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

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI , May 11 2013 (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.

On Apr. 16, 2013, a Taliban suicide bomber targeted a political rally organised by the Awami National Party (ANP). Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Apr 17 2013 (IPS)

Bacha Khan Markaz, a two-storey building in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar, is abuzz with activity. Located deep in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, whose northwestern tip borders Afghanistan, the building serves as the headquarters for the Awami National Party (ANP), which is gearing up for general elections on May 11.

But contesting major polls in a Taliban stronghold is no easy task. Tucked in between the flurry of press conferences and public meetings are warning letters, death threats and even assassinations.

"We do not fear the Taliban. We have been making sacrifices even before Pakistan itself came into being."
On Sunday, Apr. 14, ANP leader Mukarram Shah was killed in a bomb blast in the Swat valley, an administrative district of the KP. A prominent member of the Swat Peace Committee, Shah was alone in his car at the time of the explosion, which the outlawed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP) quickly claimed responsibility for.

TTP does not trouble to hide its hatred of the ANP, which has ruled the KP since 2008. In 2009, a major ANP operation evicted the Taliban from the Swat valley.

Following the Apr. 14 assassination, militants reiterated their stern warning to “secular” parties that opposition to the Taliban will not be tolerated.

All civilians have been instructed to stay away from rallies and public meetings – but the threats have fallen on deaf ears as, time and again, election hopefuls from groups like the ANP, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) come out into the streets, drawing crowds of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of supporters.

On Apr. 16, 2013, a Taliban suicide bomber targeted a political rally organised by the Awami National Party (ANP). Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

And as the popularity of secular parties grows, so too does the wrath of the militants. On Tuesday, Apr. 16, a suicide bombing at an ANP public meeting in Peshawar killed 10 people.

Though visibly shaken by these attacks, the ANP is showing no sign of slowing down its campaign drive in this last push before Election Day – rather, it seems to be ramping up efforts.

The party has a long and proud legacy of taking up the cudgels on behalf of their countrymen and women. ANP Vice President and former Federal Minister Ghulam Ahmed Bilour tells IPS his party “does not fear the Taliban, as we have been making sacrifices even before Pakistan itself came into being.

“Our leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (known as Bacha Khan, or “king of chiefs”) spent 33 years in jail for fighting British rule and then later, fighting the Pakistan government for the rights of Pashtuns”, the country’s second-largest ethnic group, in what was then called the North-West Frontier Province.

Through years of struggle, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan helped residents of the province win the right to vote, while his son Abdul Wali Khan worked relentlessly to bring about some degree of provincial autonomy for the majority-Pashtun region.

Today, Bilour – who was injured in Tuesday’s suicide — is contesting elections for a seat in the 342-member National Assembly of Pakistan, which is responsible for electing the country’s prime minister.

While courting his constituency in Peshawar, Bilour faces strong opposition in the form of the beloved cricketer-turned-politician, Imran Khan, head of the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), which has not yet fallen out of favour with the Taliban.

But for people like Mushtari Bibi, a student in the political science department of the University of Peshawar, the choice is clear: “The ANP must win to establish peace and do away with militancy. If the ANP is kept out of politics, the country could fall to the Taliban,” the young student told IPS.

She says others parties have not openly criticised the Taliban as vehemently as the ANP.

The party has pledged to end militancy in this war-ravaged northern province that struggled against violence ever since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan toppled the government in Kabul and sent thousands of militants fleeing into the mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The ANP has also launched major development projects here; between 2008 and 2013 the party established over 30 colleges and universities, distributed free textbooks to students up to the 10^th grade, built the province’s first ever children’s hospital, and provided scores of scholarships to girls in rural areas to promote women’s empowerment.

The top priorities in its political manifesto are eradicating militancy, ensuring women and minority rights and providing healthcare, education and employment to the people in northern Pakistan, millions of whom have been rendered homeless or jobless by the militancy.

Over the years, the ANP has also won the sympathies of many of the province’s 25 million residents for withstanding “a merciless campaign of violence, launched against it by militants”, according to Bilour.

The party’s 2013 election campaign began in the Gul Bahar area of Peshawar on Monday, Apr. 7, just a few short months after Bilour’s younger brother and former KP Senior Minister Bashir Ahmed Bilour was assassinated by the Taliban in a suicide attack in December 2012.

According to Ghulam Ahmed Bilour, the ANP has “sacrificed too much” to call off its campaign in the face of threats and intimidations.

In total, the group has lost 750 members to attacks by the TTP. Rather than allowing the terror to deter them, however, Bilour and his fellow party members are determined to see the race through in order to convey their message of peace to the people.

“If we take the Taliban seriously and sit home instead of campaigning for the election, it would amount to leaving the field quite open to them — and, by extension, the religious parties who have a soft spot for militants – to consolidate their power. We don’t want that to happen,” Bilour said ahead of his election meeting in the historic Qissa Khwani Bazaar, where British troops massacred over 400 unarmed, peaceful demonstrators in 1930.

This rally, like most public gatherings hosted by the ANP, is expected to draw upwards of 5,000 people.

Some, like Peshawar University doctoral candidate Shehnaz Begum, believe an ANP victory will only mean more bloodshed and violence. “If they (ANP) win, it could snowball into a major crisis because the Taliban would never spare them for their secular views,” she told IPS.

She also echoed an oft-expressed sentiment here, that the ANP should refrain from “siding with the United States” against the Taliban, and should denounce “liberalism”.