{"id":133867,"date":"2013-05-14T17:48:01","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T12:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=133867"},"modified":"2013-05-14T17:48:01","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T12:18:01","slug":"pakistan-a-house-deeply-divided","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/pakistan-a-house-deeply-divided\/","title":{"rendered":"Pakistan: A House Deeply Divided"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[cycloneslider id=&#8221;pakistan&#8221;]<br \/>\nMake no mistake. The 11 May General Election has sharply divided Pakistan. The back-slapping commentariat has been congratulating fellow Pakistanis for democratically voting out a government. Before the end of the next week, Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif, whose Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has won the most seats in the National Assembly, will become prime minister. This election is being touted as a deepening of representative democracy in Pakistan because it is the first-ever \u201csmooth\u201d transition from one elected civilian government to another.<br \/>\nBut in truth, as with many elections in Pakistan in the past, this time, too, there is widespread belief that the results have been manipulated. Of course, it may never be known if the charge is accurate or not. It must be stressed though that the world would be in error if it believed that Pakistanis see this election much differently from the past ones. They don\u2019t. Perhaps they are angrier than in the past as for the first time the charge that an elector may have rigged the vote is the elephant in the room. In a rush to hail Pakistan\u2019s arrival as a nation of elections, no one wants to talk of vote manipulation.<br \/>\nFirst of all, the charge that the results may have been manipulated is emerging not only from Pakistan\u2019s former cricket captain, Imran Khan\u2019s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) party but also from the Pakistan People\u2019s Party (PPP) that led the outgoing government. And they aren\u2019t all tantrums of the crybabies. Dozens of seats across Pakistan saw a surprising spike in the tally of votes cast in comparison with the last elections of 2008.<br \/>\nFor example, in one of the 13 constituencies of Lahore, about 1.6 lakh ballots were cast. Five years ago, that figure had been around 90,000. This time, the incumbent, Tahir Shabbir of PPP, lost to Nawaz Sharif\u2019s brother Shahbaz Sharif. \u201cNo one reported that there was a dramatic surge in voting this year compared with 2008,\u201d Shabbir\u2019s brother, Tahir, a 50-year-old paediatrician, told Tehelka. \u201cAnd yet we are told that the number of voters who showed up were almost double of 2008. How is that?\u201d The answer to that question may arrive soon enough when a by-election is called on that seat as the winner, Shahbaz, is likely to resign from it. He is set to return to his day job as chief minister of the Punjab province that he had since 2008. The PML-N has handsomely won Punjab\u2019s provincial polls held simultaneously with the national one.<br \/>\nAnother PML-N victor to the National Assembly from Lahore, Sheikh Saad Rafiq, has been all over television since winning for all the wrong reasons. In stills and videos, he is shown to have forced his way into the women\u2019s section of a local polling station. Certainly, as a candidate, he had the legal right to visit it. But he is seen arguing with voters and polling officials. Rafiq, who I hung out with on polling day as he went to vote, denies he and his men threatened electors who were opposed to him. \u201cI have won fair and square,\u201d he told me later. \u201cThese are baseless allegations.\u201d<br \/>\nOnce again, however, his opponents point to the numbers being put out. Rafiq won about 1.16 lakh votes. The runner-up, a prominent lawyer named Hamid Khan from PPP fetched 80,000. \u201cThis is the cantonment area where most residents have their votes elsewhere in the country,\u201d says Adam Pal, 30, a political activist who travelled across Pakistan to observe the campaigns. \u201cThe voting couldn\u2019t have been that high.\u201d<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>PODCAST<\/strong><\/span><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F91986727\" height=\"166\" width=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nIndeed, for hours on 11 May afternoon as Sharif voted in downtown Lahore and returned to his sprawling party office in the upscale Model Town area, I sat with him, his daughter, Maryam, his brother, Shahbaz, and an assortment of family members and close and trusted aides. It was a unique experience to watch Sharif anxiously flip between the television news stations to see which way the wind was blowing. And anxious he was for at least three hours, until the early results began to trickle in, most of which were in his party\u2019s favour. He began to be relaxed much later.<br \/>\nWhen I asked Sharif right at the start what he thought of his chances, he in turn asked me what I felt from my romp at the city\u2019s polling booths. He would not speak his mind when a trusted former bureaucrat told Sharif that he believed the PML-N would win upwards of 125 seats in the 272-member National Assembly. (Seventy seats are nominated from among women and the religious minorities.) The discussions there did not include any reports of a massive turnout at the city\u2019s polling stations. A couple of aides even said that the morning had seen mostly voters of the PTI turn up while Sharif&#8217;s voters had started coming in after lunch hour. Polling closed at 6 pm. Yet, in the end, his party won 12 of Lahore\u2019s 13 seats, defeating even Imran Khan.<br \/>\nFew are thus buying the official national average turnout of 60 percent. The figure is rather difficult to digest because in several parts of Pakistan, such as in the Baluchistan province in the southwest, the turnout has been as low as 10 percent due to threats from a nationalist insurgency that has wracked the region for decades. Similarly, many constituencies in northern Pakistan and along its western borders with Afghanistan also reported a poor response in view of threats from the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is distinct from the Afghan Taliban and has run a series of murderous attacks on candidates and their supporters as well as on civilians during the campaign season.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe fact that the election commission chose to count votes in private and took inordinately long to do so has also raised suspicions that the results may have been \u201cmanaged\u201d. Several non-PPP, non-PTI types have told me that the administration across the Punjab province, which is the largest of all Pakistani provinces and has the most seats in the National Assembly, has been blatantly supportive of candidates of the PML-N, which is essentially a Punjabi party led by Sharif, as opposed to the PPP, which is predominantly a party of the southern Sindh province. I have been told strange stories of how judges of the lower judiciary, tasked with scrutinising nomination papers in Punjab, rejected them on a whim. \u201cThey would ask the candidates to recite from the Quran and reject those who didn\u2019t satisfy them,\u201d said Pal.<br \/>\nThen, of course, is the influence and the interests of the Americans. Incredulous Pakistanis ask why would US President Barack Obama rush to congratulate Sharif on winning the election even though the final results had yet not been officially announced at the time, and that Sharif was yet to figure out, as he still is, his coalition since he wasn\u2019t going to win a majority on his own. That Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Saudi Arabian regime, both close confidantes of the US administration, did likewise on the trot lent credence to their belief that America wants Sharif to lead the next government in place of President Asif Ali Zardari\u2019s discredited PPP.<br \/>\nIndeed, Sharif appears to have achieved a unique feat by appearing to be the right man (or the least untrustworthy) at the right time for a host of players, domestic and international, namely, the Pakistan Army, the US and its allies, the Sunni world led by Saudi Arabia, and India. While realising that the PPP had lost the people\u2019s confidence in Pakistan, the US has been wary of Imran Khan, whose politics has hinged unwaveringly on opposing bombings by unmanned US aircraft, the drones, in the Taliban-strong areas in the west. In contrast, Sharif now has something for everyone.<br \/>\nTo the US, which appears headed to withdrawing its troops from the neighbouring Afghanistan next year, Sharif is the man who may hold traction with the Afghan Taliban whose involvement would be inescapable in stabilising any regime at Kabul once the Americans leave. For India, Sharif is the one player who could perhaps make genuine peacemaking efforts as, unlike Zardari and his PPP, Sharif carries some influence among the Islamic fundamentalists who strut Pakistan\u2019s politico-religious firmament. And for Saudi Arabia, none can be better than Sharif for this is payback time: Sharif had availed of the Saudi royal hospitality for his years in exile from 1999 to 2007.<br \/>\nEven the ubiquitous national security agencies of Pakistan, the most well-known of which is the Directorate of the Inter Services Intelligence, or the ISI, haven\u2019t had much reason to raise the flag over Sharif. The \u201cagencies\u201d, as the spectrum is collectively referred to in Pakistan, have had their hands full in the election weeding out candidates that might ask uncomfortable questions about their entirely dubious role in, among others, facilitating the Americans\u2019 activities on Pakistani soil, both overt, which include their War on Terror along the border with Afghanistan, and covert, including espionage, which has involved a violation of Pakistan\u2019s territorial sovereignty and laws.<br \/>\nThe starkest example of this is the National Assembly election in the faraway constituency of Wana in South Waziristan in the west, where the Afghan Taliban have been in numerous presence since being ousted from Kabul by the US invasion in 2001. On 12 May, news snippets announced that a candidate named Ali Vazir, who is a tribal lawyer and a grassroots Marxist activist, was on course to winning the election. As news networks obsessed over the PML-N victory in Pakistan, a clutch of Marxist activists in Lahore strained to stay connected with Vazir via a landline telephone at a gas station in Wana, fearful that the agencies might step in to prevent him from winning.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAnd step in they did. Vazir called from the gas station late that night and, struggling to be heard over the static, disclosed that the agencies had shut themselves in with the ballot boxes. This morning, word came in that four of the 50 polling booths in the constituency would be re-polled. \u201cVazir should still win,\u201d Tanveer Gondol, his party leader in Lahore, told me. \u201cBut will they let him win?\u201d It goes without saying that the Taliban, the US and the Pakistani State jointly oppose Vazir. Largely unreported by newspapers and TV news, the agencies were active from the time the parties began choosing the nominees. A seasoned politico here told me \u2014 provided I did not name him \u2014 that the agencies forced the leading parties, especially Sharif\u2019s, to field some candidates the spooks backed. \u201cThose not acceptable were dropped,\u201d he said.<br \/>\nAn analyst with a think-tank in Islamabad told me over the phone that Sharif\u2019s smartest move has been vis-\u00e1-vis the Pakistan Army, the proverbial bad wolf of the Pakistani State. In interviews before polling day, Sharif said he would let Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani retire when his extended term ends in a few months. This was immediately hailed as a bold statement from a man who Kayani\u2019s predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, had ousted in a coup d&#8217;\u00e9tat in October 1999. But in truth, it is in fact conciliatory towards powerful factions within the Pakistan Army, several of which are not in harmony with Kayani. A less-talked-about fact of the army is that it is uncharacteristically riven with factions for a variety of reasons, the analyst said.<br \/>\nThe Pakistan Army is no more as sorted in its positioning as it was for decades as a bulwark of American geopolitical footprint in South Asia, a protector of sovereignty from a likely attack by India, and a mostly unified entity that ensured that the constantly quarrelling and immensely corrupt political classes did not pull down the State. This authority of the army, however, weakened considerably after Pakistan\u2019s then ruler, Musharraf, joined America\u2019s War on Terror following the 11 September 2001 terror attacks in the US. Musharraf turned Pakistan\u2019s back on the Afghan Taliban as also on home-grown jihadi outfits that engaged Indian Army and other security agencies through proxy militancy in Jammu &amp; Kashmir, the two-thirds of the northern region that Pakistan has claimed since it was carved out of India in 1947.<br \/>\nA conversation with a former army officer this week offered me the view that the Pakistan Army is struggling to reinvent itself and regain the pride of place it once had among ordinary Pakistanis, which it lost after it followed the State\u2019s diktat in 2007 and launched real wars against the Islamic fundamentalists who were attacking Pakistan. Sharif knows that fellow Punjabis in the hinterland have disapproved of using the military option against the Pakistani Taliban, the TTP, not the least because most Pakistanis in the TTP ranks are from within Punjab and often blood brothers of the army\u2019s soldiers. It is in this turmoil that Sharif wants to step in and reshape the army.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whispers of rigging have taken the shine off Nawaz Sharif\u2019s triumph, says Ajit Sahi in Lahore<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":133930,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[56],"tags":[8626,1476,48,8920,8921,8922,8923],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}