AT their hujras, district and town councillor candidates are surrounded by supporters. General and youth councillor candidates chat at corner shops. Colourful posters and graffiti depicting election symbols adorn the walls.

We are here, making our way through mostly unpaved streets, to look up polling stations in Urmar Payan union council in Peshawar, which saw violence during the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa local government elections on May 30.

We reach a government school that was used as a polling station last Saturday. Today, it’s locked. Someone locates the watchman who brings the keys.

Inside a classroom, boards proclaiming ‘presiding officer’, ‘polling booth’, etc., are pasted on the walls. Chairs and tables have been scattered, some windowpanes broken with the shards still lying on the floor. Amongst them are pieces of paper, wrappers, biscuit packs and some torn-out ballot papers.

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“The ballot box was placed here,” somebody tells me. “When they came in, they broke ballot boxes and windowpanes,” interjects another person who follows us in from the street. More people gather, each one giving his view of events.

“It all started from this women’s polling station,” explains Iftikhar Ali, a PML-N supporter. “Men were not allowed to enter but PTI men did and stamped ballots. When candidates and supporters from other parties came to know, they rushed here too. They had to break down the door. They saw PTI people stamping ballots in bulk. Then more people came in and a scuffle broke out. Eventually, polling was cancelled and the army took away the ballot boxes. Then some people got violent at the men’s polling station and electioneering in the entire union council was put off,” continues Ali.

“They were all party to it: the government, the administration and the police,” alleges Haji Malik Nisar Khan, the PML-N candidate for district councillor. “They told our female voters that the stamp to cast votes had not arrived yet. They allowed PTI voters to go in and vote.”

“After two hours of polling, only 29 votes could be cast at the men’s polling station,” he adds. “At the women’s polling station, 211 votes were cast. When people heard about this rigging, they reached the women’s polling station. By the time we arrived, some people had already broken the ballot boxes and left.”

The Jamaat-i-Islami’s local leader Latif-ur-Rehman blames the “educated and trained” female polling agents of the PTI.

“The PTI’s female agents were educated, highly trained and shrewd. I brought around 130 women with me to vote. PTI agents were telling other women to come in and vote for the bat [the PTI’s election symbol]. The security guard would not allow me to enter. The PTI’s women influenced all the local women, who are naive and unaware of the process. Then many people came in here and broke everything.”

The ANP candidate for district councillor also believes that the reason behind the violence was “outsider women”. “The PTI women who had come here from other parts of Peshawar were running the show,” says Malik Qamar-uz-Zaman. “They were allowing only those local women to vote who wanted to vote for the PTI.”

Now, we look for the PTI candidate. He asks us to contact him another day. Upon insistence, he invites us for a meeting in main Peshawar city.

“The entire media has teamed up against our party. That’s why I avoid meeting journalists,” says Naveed Khan Barki. Then he comes to the point.

“Basically, they did not want women to vote. The PML-N, ANP, independent candidates, everybody asked me to bar women from voting, but I did not agree. I knew local women didn’t know about the polling process, so I gathered all my female relatives from different parts of Peshawar and made them agents in my union council. When they saw that the majority of the women were voting for the PTI and our agents were doing well, the opponents resorted to violence,” he explains. “They were from the PML-N and other parties. They even fired shots in the air.”

A female assistant presiding officer who was assigned duty at this station says they were not allowed to work.

“When we arrived there with the polling material, the station was already packed to capacity. The women here did even not know how to make a queue,” says the assistant presiding officer who does not want to give her name.

“We had to set up three booths but the crowd allowed us to make only two. There were almost five agents from each party and they were unable to handle the situation. As soon as we succeeded in getting the polling under way, a mob of men intruded and ordered that everything be closed down. They broke everything they saw. Many of them took away polling material. We had to take refuge in a police station,” she recalls. “All this happened because of the shortage of staff and because people were hostile towards polling.”

Sajjad Khan Tarakzai, a senior journalist who has monitored political developments here for two decades, says the violence should not be given undue consideration given the large scale of local government elections and local norms.

“These elections were a huge activity,” he comments. “Almost everyone was involved because there were so many candidates, and it was at the real grass-roots level. Plus, people here carry weapons. So violence was not a distant possibility.”

Published in Dawn June 5th, 2015

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