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.

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.

Former provincial assembly member Shagufta Malik and former national assembly member Bushra Gohar at Peshawar Press Club. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, May 8 2013 (IPS)

“Women in Pakhtun society have traditionally helped their men in hard times,” declares former Pakistani lawmaker Shagufta Malik. They are doing so again, and how, going by their hectic campaigning activity in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

An erstwhile member of the provincial assembly, Malik is spearheading the election campaign for Awami National Party chief Asfandyar Wali Khan, who is running for a seat in the national legislature.

The ANP leader had narrowly survived a suicide attack in October 2008 in Charsadda, one of the 25 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the birthplace of the party, and has since been confined to the federal capital Islamabad and restricted from visiting his constituency as often as he would have wished.

Now, as the May 11 election date looms near, the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has stepped up its deadly exploits against the ANP primarily, and other parties such as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). Accordingly, Wali Khan and other leaders have been instructed to stay away from electioneering in the province, which is adjacent to the Afghan border.

A band of women leaders from the ANP has therefore taken it upon themselves to campaign for their leaders in their absence. “The Awami National Party is not the type to be frightened by acts of terrorism,” says Malik, who hails from Nowshera district and is leading the campaign for Wali Khan in the NA-7 constituency in Charsadda. “It’s high time we supported our leaders and campaigned for them,” she adds.

Assisting Malik in her effort are other prominent ANP women leaders, among them Bushra Gohar and Jamila Gilani, both former members of the National Assembly. Carrying lanterns – the election symbol of the ANP – these feisty women are going from area to area, talking to the female population.

“We have decided to reach out to the people through our women,” says Malik.

Gohar adds: “We gather them in spacious homes in different villages and hamlets and address them.”

Currently, the National Assembly has 60 seats reserved for women and 10 for minorities; there is direct election for the remaining 272 seats. And forget contesting elections – women in some provinces cannot even cast their votes as it would amount to going against local tradition.

That situation has undergone a sea change now, says Gohar. Malik and her team are not only convincing women in the region to cast their votes in favour of ANP candidates and persuading their menfolk to do the same, but also educating them in the whole process of casting a ballot.

There are a total of 12,266,157 registered voters in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: 5,257,624 women and 7,008,533 men. The ANP won the largest number of seats in the last general election in 2008, getting its first chief minister since 1948.

Attacks on the party, however, have made the going tough for the ANP. The 2008 attempt on Wali Khan’s life took its toll and he has had to pay the price of being away from his constituency. Incidentally, his mother, Begum Nasim Wali Khan, was the first woman to win a general seat in the National Assembly, in the 1977 elections.

The ANP, says Gilani, who is also a staunch activist with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, has already lost some 800 leaders and workers to the Taliban and can’t afford to lose their leader. If the terrorists succeed in killing him, she says, it would be difficult for the party to stay united because he is a binding force.

The ruling party is standing steadfast in its resolve to face up to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Despite the blasts and the killings, party leaders are continuing their electoral campaign and holding meetings, though perhaps with less fervour than in the last elections.

The effort is to garner sympathy among the electorate by highlighting the sacrifices of its leaders and the ANP’s bravery in not backing down despite the constant threat to lives from the militants. Impressed by their efforts, people are joining the party in droves, the leaders claim.

Senior leader Ghulam Ahmed Bilour survived a suicide attack as recently as Apr. 16. His younger brother, Bashir Ahmed Bilour, a senior minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, was killed Dec. 22 last year.

Regardless of this, Ghulam Ahmed Bilour is in no mood to give up and cede ground to his rivals, particularly Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan, against whom he is running in the NA-1 constituency of Peshawar.

Barely a fortnight before the elections, he was found addressing a meeting of the elders of the Mohmand tribe. Ghulam Ahmed’s nephew – the deceased Bashir’s son – Haroon Ahmed Bilour is contesting PK-3, a constituency they have won five times in a row.

Former chief minister Ameer Haider Khan Hoti is also holding election-related meetings in Mardan, a city and district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. He is cautious about the unsafe environment, but is managing to stay in touch with workers.

Likewise, the ANP’s general secretary Malik Ghulam, who is standing in PK-2, in Peshawar, is leaving no stone unturned to reach out to his electorate.

In a meeting at Bilal Town Grand Trunk Road on May 2, where he says many people announced their intention to join the ANP, he tore into rival Pakistan People’s Party candidate, former minister Syed Zahir Ali Shah, and presented himself as the credible alternative. He argued that his party’s track record would help them win.

At their end, Shagufta Malik and other women leaders are spreading the same message of development and the need to battle against Islamist militancy.

At a public meeting of women in Prang Mamakhel in Charsadda district on May 2, Malik said the party was confident of showing better results due to the massive development work it had undertaken during its five-year rule in the province.

“Our party executed development schemes at the cost of the lives of its workers and leaders, and won’t spare any effort to continue their struggle for the uplift of the Pakhtun population (the majority in the province),” she said.

She exhorted people to vote for ANP leader Wali Khan and other candidates, to enable the party to resume its efforts to crush militancy and establish peace.

Gilani and provincial assembly member Yasmin Pir Muhammad Khan also addressed the meeting.

Muhammad Khan emphasised yet again that the ANP was the main target of the militants and the only party taking them on. She also said the matchless sacrifices were bearing fruit: even the women are out in support of the party.