KARACHI, Feb 8: The general elections scheduled for Feb 18 pose a great challenge to the political skills of the leadership of the Awami National Party’s Sindh chapter. While the party failed to win any seats at all in the 2002 elections, the party leadership has, in the recent past, made a successful attempt to raise itself beyond merely raising slogans to practising issue-oriented politics.
The mobilisation of the city’s transporters under the banner of the ‘Loya Jirga’ in March 2007 was one of the manifestations of the party’s move towards issue-oriented politics. In a bid, no doubt, to gather the Pushto-speaking population under the ANP banner, a transporters’ rally was staged during which the city’s main arteries were blocked by parking buses and other public transport vehicles at focal points. All public transport vehicles, meanwhile, were withdrawn from their routes.
By uniting the transporters, the ANP leadership succeeded in stalling for two years government action against smoke-emitting public transport vehicles and two-stroke rickshaws. More importantly, perhaps, it created the vital impression that the city’s Pushto-speaking people were behind the party under its banner of the Loya Jirga.
While some analysts say that the transporters’ move dealt a blow to years of effort to bridge the ethnic divides in the city, others maintain that the Loya Jirga is likely to play an important role in the upcoming elections which, they maintain, are likely to be transparent given the immense pressure being levied by the United States and Europe.
Despite its dismal performance in the 2002 elections, the ANP leadership is this time quite hopeful in terms of reaching both the national and the provincial assemblies as long as the elections are free and fair, as per the commitment made to the international community by President Pervez Musharraf who continues to call the shots despite having doffed the uniform of the chief of army staff.
The ANP is the successor of the National Awami Party which was banned in 1975. It was founded by Khan Abdul Wali Khan, the son of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan who was a great believer in and practitioner of non-violent politics.
The provincial headquarters of the ANP are located in Banaras Colony where the main crossing is named ‘Bacha Khan Chowk’ after Khan Ghaffar Khan’s popular title. The party draws support from the city’s Pushto-speaking population which is concentrated mainly in peripheral areas such as Sohrab Goth, Quaidabad, Landhi, Site Area, the Korangi Industrial Area, Gadap, Baldia, Keamari and Jamshed Town. Like the other communities of the city, the Pushto-speaking community has contributed its share in forging the metropolis of Karachi from Kolachi.
Poor track record
The ANP’s performance in 2002 was a disappointment in terms of the Pakhtoon nationalist card. According to the party leader Asfandyar Wali Khan, Karachi has a Pukhtoon population of over three million and is the largest urban centre of the Pushto-speaking people in the country. Despite this, however, none of the nine candidates fielded by the party in the 2002 elections won a single seat, and these candidates collectively gathered only 13,363 votes between them. No party representative managed to get elected to the provincial legislature either.
This fiasco is attributed to a number of factors, amongst them the party’s secular character which sits uneasily with the basic grooming of the majority of the Pushto-speakers who were brought up with a strong religious outlook. One proof of this hypothesis is the fact that at least three Pushto-speaking candidates, who contested the 2002 general elections from the platform of the six-party religious alliance of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), proved successful in reaching the Sindh Assembly. These were Maulana Omar Sadiq, Hafiz Mohammed Naeem and Maulana Ahsanullah Hazarvi.
Another reason behind the ANP’s failure to make it to the national and provincial assemblies is that fact that there is a low voter turnout amongst the community’s female population. Furthermore, say analysts, the majority of the working class vote bank of the party refrains from indulging in party politics and instead remains predominantly preoccupied with employment issues.
Optimism about polls
However, such analyses are not accepted by Amin Khattak, the Sindh secretary-general of the ANP. He believes that the party’s failed mainly because constituencies were demarcated in such a way that the Pushto-speaking population was divided up and rendered unable to send its representatives to the assemblies.
However, the success of the three MMA candidates from the Pushto-speaking community comes to mind here, as does that of Irfanullah Khan Marwat who was elected in 2002 on the ticket of the Farooq Leghari-led National Alliance.
Mr Khattak also pointed out that ‘vested interests’ play an important role, citing the 2002 elections when the National Alliance was prevented from forming an electoral alliance with the PML-Q in Karachi, although such cooperation was witnessed in other parts of the country, including Sindh. According to the ANP leader, on the eve of elections the establishment always created an atmosphere that prevented candidates contesting on tickets of principled opposition from being successful. This was why, he said, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which bagged a total of 0.675 million votes from a 1.7 million strong electorate, emerged as the sole arbiter of the metropolis.
Nevertheless, Mr Khattak expressed optimism about the outcome of the upcoming Feb 18 polls and said that this time the party had made a concerted effort to ensure a high voter turnout, including the women.
ANP’s performance in the 2002 elections
Constituency Total # of Voter ANP candidate Votes Winning candidate Votes
