KARACHI, Oct 10: Those who braved the scorching sun to use their right to vote in NA-249, PS-110 and PS-111, were few, but charged with political spirit.
The electoral staff, polling agents as well as the voters seemed involved in the process. But exceptions were there - to prove the rule. “I came to the polling station at 11am,” a woman polling agent of the MQM admitted bashfully at the Government Degree College in Lyari.
It was 5:15pm. The presiding officer had stopped polling, saying that they had begun the day exactly at 8:15am. But a woman PPP polling agent challenged this, saying that the polling had started not before 9am. But she too admitted that she was a bit late.
The college housed three polling stations. The presiding officers claimed that polling had started by 8:15am. So there was nothing wrong if they stopped the process by 5:15pm. But scores of young men outside the college complained that at least in one of the three stations polling started between 9am and 9:30am. They wanted that they be allowed to cast their votes till 6pm to 6:30pm. They were, however, not allowed.
In Zahid School Jinnahabad, Presiding Officer Ghulam Haider Rizvi said: “Our polling station (No 34) was to be housed in Degree College, Lyari, but when we reached there we were told that it is a school. Because of this, polling started at the school quite late,” he said, in the dim light of candles as power supply was off. Outside the building, Abdul Basit of the MQM said polling started at 10:50am, which was confirmed by the polling staff.
“Late polling will be allowed at this station,” Assistant Returning Officer Qazi Naeem said, adding that the confusion arose as the contract letter to the presiding officer had the name of Degree College as his polling station. A repeat visit to the station showed that polling was going on after 5pm.
The turnout was hardly 30 per cent according to the figures that Dawn gathered from 20-plus polling stations out of total 147. At the Syed Mahmood Shah Ghazi Primary School in Kumharwara, the figures showed 516 and 397 votes cast till 5pm out of around 1,771 at the polling station No 37 and about 2,000 at station No 38.
The percentage might have improved a little afterwards as some 50 men and women were waiting outside to cast their votes and the two presiding officers seemed almost willing to allow them extra 30 minutes. “Polling had started at 8:30am here,” said one of the president officers. “But at our station it started at 8am,” said another. Eventually he had to give in his logic to the rising demand of the voters who were arguing with the policemen outside. Some of them did come in to cast votes.
But not all the 250,000 registered voters in the constituency seemed eager to use their right as those who were on the verge of picking up a fight with the policemen at this school in Kumharwara.
At S.M.B. Fatima Jinnah Govt Girls College, only 18 votes had been cast by 11:30am out of total 397 registered voters at one of the four polling booths. A polling agent of the PPP offered a justification: “Voters here live mostly in flats and you know people living in apartments are not the early birds.”
One marked feature of the polling process in this constituency was the involvement of whoever had turned up. Beaming faces, smiling eyes, rising temperature of the youth of the two prominent parties trading allegations and Baloch women clad in traditional embroidered flowing robes pushing their ways into the polling booths.
Ladies first: it is a government boys primary school in Nawa Lane. Yaqoob, an acting presiding officer of polling station No 24, is sweating. He cannot keep a large group of women in queue: they are becoming noisy minute after minute. Silence remains a strange word for them when PPP candidate Abdul Habib Memon makes an appearance. He grabs the presiding officer by shoulder and take him to one of the female booths as an elderly woman had been denied the right to vote. The rangers jawans try to send him out but he waves a copy of his identity card and roars: “Mind you men I am a candidate from this area.”
Mistakes were there and mismanagement seemed rife. Yaqoob said he being an assistant presiding officer had to take over as a presiding officer, because the designated officer did not show up. Two assistant presiding officers also did not come.
At polling station No 97, in a Govt Girls Secondary School on Mission Road, Dawn saw policemen in civvies carrying six ballot boxes at 10:15am. “We had asked the TMO Saddar to arrange eight ballot boxes for that particular station,” said Assistant Returning Officer Qazi Mohammad Naeem. “Ask him and the TPO why the delivery was delayed.” Neither could be reached immediately to resolve the mystery.
At another polling station (No 45), the presiding officer confessed to have opened the seal of the ballot box “in the presence of the police”, as no polling agent had turned up till 9:30am.
But two sub-inspectors posted outside the polling station said they were not present at de-sealing of the boxes. “But I was there, sir,” said a young man in civvies who identified himself as a constable of the special branch.
