December 19, 2006	Tuesday	Ziqa'ad 27, 1427

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LAHORE, Dec 18: The announcement of Supreme Court Bar Association election results was heralded by anti-government slogans by a good number of lawyers in Lahore on Monday night.

As many as 611 out of 1,080 votes were cast in Lahore where the Punjab Bar Council vice-chairperson Chaudhry Mohammad Azhar presided over the re-poll process held at the Lahore High Court Bar Association building. However, not much enthusiasm was witnessed among senior lawyers who turned up in small numbers. No long queues were witnessed at any time in they day.

A senior lawyer told Dawn on the condition of anonymity that most of his colleagues were not interested in the re-poll, yet they had come to the polling station for the sake of the unity of the legal fraternity whose confidence stood shaken after the developments taking place following the first poll on Oct 31.

At the same time, the unofficial results coming from Lahore and elsewhere in the country showed that no big difference had resulted in the re-poll as the pattern of voting was more or less on the same pattern as on Oct 31.

The margin of victory and loss of main rivals in the contest, particularly Munir A Malik, who is the nominee of the Hamid Khan-Ashraf Wahla group, and Raja Haq Nawaz, the candidate of the Qayyum-Khosa group, and the pattern of vote cast in their favour or against them, had undergone no big change except for minor variations.

For example, the lawyers of Quetta voted against Munir Malik who won from Balochistan on Oct 31. The pattern also changed in Bahawalpur where more lawyers cast their vote in favour of Raja Haq Nawaz on the first poll and supported Munir Malik in the re-poll.

In Lahore also, a little change in the mood was witnessed when senior lawyers polled a few more votes in favour of Mr Malik than the first vote when Raja Haq Nawaz won, although with a slander majority.

The re-poll was supervised by the Pakistan Bar Council under a direction by the Supreme Court. The PBC also involved the provincial bar councils and nominated their vice-chairpersons as presiding officers at principal seats of provincial high courts at Karachi, Quetta, Peshawar and Lahore.

The presidents of high court bar associations were given a similar responsibility at benches at Abbotabad, Rawalpindi-Islamabad, Bahawalpur and Multan.

The PBC appointed the chairperson of the its executive committee, Syed Kalb-i-Hasan, as the returning officer, and constituted a six-member committee, comprising Justice Gul Zarreen Kiyani (retired) from Islamabad, Justice Amir Alam (retired) from Lahore, Akhtar Ali from Karachi, Syed Zafar Abbas Zaidi from Peshawar and Raja Muhammad Afsar from Quetta to supervise the re-poll.

The committee is scheduled to meet on Dec 21 at the Supreme Court building in Islamabad to count the vote from all the eight polling stations and announce the result through a notification.