Voters in Pakistan’s general election outrightly rejected political parties with extremism records in the country’s Jul. 25, 2018 – which had the largest ever voter turnout. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jul 30 2018 (IPS)

Voters in Pakistan’s general election outrightly rejected political parties with extremism records and candidates linked to banned terrorist groups, opting instead to back liberal forces in a support for peace.

“None of the parties related to terrorism won any of the 272 national assembly seats as the people don’t want to empower them to legislate,” analyst Muhammad Junaid told IPS.

On Saturday, Jul. 28, electoral officials announced that Pakistani cricket star Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf or PTI (Move for Justice party) won 115 of the 272 contested seats in the National Assembly. The former ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), won 64 seats and Pakistan People’s Party won 43. Other seats went to smaller parties and independents, with militant parties losing badly.

Junaid, who teaches political science at the University of Peshawar, said that Pakistan has suffered a great deal because of terrorism and people had clearly rejected terrorist-linked groups in the polls.

Political party Allah-o-Akbar Tehreek supported extremist candidates allegedly linked to the mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attack that killed 108 people, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Saeed is head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), one of the largest terrorist organisations in South Asia.

However, the party was rejected by voters across the country as it failed to win a single seat in the national assembly.

Saeed’s son, Talha Saeed, contested the elections from Punjab province, but lost. Saeed’s son-in-law, Khalid Waleed, faced a similar fate. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) results show that the party’s candidates received just 171,441 votes, just a drop in the ocean when compared with the more than 49 million votes that were cast.

Tehreek-i-Labaik Pakistan (TLP), another party with a clear sectarian mindset, had fielded more than 150 candidates contesting the National Assembly seats and hundreds more who contested provincial assembly seats. The party received just over two million votes and just two of its candidates were elected to the Sindh provincial assembly, the ECP results showed. Sindh is one of Pakistan’s four provinces.

People also rejected candidates from Jamiat Ulemai Islam Sami for the party’s connection with the terrorist group Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The party’s leader, Maulana Samiul Haq, is known as the father of the Taliban and his seminary Darul Uloom Haqqania is referred to as the “University of Jihadists”.

Pakistan faced a great deal of criticism from both the international and local media, human rights groups as well as political leaders for having hundreds of individuals with clear links to extremists openly campaigning in the election.

In June, the global watchdog Financial Action Task Force placed Pakistan on its terrorism financing watchlist. The call for Pakistan to be placed on the list was led by the United States in a move to pressure the country to close financing loopholes for terrorist groups. The U.S. has previously accused Pakistan of providing a savehaven for terrorists.

The country itself, however, has not been immune to terror attacks.

On Jul. 10, Haroon Bilour, a candidate from the Awami National Party, was killed in Peshawar along with 30 others. The terrorist group TTP claimed reasonability for the attack. Two days later, a candidate from PTI was killed in a separate act.

On Jul. 13, candidate Siraj Raisani, along with 130 others, was killed in a suicide attack in Balochistan, one of the Pakistan’s four provinces. On election day the province was scene to another suicide attack, which killed 30 people.

However, the deadly attacks failed to deter people as they formed long queues at polling stations to cast their votes. Some 55 percent of Pakistan’s registered 100 million voters turned out at the polls – the highest ever turnout in Pakistan’s history.

Junaid said militants wanted to advance their own agenda and rule people through the use of force and fear and not democracy.

In Khan’s victory speech he continued to condemn terrorism and vowed to establish peace in the region. “We want a better relationship with neighbouring countries, India, Iran and Afghanistan as well as China and the U.S. to have peace in the region,” he said.

Pakistan’s army deputed 350,000 soldiers to guard polling stations on election day and publically declared their support for democracy.

“Militants want to create anarchy in our country, but the nation is united against militancy. Our military and civil leadership are on the same page and determined to continue the war against terror till its logical end,” military spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor said.

Analyst Khadim Hussain said that it was indicative of people’s hate for terrorism that they took part in a “high-decibel campaign” for the national polls to defeat terrorism.

“Long queues were seen outside the polling booths. People remained vibrant and upbeat, which was a signal that they wanted democracy and rejected terrorism in all its forms and manifestations,” he said.

Despite incidents of terrorism, the mood was extremely upbeat, and towns and villages were adorned with party flags and banners calling on people to vote for respective candidates, he said. The message was loud and clear that people wanted democracy at any cost, Hussain said.

Foreign observers declared the election free, fair and transparent.

“A number of violent attacks, targeting political parties, party leaders, candidates and election officials, affected the campaign environment,” the European Union’s election observation mission chief Michael Gahler, told a news conference Jul. 27.

Most interlocutors acknowledged a systematic effort to undermine the former ruling party, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), through cases of corruption, contempt of court and terrorist charges against its leaders and candidates, he added.

Religious parties contesting the polls also fared poorly.

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

By Zofeen Ebrahim, Irfan Ahmed, and Ashfaq Yusufzai
LAHORE, May 13 2013 (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.

For 70-year-old Ghulam Fatima, the upcoming general elections on May 11 promise to be unlike any she has witnessed before in Pakistan.

Women’s advocate Shazia Bashir leading a rally in support of women’s right to vote in Paikhel, Pakistan. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

For the first time in her life she will step out of her house on Election Day and join the throng of people heading to the neighbourhood polling station in Paikhel union council, an administrative unit of Mianwali district in the northwest Punjab province, to exercise her right to vote.

Fatima and the roughly 6,000 eligible female voters in this community have been barred from the ballot box for half a century. They were disenfranchised in 1963 when tribal elders and rival castes decided that women must “respect traditional values” of tribes like the Niazi, which dominate this area.

According to Shazia Bashir, a programme specialist at the national advocacy group Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO), local male leaders agreed that the sight of women at polling stations was indecent, and would attract the unwelcome gaze of strangers. They also disliked the idea of women “confronting” or interacting with men at the ballot box, Bashir told IPS.

Tribal elders command a great deal of authority here. A local justice system known as “jirga” acts as a substitute for courts, and few political parties have a presence in the community.

Thus the ban remained in force until Herculean efforts by local activist groups succeeded in bringing stakeholders to the table to finally overturn the archaic law in December 2012.

Struggle to achieve voter literacy

Fatima says her son, who in previous election years had supported wholeheartedly her exclusion from the ballot box, has this year agreed to accompany her to the polling station, since she is completely ignorant of the voting process.

NGOs committed to bringing women into the electoral sphere are conducting practical trainings to develop basic voter literacy, but they face obstacles in the form of deep-rooted patriarchal attitudes.

The SPO’s repeated attempts to set up an adult literacy centre for women in Paikhel have been consistently thwarted since 2009 by locals determined to keep women “in their rightful place.” At most, two or three women would attend classes intended for at least 25 people.

For years, women themselves resisted attempts to reverse the ban, refusing to attend events on voter rights and preventing SPO activists from entering their homes.

Shazia says she even received death threats from some locals who wanted to maintain the status quo, but she stayed her course.

Eventually the campaign turned its attention to the men, spelling out the cost of keeping a huge section of the community out of the electoral process.

Seen by mainstream political parties as an “insignificant” electorate, Mianwali bears all the signs of government neglect, says Muhammad Ziaullah, president of Al Rehman Welfare Development Society.

Only one basic health unit, one dispensary and two secondary schools for boys serve this community of 4,000 households, he told IPS. There are no secondary schools for girls or higher secondary schools for male or female students.

Employment here is restricted to small-scale agricultural production, menial labour and honeybee farming, bringing families an average monthly income of between 30 and 50 dollars.

Children are forced to work to supplement their parents’ income, often employed as assistant mechanics in auto repair shops or helpers in tea kiosks. Inadequate health and education facilities feed this vicious cycle.

In a bid to promote voter participation, activists urged the influential District Steering Committees (DSCs) to revive welfare centres, known as Zakat Committees, capable of doling out funds to the needy.

SPO Regional Head Salman Abid told IPS the ensuing influx of government aid “helped locals to understand the benefits of staying in the political mainstream. They started listening to us seriously.” From there, activists moved to advocating for women’s right vote as crucial to maintaining government support and financial assistance.

By Dec. 12, 2012, tribal chiefs aligned with leading political parties like the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) agreed to lift the ban on women voters, with endorsement coming directly from the descendants of those who imposed it 50 years ago.

Raza-ul-Mustafa, a tribal chief whose grandfather was instrumental in implementing the ban, announced in a meeting held in December last year that his wife would be the first to cast her vote. He is currently contesting elections on the PTI ticket.

To help publicise their efforts, local advocates erected a large board at the main junction in Paikhel, in between the central bus station and rickshaw stand, and asked male members of the community who supported women’s right to vote to sign it.

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has promised to set up women-only polling stations at a maximum distance of two kilometres away from the men’s, says Abid. It has been decided that husbands or sons will accompany their female relatives on Saturday.

Zaitoon Bibi, a middle-aged mother of two, told IPS she is “happy to go along with the change”.

“We refrained from voting as our elders decided it was against tradition; this time we will vote, as there is a unanimous decision on it,” she said simply.

But others see this as a monumental development, one that could impact other regions in Pakistan where women’s turnout at the 2008 general election, though not banned outright, was “abysmally low” according to Abid, who cited Punjabi districts like Attock, Chakwal, Sargodha and Jhang as examples of low female participation.

“The Paikhel decision is a historic one and could be an example to be followed,” he said. “If such a strong decision can be made here, why not in other places?”

Indeed, many women’s rights groups around the country have mobilised ahead of May 11 to provide protection to women voters on Election Day. Memories of 2008, when polling stations were torched to prevent women from casting their ballots, are fresh in people’s minds.

Analysts have praised the ECP for publicising the fact that “undue influence” on prospective voters is a punishable offence under the 1976 Representation of the People Act, carrying a one-year jail sentence or a fine.

Kashif Nawab, an election observer with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told IPS that banning women from voting falls under this category.

Nawab’s duties include timely reporting of violations of the code of conduct issued Wednesday by the ECP. He says he witnessed religious groups attempting to convince women to remain home on May 11 during his recent visit to the Attock district in Punjab. After he recorded his observation, the district election commissioner reprimanded the groups involved.

In Paikhel, the SPO has engaged a local task force to observe and report on possible violations, and ensure that women reach polling stations in time to cast their votes.

This past week volunteers visited hundreds of households and conducted “voting exercises” with women to ensure that they understand the procedure.

Encouraging support for women voters has also come from the most unlikely place: the Pakistan Ulema Council, which issued a decree last month calling voting an “Islamic responsibility” and non-voting a sin, including for women.