Over 86m to choose 268 MNAs today; violence during campaign cost 117 lives

ISLAMABAD: As the Pakistani voter prepares to vote today, it is safe to say that this has been the most unpredictable and predictable election race at the same time.

Thursday night ended with rallies by the three main parties in Lahore and Islamabad where Nawaz Sharif, Imran Khan and Bilawal Bhutto spoke — two of them via video links. One because he was bedridden due to a fall and the second because of the security threat.

A grand total of 86,162,639 registered voters will vote at 69,729 polling stations spread across the country. They will be deciding the fate of 268 seats (the election on four was cancelled).

Among those watching this contest the most anxiously will be Nawaz Sharif from Raiwind, Imran Khan from the Shaukat Khanum Hospital in Lahore and President Asif Ali Zardari from Bilawal House, Karachi.

Victories and defeats foretold

That the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Awami National Party were in for a drubbing was evident some time ago; that they were going to face an onslaught from the militants was also no secret.

There were also few doubts that the PPP was going to suffer from its perceived poor performance for five years and its leadership’s neglect of its party workers.

This has been more than obvious during the election campaigns of PPP stalwarts such as Qamar Zaman Kaira and Raja Pervez Ashraf who have focused on the development work they carried out for their constituents and avoided mentioning the party in their speeches and campaigns.

As a result, there were also few who didn’t realise that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz was going to improve on its 2002 tally though its expected clean-sweep of Punjab’s GT road was stopped short by the unquantifiable force called the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf which seems to have caught the middle class’ and the political pundits’ imagination.

None of these earlier predictions were challenged by the short election campaign that lasted but three weeks.

The luxury of campaigning in Punjab

In those three weeks, however, one province was a completely different country in the territory called Pakistan.

In Punjab the election was fiercely fought as two parties faced each other vigorously, with rallies, jalsas, speeches and insults. But there was little election news and campaigning frenzy from the other three provinces.

Violence by militant groups, including the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan and the separatist groups in Balochistan, effectively forced the participating parties in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Karachi to limit their campaign. They only ventured out occasionally and silently for door to door campaigns or speeches on Skype.

A recent news report called it “Pakistan’s bloodiest campaign” adding that it cost “117 lives”.

No wonder then that in a recent interview with Dawn, Asfandyar Wali who is restricted to Islamabad refused to call these elections “free, fair and transparent”.

“Where is the level playing field,” he added.

In interior Sindh also, the campaign was one-sided as the PPP was “low key” according to one observer, who added that it was limited to Larkana and Thatta and that “in the latter it was only due to the efforts of Owais Tappi”.

The country’s largest national party appeared rudderless in a manner it did not even on the day Benazir Bhutto lost her life in 2007.

Similarly it appeared absent from the Punjab scene as well where those who were to lead its campaign — Manzoor Wattoo, Raja Pervez Ashraf and Yousuf Raza Gilani — rarely left their constituencies.

Ashraf said that he had restricted his appearances in his home town because “of the security threat”. Even on Thursday night he did not appear in the jalsa in Islamabad addressed by Bilawal Bhutto at the last minute because of a security threat.

In the last week of campaigning, another former PPP federal minister from upper Punjab said in confidence that “he was struggling and there was no one in the party who could come to his help” while both Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif had held jalsas in his district.

However, Nusrat Javed, who has covered politics as a journalist for decades, did not agree with the assessment that the PPP election campaign was non-existent. He said that the PPP candidates in Punjab were “overstretching themselves” campaigning in their individual capacity because of the “fear of losing”.

The wild card

In the unpredictability column, the first item is the performance of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf.

There is no doubt that the party and its kaptaan has arrived.

In the heart of Punjab and in some areas of KP it has impressed the watchers with its candidates and its jalsas where the fervour of the participants has compelled some of the more idealistic observers to remember the charisma of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

This time around however the support is solidly middle class and primarily urban. Social scientist Akbar Zaidi points out, the PTI has to be identified as middle class because of its support base and not its candidates.

However, no one has any clear idea of how well the party will do, which has limited the ability of pundits to predict the final seat tally that will only become clear on Sunday.

For instance, Nusrat Javed, who says that he is willing to concede no more than 35 to 40 seats to the PTI, then hastens to add that he “can be entirely wrong as were the predictions in 1970”.

All that can be said is that the party has ensured that the N’s dreams of sweeping Punjab in the face of a decimated PML-Q and a PPP in shambles have been put paid.

A PML-N member (who is not contesting the polls) told Dawn that his party leadership was having “sleepless nights”.

The senior Sharif, aware of the challenge his party faces from PTI and the numbers being bandied around, in at least two interviews (one of which was to Dawn) appealed to the people to avoid a split mandate.

“..it [the winning party] needs to have a very clear majority … to deal with serious challenges..”

PTI’s challenge to PML-N is two-fold.

On a number of seats in Punjab, it has fielded tried and tested politicians whose past performance can be used to safely predict that they have a good chance of winning the seat.

These mainly include former PML-Q leaders such as Jehangir Tareen in Lodhran and Ghulam Sarwar Khan in Taxila, Rawalpindi. Other PTI stars with a past include Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Javed Hashmi and Sher Afgan Niazi’s son who is contesting from Mianwali.

The second and unknown challenge is from the ‘new voter’ the party might attract to cause upsets anywhere, including in PML-N strongholds such as Lahore and Rawalpindi.

For instance, in NA 56 Rawalpindi, PML-N’s candidate Hanif Abbasi polled 73,433 in 2008 while PPP came second with a mere 22,720. But the turnout in this constituency was around 35 per cent.

Here the conventional analysis would show that the PML-N seat would be difficult to wrest away from the party. But an increased turnout coupled with some splintering of the PPP and the PML-N vote makes a PTI victory a possibility.

Most PML-N seats in Lahore and Rawalpindi will fall under this category. And the N League was aware of the challenge. A number of residents from the city told stories of a renewed PML-N campaign in their respective neighbourhoods.

The enthusiasm of the non-voters and the youth for Imran Khan coupled with multiple general awareness campaigns about the importance of voting has led to hopes that Pakistan, which experiences a rather low voter turnout, will show better numbers this time around.

This is why some analysts have said that a turnout of 50 to 60 per cent can throw up a surprise result.

A recent report by Nadra and the ECP said that the country’s average turnout of 45.3 per cent was worse than India’s and better than Egypt; overall it was placed sixth from the bottom.

However, the success (however small or large) of this party is surely and predictably going to be the talk of all election watchers for days.

PPP’s chances

Equally unpredictable appears to be the fate of the PPP.

Though most agreed the party will do poorly, there is little agreement on what this means. As no one expects the PPP to lose its domination of the interior of Sindh, the uncertainty is about its performance in Punjab.

With 44 directly elected seats under its belt, this time the number is expected to go down but no one is sure to what.

While some are predicting a 1990 scenario where the PPP won about 14 seats from Punjab, others are more optimistic. This is what a Lahore-based journalist said is the best possible scenario in Punjab for the PPP.

But Amir Mateen, a senior journalist and political analyst, is of the opinion that the tally could be “between 20 to 30, with five to eight from upper Punjab and ten to eighteen from the South.”

The predictions are considerably far apart.

Once again this is due to the anger in Punjab against the PPP; the party workers’ disgruntlement and of course PTI. After all, not all the seats that Khan’s party is expecting to win is against N; it may also win against the PPP in places such as Multan.

In short it is impossible to say anything for sure – but suffice it to say that if the number from Punjab is respectable, (in addition to its 30 or so from Sindh) the party can be expected to play a key role in the making of the next government.Similarly, in KP too it is expected to lose some of its seats.

Unpredictable hung parliament

This brings up perhaps the most predictable prediction of this election – it will result in a hung parliament.

Surprising and predictable because 1988 onwards all governments in Pakistan have been the result of alliances and coalitions. Hence, this ‘prediction’ should more accurately be called a cliché as common as the observation that the key to the Pakistani election is Punjab because of its high constituency numbers.

The only unpredictable element here are the components of the coalition that will become clear only after Sunday.

Both Sharif and Khan have in recent days conceded that they are willing to be part of a coalition while the PPP has never been averse to this. Similarly, the MQM will retain its numbers from Karachi and Hyderabad and is an old hand at joining coalitions as is the JUI-F which is expected to do well this time in KP.

Beyond the national race

Zeroing down to the provinces from the national level, there are just a few more points to add.

Sindh is expected to throw up few surprises with the PPP and the MQM expected to hang on to their spheres of influence.

Though there is little that Balochistan can add to the national tally and hence the numbers game for the government making in Islamabad, this province has thrown up the most positive trend this time around – the return of the nationalists to the electoral game which it is hoped will soothe some of the wounds of Balochistan later.

In KP, even more so than in Punjab, the electoral game now includes around six major parties. Though the ANP and PPP are expected to lose, most analysts are expecting the JUI-F and the N to do well.

In Punjab, the triangular race that people are predicting has been there since 2002 when the King’s party was carved out of the N League. What May 11 will make clear is whether this has now become a four-way race with the emergence of the PTI or whether it remains three-way as either the Q (permanently) or the PPP (temporarily) bite the dust.

All these answers and more will be clear soon.