Imran Khan’s partymen find cause to cheer

KARACHI: Gulbaz Khan heard the blasts at the Awami National Party office near his voting area in Landhi, Karachi, but that didn't stop him from venturing to his polling station to vote. “I told all my relatives that there was no way they could keep me home; my vote had to be cast,” said the 31-year-old from Swat, a once-beautiful valley plundered by the Taliban and badly disfigured in the army action that followed.
There was no question in Khan’s mind regarding whom to give his vote: Imran Khan and Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf, or the PTI. The PTI candidate lost the seat but that didn’t matter to Khan. A Karachi-based Pathan, his focus was on election results in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the restive province in Pakistan’s northwest where opinion has rapidly become anti-American.
“His anti-drone stand is excellent. We support him 100%. We are victorious today because he has taken the province,” said Gulbaz Khan.
Imran Khan’s close aides anticipated a much greater win across Pakistan in the 2013 elections but the reality was otherwise. In the 154 National Assembly seats that had been completely counted by 5pm on Sunday evening, 121 had gone to Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N and 24 to the PTI. Imran, himself, won three of those seats.
The excitement of a ‘naya’ Pakistan dimmed across the country yesterday as enthusiastic supporters of PTI, realized that the rest of Pakistan wasn’t with them.
Still, serious allegations of rigging were coming in from all over the country. Voters took cell phone videos of various party thugs putting in several votes at a time in the ballot box. Others found ripped ballots outside polling stations. The PTI officially registered its complaint against voter rigging. In Karachi 1,000 people marched at The Three Swords Round about in an elite neighborhood demanding recourse.
That aside, a PTI assessment of failure to “sweep the elections” is in order.
One reason, of course, could be PTI’s failure to be seen as a party rather than a one-man show. Whatever route the PTI now takes, they will have several years in government to return with experience to the vote bank.
According to a report in the Express Tribune in 2012, Facebook Pakistan registered eight million users from Pakistan. Some of these users may not be reflected because they could be students or workers temporarily working overseas with registered accounts elsewhere. That number, however, could hardly be more than two million users.
This number looks paltry next to Pakistan’s 86-million electorate, most in rural areas, without regular access to the Internet. Most of the power – in terms of numbers – was in rural areas, in particular, the Punjab, where overwhelmingly people came out to vote for Sharif.
Election predictions in the weeks before had already anticipated a Nawaz Sharif win. “The PML-N… appears to be leading in most opinion polls (IRI and Gallup) with a good mix of traditional vote bank in urban centres and strong candidates in the rural belt,” according to a report from Credit Suisse.
However, as the elections neared, the PTI ran a successful television, radio and social media campaign that impacted the mood in the urban areas. There were predictions of a late-swing in Imran’s favour, and the addition of a sympathy vote after the PTI leader fell 16 feet from a forklift due to mismanagement of a rally in a market in Lahore.
In reality, however, it seems the PTI message didn’t fully penetrate as Nawaz Sharif’s party not only swept the Punjab provincial elections, it has also taken over 130 seats in the National Assembly.
There are two provinces in which Khan’s message for a Naya Pakistan would have impacted the public: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. A student uprising against the state mobilized in the latter meant that that message was largely irrelevant there. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, however, Khan’s voice resonated deeply.
Elsewhere in Pakistan traditional parties maintained the equilibrium. The PPP didn’t play a very strong election campaign and didn’t even have candidates standing in some areas. In Sindh, biradari and caste politics are reflected in the result. In Punjab, too, that was the case in man places. Imran couldn’t fulfill his promise to break the baradari structure of Pakistan’s politics. The one province in which he made many gains is the only province where the tribe, baradari and caste doesn’t play a role.
If allegations of widespread rigging are true, than some of Sharif's more-than-expected victory could be explained. Khan's party may have made greater gains in Sindh and Punjab than the results indicate. In an interview, Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, a senior ANP leader from Peshawar who lost his contest to Imran congratulated PTI. “For Tehreek-e-Insaf it is a big day, a golden day. A party which has no existence in Parliament has emerged the second largest national party and the leading party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where God willing it is going to form a government,” he said.
It’s for this reason that Gulbaz Khan didn’t care that PTI lost in Karachi. “We won,” he smiled, his mind on the northwest.