The Awami National Party (ANP), in its just-concluded five-year rule, has to some extent achieved its promise of having the province renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and obtaining provincial autonomy. This would have gladdened the heart of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as Bacha Khan, whose principles still inspire the province’s Pakhtun population.

In 1956, Bacha Khan’s son, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, joined the National Awami Party (NAP) which split in 1965 with Wali Khan becoming the president of the pro-Moscow faction. The party participated in the 1970 elections with the PPP but the alliance did not last. However, the NAP emerged strong in the 1970 polls and formed coalition provincial governments with the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) in what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (then the NWFP) and Balochistan. This, however, was also short-lived and Wali Khan was sent to jail; the NAP was barred from politics when the Supreme Court upheld the allegation that it was conspiring against the state of Pakistan. General Ziaul Haq had the charges against the NAP quashed and Wali Khan was set free. He joined the National Democratic Party and ultimately formed the ANP in 1986.

The ANP is currently the largest Pakhtun party in Pakistan. It formed a coalition government with the Pakistan Peoples Party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and arch-rival Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in Sindh in 1988. It was also a member of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy. It allied with the PML-N in June 1989, which led to a formal split in the party with many activists allying with the PPP.

In 1990, it went into an alliance with the PML-N to form a coalition government in the erstwhile NWFP till the dissolution of assemblies in 1993. The ANP again forged and electoral alliance with the PML-N 1997 but pulled out of the coalition in 1998, accusing the latter of backtracking on its promise of renaming of the province. The party campaigned against the Nawaz Sharif government in 1998 from the platform of the Grand Democratic Alliance.

The party had six seats in the National Assembly in 1990 and three seats in 1993.The party played an active part as a member of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy. That was until the September 2001 attacks in the United States, when it left the alliance over Nato’s intended ouster of the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

An ANP-PPP alliance was routed by the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal in the 2002 elections, after which it was thought that the party would not recover. But in 2008 it became the single largest party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and formed a coalition government with the PPP.

The emergence of the ANP in Karachi, where it won two Sindh assembly seats in the last elections, was a welcome development. It also saw general success with 12 seats in the National Assembly, as many in the Senate and 47 in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly.

A political party that lays claims to liberalism and secularism, the ANP also enjoys support in Balochistan and lately in Sindh, and maintains cordial relations with Afghanistan and India. Known for its pro-Moscow tendencies, the ANP has also become close to the US, especially when the ANP-led provincial government spearheaded the military operation against the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in Malakand.

Currently led by Asfandyar Wali Khan, the party enjoys greatest support in Peshawar, Mardan, Malakand and Charsadda, as well as Karachi and Balochistan; it has been the only political party that has battled the TTP on the ground. The party has lost an estimated 800 leaders and workers to the TTP since 2008 and the militant outfit has placed the party on the top of its hit list.

The TTP has launched six attacks on ANP leaders and candidates during the past month alone, including an attack on Ghulam Ahmed Bilour in Peshawar, making it almost impossible for the party to run its election campaign. This, together with the incumbency factor, may make it hard for the ANP to repeat its 2008 success story; it is defiant nonetheless. More than 500 have applied for party tickets.