS.

Not far away, in Karachi’s Defence Housing Authority, 48-year old homemaker Tarrannum Lakda was frustrated by the eight-hour wait to cast her vote but she refused to call it a day – she wanted her voice to be counted in this historic election, she told IPS.

Still, the voting process was not without its flaws.

As Lakda stood in the sun, the presiding election officer ventured out to inform the waiting citizens that the ballot papers, boxes, voter lists and stamps had still not arrived.

Similar hold-ups were experienced across the city. Analysts and election observers have blamed the MQM for engineering delays in a bid to deter the PTI’s urban youth base, many of them first-time voters, drawn to Khan’s condemnation of drone strikes in the country’s tribal belt and his vow to end corruption.

Various sources told IPS that pre-poll rigging had begun the night before.

“My mother is a government teacher in a school in Bufferzone (an MQM stronghold) who was appointed to report for election duty,” a youth living in the area told IPS under condition of anonymity. “But on Election Day she was informed not to report for duty as she would be replaced by someone else.”

Other anomalies included MQM members entering the Nazimabad area and confiscating students’ identity cards, or “forcing residents to vote for them”, a local student who did not want to be named told IPS.

Five religious parties – the Jamaat-i-Islami, Sunni Tehrik, Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan, the Sunni Ittehad Council and the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (Haqiqi) – pulled out of the race on Saturday, alluding to “irregularities and poll rigging” in Karachi. For its part, the MQM also “boycotted” the polls in a few constituencies, citing the very same reasons.

Across Pakistan, election violence claimed a total of 38 lives, with over 150 injured.

Taliban stronghold takes a turn

While rival parties battled it out in the southern Sindh province, and Sharif and his supporters basked in their glory in the eastern Punjab province, it was the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province that really expressed a desire for change.

Devastated by the ongoing militancy and fed up with living under the Taliban’s boot, KP residents turned out in droves, buoyed by the presence of scores of PTI workers on the streets, monitoring the poll stations, encouraging voters to come out of their homes, and generally livening up a process that had promised to be, at best, dull and at worst deadly.

Unlike in previous election years, plenty of women were seen at polling stations in cities like Mardan and Peshawar.

By the end of the day the PTI had bagged 32 out of a total of 124 seats, becoming the largest political party in the province. Many senior politicians like ANP Chief Asfandyar Wali Khan, former KP Chief Minister Ameer Khan Hoti and former Federal Minister Ameer Madam lost to new candidates fielded by the PTI.

Though the party suffered huge defeats in Pakistan’s three other provinces and at the federal level, PTI activists flooded the streets and held processions in KP’s capital Peshawar to celebrate their victory in the north.

The climate was much less joyful in the adjacent Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where most people failed to cast votes for the region’s 12 National Assembly seats.

The PTI is now poised to form a provincial government in the violence-wracked northwest with the Jamaat-i-Islam, though Khan has announced his intention to go into opposition at a national level.

According to Al Jazeera English, Khan said Sunday that the mark of a strong democracy is a “strong opposition”, which has been missing in Pakistan for ten years.

Looking ahead

Analysts say Pakistan must now look beyond the elections, and its prime minister-in-waiting must set his eyes on the many challenges that lie ahead, such as tackling terrorism and solving the energy crisis that has crippled the country: according to some estimates, Pakistan faces a shortfall of more than 7,000 megwatts, or 40 percent of total electricity demand.

Salman Abid, a political analyst based in Lahore, told IPS that relations with the United States and Afghanistan in the context of NATO’s withdrawal in 2014, peace talks with the Taliban, relations with India, increasing foreign investment and solving unemployment will be the new government’s priorities.

“The victory in elections may be a milestone,” he said, but the party has a long way to go before reaching its desired destination.

Tanvir Shahzad, a Lahore-based journalist, stressed that the PML-N must not fail to deliver its promises on incorporating youth into the country’s development, reducing poverty and ending load shedding.

*Irfan Ahmed contributed to this report from Lahore, Zofeen Ebrahim from Karachi and Ashfaq Yusufzai from Peshawar.

Red flags symbolising the Awami National Party (ANP) strung across the street in Karachi a day ahead of the May 11 elections. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

The road leading to the office of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) wears a forlorn look. The same deserted air hangs over the Awami National Party (ANP) headquarters here in Karachi, just hours before voting begins on Saturday in Pakistan’s long-awaited general elections.

Today marks the first democratic elections held here since 1962, but Pakistanis have not had much cause to celebrate. The weeks leading up to Election Day have seen much blood spilled: as campaigning came to a grinding halt on May 9, 48 hours before the polling stations opened, the death toll stood at 121, including candidates, with 496 injured.

Most of the attacks were carried out by the Taliban, which had issued numerous warnings to avowedly secular parties like the MQM, the Pakhtun-dominated ANP and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to put a stop to their campaigning.

The militants issued an official communiqué on May 1, signed by Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, instructing members to carry out suicide bomb attacks across the country on Saturday. “We don’t accept the system of infidels, which is called democracy,” the letter said.

Refusing to be moved by the Taliban’s terror tactics, political parties resorted to clandestine meetings, television talks shows and the Internet to spread the word to their respective electorates.

The ANP has borne the brunt of the Taliban’s wrath. Senator Shahi Syed informed IPS that in Karachi alone the party has “lost over 35 office-bearers in the last six months.” A ghastly sense of déjà-vu has accompanied their election campaign, which has largely consisted of picking up the dead, marching in funeral processions or rushing the wounded to hospitals, according to ANP Leader Asfandyar Wali Khan.

The group has lost 700 workers in bomb and suicide attacks since 2001, when the United States named Pakistan an ally in its War on Terror.

The MQM also elicited the ire of the Taliban when it drew attention to the latter’s infiltration of Pakhtun-dominated areas of Karachi, after a massive army operation in 2009 destroyed the militants’ stronghold in Swat, a district in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, and sent thousands of displaced fighters fleeing into urban centres.

Back then, according to MQM Spokesman Haider Abbas Rizvi, his party was “made a mockery of” for expressing such concerns. Today, all of Karachi’s 18 million residents are intimately aware of the threat posed by the Taliban.

Rizvi told IPS his party has paid dearly for taking a stand against the militants. An explosion close to the party’s headquarters killed 18 people last week. Rizvi, a resident of Sohrab Goth, a Karachi suburb thought to be a Taliban stronghold, has so far survived five attempts on his life.

But he fears less for his safety than for the safety of his supporters, whom the Taliban have threatened to attack if they defy the group’s so-called “election ban”.

The PPP, meanwhile, has relied on eulogising its former premier Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated in 2007. Her son and heir to the PPP dynasty, 24-year-old Bilawal Zardari Bhutto, fled the country and spent a good part of the election campaign in Dubai.

As election day dawned there was still no word on the whereabouts of Ali Haider Gilani, PPP member and son of former Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, who was kidnapped by gunmen at an election rally in the central Punjabi city of Multan, also known as the City of Sufis, on May 9.

The landowning Gilani family is among the most powerful in the country. Police suspect that the banned militant groups Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi are behind the kidnapping.

In the face of endless warnings, all parties have been forced to innovate new and creative ways of electioneering. Rizvi says the MQM turned to the Internet, using Twitter and Facebook to reach supporters, while the ANP, unable to afford official advertisements on the radio and television, held what they called “drawing room meetings,” went door to door distributing pamphlets, and used Skype.

With much of the country’s attention focused on the Taliban’s actions, little thought has been given to possible skirmishes between official political parties.

Tensions were running high on Thursday night as former cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan, currently heading the opposition Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) party, addressed his supporters from a hospital bed in Lahore, after falling 15 feet from a mechanical lift trying to reach a stage at an election rally just two days earlier.

His loud criticism of U.S. drones strikes in tribal areas and his long campaign against corruption have won Khan the support of scores of young, urban Pakistanis.

But Rizvi dismissed Khan’s supporters as “young people from posh localities and the affluent class who know nothing of the ground realities or the problems faced by the common man; they form just five percent of the youth and will not be able to take away our youth vote bank.”

Mehmood Y. Mandviwalla, the law minister of the Sindh’s caretaker government, told IPS on May 10 that the situation could “get ugly” if rival parties clash at the ballot box.

Still, opinion polls taken ahead of May 11 indicated that, despite a prevailing climate of terror, turnout this year would exceed the 44 percent voter participation of 2008. Just a day ahead of the election Rizvi predicted that people would come “in droves” to cast their ballots.

“It’s worth giving your life to eliminate the terrorists,” he said.

Many rural women in Pakistan have never voted. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

As Pakistan inches closer to the May 11 elections, and the accompanying heat and dust get even thicker, it is pertinent to stop for a moment and ask: what do women voters in Pakistan want?

Just three square meals and an education for their children, according to Shabina Bibi, an unlettered woman in her thirties who lives in a shanty near the Kemari port in Karachi.

“My husband lost his job last month,” she told IPS, “and for the first time in my life, I have had to venture out, looking for a job.” A mother of four, she now works as a domestic in Karachi.

It has taken Bibi – and her husband – tremendous courage to step out of this boundary. The participation of women in Pakistan’s labour force is just 28 per cent, according to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2013. Gender roles in this society are defined very strictly: a woman has to stay home to look after the family, while it’s the man’s job to go out and provide for them.

There is nothing more that women voters want in this election than to be able to move beyond the traditional stereotypes and walk shoulder to shoulder with men. No longer content to be confined to the shadows of home, they want to step out into the light and participate actively in the public sphere.

It’s not easy being a woman in Pakistan, said Tahira Abdullah, an Islamabad-based peace activist. It’s worse if you occupy the lower rung of the economic ladder, she added, speaking to IPS from the capital, Islamabad.

“Women face disproportionately high levels of poverty, work in exploitative labour conditions, get little or no remuneration, face the double burden of housework and reproductive responsibility, and are subjected to gender-based violence.”

Abdullah wants to see this changed in these elections and hopes for a more emancipated leadership. “It’s time political parties woke up to the feminisation of poverty in Pakistan which is resulting in disproportionate misery and injustice for women,” she said.

However, in a conservative society such as Pakistan’s, that is asking for the moon. “Most men still believe in their own chauvinism and consider women taking a backseat as appropriate to their gender,” said Najma Sadeque, a veteran journalist in Karachi. “The process would have been faster had we got rid of the feudal system and fundamentalists.”

There are some 37 million registered women voters in Pakistan, making up 44 per cent of the country’s 86 million-strong electorate. Another 11 million women are eligible to vote but have not registered.

Women seldom get heard or find leaders on decision-making bodies to carry their voice.

In addition, their aspirations for their country are often radically different from men’s – but these, again, are never articulated.

Women, Islamabad-based gender specialist Naheed Aziz told IPS, are more concerned about day-to-day affairs like food, water, health, sanitation and the welfare of their children.

“The country a woman wants is one where she is not treated as a secondary citizen,” said Aziz, “where she can live with peace and dignity, has a say in the affairs affecting her life, and is not subjected to age-old negative socio-cultural traditions; where her honour and life are not threatened within her home or her community, where she feels secure, where she and her family members will not be subjected to violence and exploitation, where the rule of law prevails, and where everyone has equal and equitable justice.”

“Women want a welfare state, not a nuclearised security-driven state,” said Abdullah. And, unlike men, who are obsessed with their own selves, their ‘biradari’ (clan), feudal and tribal politics, women worry about the future of their families.

“Women are inherently peace-loving and envisage a world free of weapons, war and strife,” Abdullah said. They prefer lawmakers to devote their energy to solving the nation’s problems rather than worrying about who to go to war with or how much money to spend on defence, she added.

Endorsing this sentiment, Sadeque said that women have rarely started or propagated wars. “There are few Margaret Thatchers among women,” she remarked to IPS.

Yet, women are the ones affected disproportionately by conflict and disaster situations, she noted. To help change this, women must be better represented in political bodies and must have a say on the various issues affecting them.

The Aurat Foundation, an organisation working for the rights of women, has long been advocating an increase in the representation of women in the national and provincial assemblies, from 17 per cent to 33 per cent.

The foundation has also asked political parties to hold internal elections for women and to have specific women-only constituencies, to ensure a level playing field during elections. None of these recommendations has so far been accepted.

The foundation had, in fact, come out with a handbook of suggestions on women’s empowerment, for the election manifestos of political parties.

While a few parties included some of the recommendations in their manifestos, most were “relegated to a separate chapter, without cross-references or linkages to mainstreaming,” said Abdullah, who co-authored the handbook with Aziz.

Among the suggestions that were included were the repeal of discriminatory legislation against women and /or minorities, action against negative socio-cultural practices, legislation against domestic violence or violence against women in general, and giving title deeds to women when allocating land to landless peasants.

A few parties even promised to ban ‘jirgas’ (tribal or village councils), but most of them hedged and suggested an alternative dispute resolution system under the local government.

Unfortunately, very few women are members of the manifesto committees of political parties. “The female to male ratio among those who have helped with party manifesto documents is, on average, three females to 20 males,” Aziz said.

What chances do women have, then, of being heard in this election?

They have a long way to go, certainly. Of the 23,079 candidates seeking general seats in the national assembly, only 3.5 per cent are women, according to the Election Commission of Pakistan. Political parties refused to acquiesce to the pressure by civil society to reserve 10 per cent of the spots on tickets for women candidates.

As a result, only 36 women across Pakistan have been able to secure spots on tickets to run for general seats in the national assembly. There are 817 women candidates, though, who are standing for the 60 seats reserved for women in the national assembly. In addition, there are 64 women candidates fighting on an independent ticket, outside of any party affiliation.

What women are doing, however, is getting out into the field and campaigning for their leaders. Party leaders are “ensuring women’s participation in their election rallies through their women’s wings, to garner their votes and nominate them for their reserved seats,” said Abdullah.

It’s a small, but significant, start.

Members of the minority Ahmadi community in Pakistan say they have been disenfranchised by the country’s election laws. Credit: Adil Siddiqi/IPS

A member of the Ahmadiyya faith, Hasan has promised to boycott the impending elections on the grounds that his community of roughly four million has been disenfranchised.

Ever since the constitution branded them non-Muslims, Ahmadis — who believe that the 19^th century cleric Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is the messiah promised by God – have been amongst the most persistently persecuted minorities in Pakistan.

This discrimination is felt deeply at the ballot box, where Ahmadis are compelled to register their votes under a separate category from other residents and thus accept the status of non-Muslim, in violation of their religious identity, Amjad M. Khan, president of the U.S.-based Ahmadiyya Muslim Lawyers Association, told IPS in an email.

According to Hasan, “If we want to vote as Pakistani Muslims, which we consider ourselves to be, we have to denounce the Ahmadi community and our spiritual leader, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, as a false prophet,” a move he is not prepared to make.

He told IPS his faith is more important to him than casting a vote.

Though the choice is a clear one for many Ahmadis, civil society leaders and even conscientious political parties worry about what the boycott means for democracy in this country of 170 million, where hopes for a “free and fair election” have been running high ahead of the May 11 polls.

For Adnan Rehmat, chief of the influential Islamabad-based media development organisation ‘Intermedia’, “If 200,000 adult Ahmadis cannot vote because the…laws disenfranchise them…it means the elections are technically neither free nor fair” and indicates that something is “seriously amiss” at the core of the state’s functioning.

“Ahmadis…are discriminated against at a level that’s unprecedented, even in our own chequered history,” Pakistani novelist and journalist Mohammad Hanif told IPS, adding that forcing Ahmadis to mislabel themselves at the ballot box is “much worse than disenfranchising people – it’s more like taking their humanity away”.

Decades of discrimination

From its inception in 1947 until Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq took over as military dictator in 1985, Pakistan has had a joint electorate system that allowed all citizens equal right to elect political candidates of their choice, irrespective of religious leanings.

In a bid to “Islamise” Pakistan, Zia-ul-Haq ordered a separate system for what he called non-Muslims who could only vote for five percent of the parliament seats allocated to them.

The system has effectively robbed the community of political representation, preventing Ahmadis from rising to prominent posts within the government or even finding employment in state institutions like the police force.

In 2002, attempting to appease hard-line Islamists, former President Pervez Musharraf issued Executive Order No. 15, which mandated that Ahmadis be registered on a “supplementary voter roll”, a move Khan says is “anathema to Islamic justice”.

Since then, he said, successive governments have been wilfully blind to Pakistan’s “voter apartheid”, violating Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Pakistan has been a signatory since 2008.

Although some see this discrimination as a purely political issue, for Ahmadis it is a matter of life or death. Legal loopholes allow religious extremists to lash out at the minority community, while the country’s controversial anti-blasphemy laws pave the way for further intolerance.

Last month, the Jamaat-i-Ahmadiyya (Ahmadi Movement) issued its annual report for 2012, stating that 19 members of the community were killed last year; in total an estimated 226 Ahmadis have been killed in sectarian violence since 1984.

Almost three years ago, on May 28, 2010, 94 members of this community were massacred in their mosques during the Friday congregation in the eastern city of Lahore. Not a single perpetrator has yet been brought to justice.

This year, the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), led by former cricket star Imran Khan, has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the persecuted minority. PTI Spokesperson Zohair Ashir told IPS his party considered all Pakistani citizens equal under the law.

“It’s a shame that past governments did not rectify the many injustices and inequalities in the system,” he said, adding that, if it comes to power, PTI will “address all such issues in an expeditious manner”.

He stopped short of specifying what concrete steps would be taken to ensure Ahmadi participation in the political sphere, admitting, “It is hypothetical at this stage to determine what legislative measures need to be taken and when. Fixing the economy and energy crisis and fighting terrorism are areas of immediate and high priority for us.”

Few believe the upcoming election will bring any changes.

Speaking to IPS over the phone from Chenab Nagar, a city in the Punjab province where 95 percent of the 70,0000 residents are Ahmadis, a 37-year-old Ahmadi journalist named Aamir Mehmood said he “cannot think of any politician or party that has the courage to initiate a debate and scrap these discriminatory laws in our country which are used against the minorities”.

As Election Day draws near, groups and individuals acting to protect the “sanctity of Prophet Muhammad” have been vocal about their approval of discriminatory election laws and their disdain for the scheduled boycott.

“If they (Ahmadis) want to reverse this decision (the 2002 executive order), they must take the route of the courts and the parliament,” Qasim Farooqi, spokesperson of the proscribed sectarian outfit Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) told IPS.

“Boycotting is not the answer,” said Farooqi. “Voting is important, the Ahmadis must play their role — by not participating in the elections, they are only making the country weak,” he stressed.

The simmering tension bodes badly for Ahmadis, who sooner or later will be forced to bear the brunt of Islamists’ wrath. Last month, seven Ahmadis were booked on various charges including “defiling the Holy Quran” and “calling themselves Muslims”. They were also accused of printing and distributing “blasphemous” literature in the form of the community’s newspaper, ‘Al-Fazal’.

Community leaders said that the paper, one of the oldest in Pakistan, was only distributed within their community.

Students at the NED Engineering University in Karachi, Pakistan, argue about “conservative” versus “secular” dress. Credit: Adil Siddiqi/IPS

From the local butcher, to the pavement fruit vendor, to the cobbler sitting beside his tools on Elphinstone Road, a busy street in the heart of Karachi, one question is on everyone’s lips: Who will win the upcoming elections on May 11?

In Pakistan, a country that is reeling from the Taliban’s militancy in the north, rampant corruption in the government and an armed force that has a life of its own, few have the answer to this question.

But one thing is certain: for the first time in Pakistan’s history, young people between the ages of 18 and 29 – who currently comprise well over half of the country’s population of 170 million people — will play a pivotal role in determining the election outcome.

A nationwide survey of 4,450 young people, carried out by the Islamabad-based Free and Fair Election Network (Fafen) back in January, showed that only 48 percent of voters aged 18 to 25 intend to vote, putting them far behind other age groups: in contrast 68 percent of those between 26 and 35, and 84 percent of those above 55, said they would cast their ballots.

Many young people, like filmmaker Abida Sharafat, are jaded. “I don’t want to elect people who will come (into power) for five years to oppress and exploit us,” she told IPS, referring to the number of politicians who have been exposed as major loan defaulters and tax evaders.

Mohammad Shafi, a barely literate 27-year-old domestic helper working in an upscale Karachi neighbourhood, says the government of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) “emptied our pockets and increased violence” over the last five years.

A recent poll conducted by the British Council (BC) on Pakistani youth found that more than half of 5,000 respondents between 18 and 29 years believed that “democracy” – a term that has been bandied about by the centre-left PPP – has not been a good form of governance here.

Sixty-four percent of male responders and 75 percent of female responders described themselves as “conservative” or religious.

Echoing what appears to be a growing trend among the youth, Shafi told IPS he would “prefer the country to be governed by Sharia law”, adding quickly: “But not the Sharia the Taliban wanted imposed in Swat (an administrative district of the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province) but one which promotes equity and justice.”

Sharafat insists that the tenets of religious law come “closest to the socialist values to which I subscribe”. For instance, Zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam, prescribes the giving of a percentage of one’s wealth as “tax” to the government or the needy.

The widespread existence of similar opinions among the youth is borne out in the BC study, whose findings, according to Lahore-based senior defence and political analyst Dr. Hasan Askari Rizvi, come as “no surprise”.

“The Pakistani youth’s conservative and Islamic orientation can easily be detected (in) their idiom and historical references,” he told IPS, adding that Arabic phrases like “Allah Hafiz” (“may God protect you”) have come to replace Persian-language expressions like “Khuda Hafiz” in the daily spoken language.

Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist and renowned peace activist with over three decades of teaching experience, blames this shift on the Islamisation of Pakistan’s education system, which was imposed by former dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s.

Over the generations, he says, students have “forgotten how to sing, dance, or act – the fear of having their heads cracked open by violent fundamentalists has worked well”.

Few of his students at the Quaid e Azam University in Islamabad have a thorough command of any language and few read anything beyond newspapers. Today’s texts are devoid of references to early recorded history, the Nile Valley Civilisation and Greek and Hindu mythology, he added.

Even when the government has tried to offset religious extremists in the education sector, they have been forced to make a U-turn. When the government of Punjab commissioned a new Urdu language textbook for the 10^th grade a few months ago the conservative media relentlessly attacked the book for having “expunged” Islamic teachings.

To the contrary, Hoodbhoy found that the very first chapter in the offending book was a “hamd” (a poem in praise of God) and the second was a “naat” (a poem in praise of Prophet Muhammad).  Also included were letters from Ghalib (a famous Urdu poet), and a fairytale.

But under intense pressure from right-wingers, the state “retreated and promised to reinsert essays on jihad and Islam”, Rizvi said.

This Islamised education has tipped young people towards a “pro-militant” and “anti-U.S.” mindset, he added.

“They tend to see themselves more as Muslims than as Pakistanis; most see the West as being responsible for their problems.”

Clothing has now begun to reflect the increasingly conservative values of the youth. Sharafat, who wears traditional Pakistani dress but does not cover her head, noted, “The number of long, untrimmed beards and black abayas (robes) have multiplied enormously among young people.”

“I feel I am now among the minority,” said Sharafat, adding that her decision to leave her head uncovered “graphically” exposes her secular and liberal thoughts. “I often have to explain to my friends that I am as much a practising Muslim in my private life as they are in their public ones.”

But not everyone is convinced this trend is so easily quantifiable. Mohammad Shehzad, an Islamabad-based writer and researcher, believes the BC survey was conducted with certain objectives in mind, which might have compromised its objectivity.

“The survey has been used by Islamists to support their outrageous claim that the majority needs Sharia,” Shehzad told IPS.

Salima Hashmi, an artist and interim minister in the Punjab caretaker government, is inclined to agree. A former principal of the National College of Arts in Lahore, she insists that “free thinking and liberal aspirations” among fine art students have not completely been quashed, adding that the “spirit of inquiry” is alive and well.

However, she fears that when institutions are left rudderless, like the NCA has been over the last four years, with no governing body, the “chaos” prevailing outside is all the more likely to creep in.

Pakistan People’s Party posters show pictures of candidates with three generations of the Bhutto family including former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, her father and former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and the new chairperson Bilawal Zardari Bhutto. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS.

Former parliamentarian Jamshed Dasti, known in his hometown of Muzaffargarh as Rescue 1122, Pakistan’s equivalent of an emergency number, is now a dubious hero. On Apr. 4, a district court served him a three-year prison sentence and a fine of 5,000 rupees (50 dollars) for presenting a fake degree to become eligible for a seat in parliament. He filed an appeal in the Lahore High Court which has overturned his conviction and acquitted him.

Many people sing his praises. “He was among the very rare breed of lawmakers who are genuinely loved by the people they serve. They didn’t care whether he possessed an academic degree or not,” Asma Shirazi, a popular television anchor, said.

Shirazi, who had visited Dasti’s constituency during the floods in 2010 and met the people who voted for him, said he never misused his position, continued living in a humble abode, had acquired no assets during his time in parliament and had never once been slapped with corruption charges.

Not everyone, however, is as forgiving as Shirazi. “Those who have cheated must be punished in some manner,” said Dr A.H. Nayyar, an Islamabad educationist.

Activist Naeem Sadiq, who was among the first to highlight the issue eight years ago and kept pressing for action on this matter, added, “More would have gone to jail had we had an active, alert and alive Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) in the last five years.”

The May 11 parliamentary elections may see several old lawmakers who have lied about their educational qualifications stay out of politics after the ban imposed upon them by the Supreme Court.

“Enough is enough. No corrupt elements will be allowed to go to parliament. Fake degree holders have not only deceived the nation but also made a mockery of their mandate. Such elements don’t deserve any leniency,” Pakistan Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry had said on Mar. 26, while hearing the fake degrees case.

Ever since, the ECP and the Higher Education Commission (HEC) have cranked into action and blacklisted lawmaker after lawmaker.

Talking to IPS, Mudassir Rizvi of the Free and Fair Elections Network (FAFEN), a coalition of 30 non-governmental organisations which observe the general elections and mobilise voters, said that, of a total of more than 1,170 legislators, less than 5 percent have had their degrees declared as ‘bogus’ by the HEC.

According to the ECP website, 80 candidates who had forged or produced fake university degrees back in the 2008 elections will not be contesting this time.

The apex court had tasked the HEC, which funds universities and recommends the award of a charter to a university, in 2010 to vet the degrees of all the lawmakers sitting in the federal and four provincial parliaments.

Under immense pressure from the parliamentarians, the HEC dragged its feet over the scrutiny for almost three years, and degrees of 189 people remained unverified.

However, with the elections less than a month away, the inquiry has suddenly gained momentum despite the fact that the law which required the legislators to prove that they are bona fide university graduates does not apply any more.

For the first time in Pakistan’s election history candidates are being screened to ascertain whether they have criminal records, defaulted on loans, evaded tax or been involved in other financial irregularities.

In 2002, former president General Pervez Musharraf had stipulated a graduate degree or its equivalent from a seminary as requirement for lawmakers to improve the standard of parliament.

However, as Nayyar pointed out, “the addition of a degree as prequalification has been shown to be of no value and seems to have failed in the last nine years. Cheaters know how to beat the system.”

The condition was struck down in April 2008 when the next government came into power, but most present legislators had been elected under the old rules.

“We fully support the stipulated screening process,” Zohair Ashir, secretary of the parliamentary board of cricketing star Imran Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) told IPS. “And PTI itself is undertaking stringent measures to verify each candidate’s credentials.” The party will be contesting elections for the first time.

“Every party worker’s life is an open book,” said Haider Abbas Rizvi, a prominent politician representing the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), the leading political party in Karachi, and the previous government’s ally in Sindh province. It has not had any candidate rejected for possessing a fake or forged degree.

The MQM says it screens all its candidates on its own, but screening does not take place in every political party.

After Dasti, elected in 2008, was found to have misrepresented his qualification in 2010, he was forced to resign. However, his party, the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, instead of keeping him at a distance for shaming it, renamed him its candidate for the very seat he had relinquished. He won and was made special adviser to the prime minister on livestock affairs.

“No party leader asked his members to resign despite knowing that many of them held fake degrees,” said Sadiq.

“It is pathetic that political parties have nurtured and protected crooks who have plundered and looted, bringing the country to the verge of bankruptcy,” said Dr Atta ur Rahman, former head of HEC.

The elections will be historic in that it will be for the first time in 65 years of Pakistan’s history that power will be handed over from one democratically elected civilian government to another.

There are 85.73 million registered voters in a population of 180 million, according to the Election Commission of Pakistan. Of these 37.32 million are women voters.

In these 11th general elections, voting will be for the 342 seats for the National Assembly and 577 seats in the four provincial assemblies. There are 7,364 and 16,730 candidates running for office for the National Assembly and four provincial assemblies respectively.

The Election Commission of Pakistan has appointed more than 400 monitoring teams across the country to monitor political activities.

The mainstream parties include the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), the Pakistan Muslim League (Functional) allied with the Pakistan People’s Party, Pakistan Tehrik e Insaf (formed by former cricketing star Imran Khan), the Awami National Party, the MQM and the religious party Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam.

Street children in Karachi prepare for their World Cup next year. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS.

Oblivious to the cloud of dust they have kicked up in just a few minutes, panting and sweating, moving lithely, this way, then that, they jostle the ball smoothly until one team scores a goal.

There’s a loud cheer. Wiping the sweat off his brow, young Iman Hussain throws up his hands in frustration, looks with displeasure at the scoreboard, and shouts: “Concentrate, you guys!”

Just 12, Hussain is among a motley group of boisterous young boys who are having a practice match of football at one of Karachi Municipal Council (KMC) sports complex grounds in Karachi. Of all sizes, and aged between 10 and 16, they have been selected after Karachi-wide trials to form the Street Strikers. It will be among teams from 20 countries to compete for the 2014 Street Child World Cup, to be held in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.

Clad in a black-and-red striped T-shirt, black shorts, knee-high black socks and shoes, Hussain is known for his agility, but as much for his temper. “They like my passing and that is why I have been chosen for the team,” he tells IPS proudly.

Hussain, till a few years ago, was a deft pickpocket, living off the streets of Karachi. He is among Pakistan’s 1.2 million to 1.5 million children living on the streets. He had run away from home when he was just seven because his older brother used to “tie him up” and beat him blue for not “paying attention to studies.” Son of a fisherman, he has five brothers and six sisters.

Today, he has been reintegrated back into his family, has joined school and counts football among his foremost passions. “I want to show the world I am good at something!” he says, adding a little excitedly: “It will be my first time on an airplane!”

The initiative was taken by Azad Foundation (AF), a non-governmental organisation that has been working for Karachi’s street children since 2001. They provide meals, shelter, healthcare and education through three drop-in centres to close to 3,500 of Karachi’s over 12,000 street children. Currently, a little over 100 among them are going through various stages of a rehabilitation process, and will finally get reintegrated.

Since the beginning of the year, AF has started a five-year Sports for Development project. “In Karachi, we are working in three (of the 18 administrative units) and in the rest of the three provinces, we are collaborating with organisations already working with street children,” Ali Bilgrami, who heads the sports project, tells IPS. “Initially, we will focus on football, but if there is demand for other sports we can always include cricket and hockey.” However, he emphasises, it will have to be a team sport.

Itfan Maqbool, spokesperson for AF, hopes the World Cup will help in “educating society to the realities of the issue of street children and how these children survive, fending for themselves.”

These boys have been training for over three months now and have played matches with other teams who have been playing for many years. A lot has changed since then – most of all, their behaviour.

“They have certainly become less aggressive,” says Maqbool.

Coach Haris Jadoon finds that the kids have been able to work on anger management issues to quite an extent. “When we started, I found them a much rowdier bunch, refusing to do their warm-up exercises or follow rules or even pay heed to the whistle. All they wanted to do was to get hold of the ball and start playing.

“Losing was unthinkable for them and throwing a tantrum, getting angry and crying was common. Slowly, however, they realised that it’s a team sport and they can win only if they work as a team,” he says.

He adds: “Through the process of teaching them the rules of the game, we teach them qualities like fairness, hard work, honesty, while building their confidence and communication skills.”

Sadia Ahmed, a psychologist with AF, knows each boy well and says her job has been made much easier ever since the boys started playing football. “It’s half my job done,” she says. “They are much happier, easier to manage and more receptive to you. I also find many have grown taller and bigger in the last couple of months,” she tells IPS.

For Itfan, however, the biggest success has been that since they started playing, quite a number of the boys have been more amenable to reintegrating into family life, which is the ultimate aim of the foundation.

Owais Ali, 16, plays as a defender. He left home when he was seven. He says he got tired of being continuously hit by his parents. He returned home when he was 13, but “I have an older brother who had also run away before me and has not returned,” he says.

“It’s a hard life out there,” he says, reflecting on the realities of the street child experience. “You cannot imagine what a seven-year old goes through on the streets of Karachi – he is harassed by street gangs and the police. Many are abused physically as well as sexually.” Ali also confesses to having smoked hashish.

At the same time, the lure of a life free from family restrictions, poverty, school and housework is enough to make many want to continue where they are, Maqbool points out.

“We are trying to make them realise what it means to live within the folds of a family. Just like in sports, a family is like a team where each member takes care of the other and helps make the team a success. At the same time, parents too have to realise that these children need love, affection and respect. Both sides have to overcome their past and move on,” says Maqbool. (END)

‘Chal Parha’, a popular TV show hosted by Pakistani singer Shehzad Roy, takes viewers on a virtual tour of the country’s education system. Credit: KT/IPS

Mounted on a Harley Davidson, Shehzad Roy, a popular Pakistani singer, is on a mission: to expose the country’s 176 million residents to the good, the bad and the ugly side of Pakistan’s education system.

Stopping by small villages dotting the mountainous terrain, or traversing miles of sandy desert and green valleys and plains, Roy takes viewers on a virtual road-trip for the popular television show ‘Chal Parha’ (meaning ‘Come, Teach’), aired on the private channel ‘Geo’ every Saturday and Sunday night.

The 23-part programme – part of the channel’s initiative to promote public awareness on education and literacy – highlights everything from the dog-eared national curriculum and ancient textbooks to dilapidated school buildings without water, latrines and electricity.

In his hallmark tongue-in-cheek style, Roy ends every episode by assigning the government “homework” – policy recommendations to correct the system.

The show has no shortage of scenes to cover: Roy has already shown his viewers everything from beautiful buildings devoid of teachers to three-roomed schools where a multitude of classes are taught simultaneously by one teacher.

Some episodes have covered children studying in makeshift schools comprised of nothing more than tents, after school buildings were destroyed in the 2005 earthquake. The money earmarked for reconstruction was misplaced, officials say.

For students in rural areas, studying under a tree is all they know. Many classrooms are taken over by village notables as storerooms for animals and fodder.

Things are no better in the big cities, where children can be seen cleverly sidestepping streams of sewage or covering their noses to avoid the foul smell on their way to school, while uniformed students are often crammed into classes with no electricity or ventilation, forced to learn by rote.

The programme quickly became a hit, perhaps because a “picture is always much more effective than words, especially a real one with real stories”, Baela Raza Jamil, head of the Islamabad-based NGO Idare-e-Taleem-o Agehi (Centre for Education and Consciousness), told IPS.

“I have asked my team to consider it compulsory viewing,” she added.

Pakistan lags on education targets

In April 2010, education was made a fundamental right for all up to the age of 16, after the insertion of Article 25-A into Pakistan’s constitution.

Yet, according to Roy, almost seven million children between the ages of five and nine do not go to school and those that do drop out after just a few years of schooling.

Some believe the root of the problem dates back to Pakistan’s inception. According to Haris Gazdar, a senior researcher at Karachi’s Collective for Social Science Research, “The dominant strand in Pakistani nationalism is divisive and has not presented a viable cultural model for nation-building.”

He believes that education, which in “virtually all other countries is regarded by the nationalist elite as a vehicle for nation-building, has no real value for Pakistan’s divided elites”.

Though many families “will invest in their children’s education to the best of their capacity, interest and knowledge, nowhere in the world has universal schooling been achieved through private demand alone”, he told IPS.

“There is no collective demand for education in Pakistan because there is no collective agreement on the cultural model for nation-building.“

Jamil agreed, stating that good-quality early childhood education in Pakistan was accessible to “fewer than ten percent of Pakistani children”.

Currently leading the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for Pakistan with several partners and volunteers, she was quick to support her statement with dismal figures: “Seventy percent of government-run primary schools have only one or two rooms for five classes,” she told IPS. “More than 40 percent of schools are without latrines; 66 percent do not have electricity; and children in 37 percent of schools lack drinking water facilities.

“Pre-primary classes in Pakistan seldom have an exclusive teacher or teaching-learning aids, which are required by the national curriculum,” she said.

The gross enrolment rate, including under- and over-age children, at the primary level is 86 percent, out of which 33 percent drop out. Meanwhile, only 18 percent of those who complete primary school are eligible for mid-level education.

Of those who make it to the 10^th grade, only 30 percent successfully complete high school and only three percent make it to the tertiary level.

This pattern has brought the national literacy rate to 58 percent, far below the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of 88 percent.

Enlightening and painful

Sprinkled with candid interviews with schoolchildren, and discussions with parents, teachers, government officials, clerics and psychologists in over 200 schools, the show has been an interesting yet painful experience, according to Roy.

Others, like professor A.H. Nayyar, a prominent physicist and peace activist, laud the programme as “riveting” and a much-needed step towards achieving the MDG education target in the absence of government action or proper resource allocation.

“The national education policy of 2008-9, promised a higher allocation for education, but that promise was never met,” he told IPS. According to official data, Pakistan spends just two percent of its national GDP on education.

The travelling TV show also offers glimpses into other reasons youth stay away from school, such as poverty, child labour and early marriage.

The use of corporal punishment is also a strong deterrent. Roy recently exposed the story of eight-year-old Malaika, whose teacher threw a pen at her eye, damaging her cornea and leading to the detachment of her retina. The teacher claims Malaika was “not paying attention”.

That episode prompted three provincial assemblies to pass a resolution scrapping Section 89 of Pakistan’s penal code, which allows “guardians” to punish children in “good faith”.

Additionally, a bill on corporal punishment that had been languishing in the National Assembly (NA) gained fresh impetus after the show was aired. Tabled by legislator Attiya Inayatullah back in 2010, it was unanimously passed in the assembly on Mar. 13, which, she told IPS, was quite “historic”.

When the bill officially becomes a law, individuals involved in abusing children will be sentenced to one year in prison, a 500-dollar fine, or both.

Another episode traced the life of a young girl with no hands who, despite learning how to write using only her feet, had been pushed out of school due to poverty. A few days after the show aired, Fehmida Mirza, the speaker for the NA, presented the young girl with a check for 5,000 dollars in order for her to continue her studies.

Fifty-six-year-old Perween Rehman had dedicated her life to humanitarian work. As head of the Orangi Pilot Project’s Research and Training Institute (OPP-RTI), she spent years working in one of the largest informal settlements in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi, helping to overhaul a primitive sanitation system that was expected to serve Orangi’s 1.5 million inhabitants.

Though many have lauded her efforts in overseeing a successful community-driven sanitation programme, which is being replicated in parts of South Africa, Central Asia, Nepal and Sri Lanka, others felt her work was more deserving of punishment than praise: on Mar. 13, she was gunned down in a killing that, to date, no armed group has claimed responsibility for.

As Karachi’s 18 million residents struggle to survive a wave of violence, extremism and targeted killings, a new and terrifying pattern is emerging — those engaged in humanitarian work are now considered fair game.

Few believe the authorities’ claim that the chief suspect involved in Rehman’s murder  was killed in a police “encounter”.

Those close to her suspect she was killed by one of Karachi’s many powerful land-grabbing groups who have a vested interest in acquiring state land on which informal settlements have cropped up.

Prior to her death, Rehman had received death threats for her attempts to document the land mafia’s practice of illegally annexing land, in collusion with political parties, then selling it to Karachi’s millions of  people in need of housing, thus creating a dependent and destitute voter constituency.

Calling Rehman a “true heroine”, Hoodbhoy added, “In a country awash in weapons, and with a state machinery that is precariously weak, a grab for resources (land) will surely result in such atrocities occurring again and again.” Indeed, almost 60 percent of Karachi is comprised of informal settlements that lack basic services.

Senior journalist Najma Sadeque believes Rehman “stepped on the toes of powerful criminal elements”.

“Where big money is at stake, such as real estate, there is danger. I was surprised that she spoke openly about the problem — perhaps she never saw herself as a threat,” Sadeque told IPS. “There are too many groups involved, internal and external, confusing the situation.”

In December, militants shot dead five female workers vaccinating children against polio, forcing the government to suspend the vaccination drive here.

Police say 2012 was the worst year as far as the body count is concerned, with over 2,000 people dead in targeted killings and bombings in Karachi.

But the violence is not just restricted to this city — across Pakistan, aid workers are attacked, polio teams hunted down and teachers killed.

Earlier this year, gunmen killed seven teachers and health workers, six of them women, in the Swabi district of Pakistan’s north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“On one side are crazed religious fundamentalists with guns, driven into a state of madness by mullahs using mosque loudspeakers and televisions. They kill women administering the polio vaccine and shoot schoolgirls for wanting to study,” Hoodbhoy told IPS. “On the other hand, there is the…equally diabolical murder of (humanitarian workers) like Perween Rahman.”

With Pakistan ranked among the top five most dangerous countries in the world for aid workers, according to a 2012 report by the group Humanitarian Outcomes, many see the space for good Samaritan shrinking rapidly in Pakistan.

Attacks on aid workers worldwide climbed to 150 in 2012, up from 129 in 2010; 308 aid workers were killed. A vast majority of the attacks — over 72 percent — took place in just five countries: Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Pakistan.

“It is sad that people who can make a difference and who can help bring about change in Pakistan, are being removed,” said Nuzhat Lotia, a Pakistani development expert.

Using the hastag #ParweenRehman, various prominent personalities in Pakistan expressed similar sentiments. Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan Director of Human Right Watch, tweeted: “Slowly but surely, everyone and everything good in our country is being targeted and killed.”

“A selfish thought tonight,” tweeted Cyril Almeida, a correspondent for the daily Dawn newspaper. “I am sick at the thought of the growing number of (people) in my phone book who have been cut down. Too much death.”

Former cricket star and Pakistani politician Imran Khan tweeted that he was “Saddened to see what we are turning into”.

The situation for foreign aid workers is no better. In its December 2012 issue, The Economist wrote, “The climate for humanitarian workers has not been improved by the authorities. They have harassed aid professionals, restricting their movements and limiting visas, fearing that spies lurk among them”.

Last year, the Red Cross suspended much of its work in Pakistan after a British doctor was kidnapped and beheaded in the western city of Quetta.

Lotia is sceptical about whether things will ever improve. “The youth are losing important role models and violence is seen as the norm as that is what they are exposed to and hear about day in and day out,” she lamented.

Although the Pakistan People’s Party-led government completed its five-year term this month and will officially pass off power to an interim government until the general elections scheduled for May 11, Sadeque believes “the trend will continue” because all political parties have self-serving interests.

While despair seems to have snuck into the thoughts of even the most resilient and optimistic members of Pakistan’s civil society, Hoodbhoy urged those committed to creating a better society not to “run away”.

“We owe it to our future generations to keep telling the truth, to keep suggesting solutions, and to keep fighting,” he said.

(END)

Nabi Ahmed, a dairy farmer in Aliabad, with his cows, a few of whom were artificially inseminated. Credit: Muhammad Hadi/IPS

Mohammad Ali’s routine has not changed in over three decades. A small dairy farmer in the village of Aliabad, in the Narowal district of Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, he wakes at sunrise and walks to the barn to milk his three cows manually, stopping only for a breakfast of unleavened bread and tea heavily laced with milk before getting back to work.

Unfazed by the multitude of flies hovering around the stainless steel milk buckets, he carefully transfers their contents to an aluminium container and, securing it firmly on his motorbike, heads off to the nearest shop that purchases 14 litres of milk from him every day.

For many years, the forty-year-old farmer had accepted that each of his cows would produce no more than three to four litres of milk a day, hardly enough to put food on the table and clothes on his back.

Until he heard of Jassar Farms, that is. Located in a village by the same name just two kilometres away, as Ali learnt from his neighbour, cows on Jassar farm produce three times the quantity of milk as the cattle in Aliabad.

Run by Shahzad Iqbal, a 43-year-old social entrepreneur, this “miracle” farm – on which over 500 of the 600 cows produce 12 to 14 litres a day – began in 2007, based on a scientific model and backed by a sound business plan.

“I began by importing the embryos of pure exotic bulls instead of the more common practice of importing elite cows from the United States or Australia that cost thousands of dollars,” Iqbal told IPS.

He then used local cows as surrogates and once the first generation was born, started crossbreeding them with his own herd.

Iqbal sees great potential in Pakistan’s dairy and livestock industry, which engages roughly 20 percent of Pakistan’s population. About 8.5 million small and landless families in rural areas comprise the bulk of the dairy and livestock sector, with 35 to 40 million people dependent on it for a living. Most farmers own just three or four cows.

With a herd of 162 million animals, including cows, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, horses, asses and mules, Pakistan has the world’s fourth largest livestock population.

Speaking to IPS over the phone from Narowal, Iqbal admitted, “The attitudes of these poor farmers are hard to change.” But change is exactly what he is after, convinced that artificial insemination could push milk production up by a minimum of 2,000 litres per animal per year.

This “translates into 80,000 rupees (814 dollars) extra revenue for every farmer from each animal if the milk is sold at the current rate of 40 rupees (.40 dollars) per litre,” he says.

“According to the Economic Survey of Pakistan, livestock generates 40 percent of rural income and 11.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) — if we can double the yield, we can contribute significantly to Pakistan’s GDP,” he added.

If farmers could embrace scientific practices, he said, the country could produce an extra 16 billion litres of milk per year.

Given its advantageous geographic location, Pakistan would then be poised to become a leading supplier of milk and dairy-based products to import-dependent “Islamic countries, from Malaysia to Morocco”.

But based on the 2006 national livestock census, estimated milk production for 2011-12 was just 42 billion litres, scarcely enough to meet the country’s own demand: according to Iqbal, the country spends half a billion dollars annually to import milk-based products.

In an effort to fill this gap in yield, Jassar Farms now produces “high quality” bull semen at an affordable price. Utilising a network of 6,000 technicians, the enterprise distributes 75,000 doses per month from Punjab to Sindh, at a bargain price of 150 to 300 rupees (1.5 to three dollars).

Rizwan Hameed, a marketing graduate working at Iqbal’s farm, told IPS that the quality of this semen can be compared to elite imported varieties but comes at a much cheaper rate.

“Our dose is tenfold cheaper than the comparable imported variety, which is available at 2,000 rupees (20 dollars),” he said.

Keeping it local

Dr. Tanveer Ahmad,  at the Livestock Production and Management Department of the Arid Agriculture University in Rawalpindi, agrees that artificial insemination could result in a genetically superior herd, thereby “decreasing the spread of veneral diseases and increasing the yield”.

But he fears lax market regulations could compromise the health of local breeds.

“There is indiscriminate insemination going on, which could spoil our pure breeds,” he told IPS.

He favours the use of high quality semen taken from local beasts like Sahiwal cattle, which originated here in the Punjab, rather than the imported variety “because our local elite animals are more resistant to the weather and environment, can endure the heat and do not develop ticks the way cross-bred imported varieties do”.

Irfan Elahi, secretary of the Punjab Livestock Department, echoed his words. Talking to IPS over the phone from Lahore, Elahi said a bill has recently been tabled in the Punjab provincial assembly, aimed at regulating semen production units across the province.

There is already a ban on artificial insemination of Sahiwal cattle with exotic semen – these beasts can only be inseminated with better quality semen from the same breed, he added.

The Punjab government has also been actively engaged in livestock research and in 2006 began testing the progeny of Sahiwal cows and the local Nili-Ravi buffalo.

In addition, the Punjab provincial government has set up 976 artificial insemination centres to provide services to smallholders. The Punjab Livestock and Dairy Development Board is training inseminators and provides them motorbikes and insemination kits free of cost to provide services in the field, where the Livestock Department has limited reach.

Still, many farmers are reluctant to embrace the change.

Shafaqat Ali, a member of the Pakistan Dairy Farmers’ Association, believes this is because the practice is cost-prohibitive: “Each imported dose costs anywhere between 6,000 and 25,000 rupees (60 and 250 dollars) and there is no guarantee that one dose will impregnate the animal.

“An impoverished farmer cannot afford to take the risk and so relies on the natural method,” he told IPS over phone from Faisalabad, a city in the Punjab.

In developed countries, 90 to 92 percent of animals are impregnated through artificial insemination, but the rate in Pakistan is as low as seven to eight percent, according to Iqbal.

(END)