Election battles: Allegations of rigging spark violent protests

Election commission postpones voting in Lahore, suspends results in Poonch.

MUZAFFARABAD/LAHORE:

Allegations of rigging descended into violence in many parts of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab, with political activists clashing with each other and with officials supervising the election, forcing the AJK Election Commission to suspend the results for LA-17 (Poonch-Sudhnoti I) and postponing the election in LA-37 (Lahore).

Throughout the day on Sunday, reports continued to surface of severe violations of electoral law, both within the territory and in Punjab, which was the only province whose Kashmiri diaspora was voting for the AJK Legislative Assembly election. Kashmiris in Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan will vote at an as yet unspecified date after elections for their seats were postponed due to a poor law and order situation.

In LA-17, political activists set election officials’ offices on fire, which burnt the records of the returns that had been filed, forcing the AJK Election Commission to suspend the results from that constituency. It was not immediately clear which candidate had been in the lead in that constituency and which party’s activists were responsible for the violence.

Meanwhile, activists from the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) clashed with those from Punjab’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) resulting in several instances of violence in Lahore that left several people injured and caused the AJK Election Commission to postpone the election for the Kashmiri diaspora in Lahore and Sheikhupura districts (LA-37).

In the Azad Jammu and Kashmir itself, electoral anomalies were both blatant and subtle. In some constituencies, especially those that have refugee camps, the identification requirements seem to have been considerably relaxed. Several children, very obviously below the voting age of 18, were seen voting at several polling booths with election officials not taking any action against them.

There was also considerable confusion about the requirements for identification documents. Some officials were under the impression that voters were required to live in the jurisdiction of the polling booth they were trying to vote in, turning away several voters because their addresses on their computerised national identity cards did not fall in the constituency they were voting in. The AJK Election Commission had initially instituted this requirement on Saturday but then withdrew it within hours after coming under severe pressure.

Election officials appeared to be quite tardy in several locations, arriving up to two and half hours late in places like Madina Market in Muzaffarabad. Very often, female voters were being served by male election officials.

In LA-27 Muzaffarabad, the constituency comprising the suburbs of the region’s capital city, elderly ladies were taken to the room for male voters where polling agents were stamping their ballots on their behalf. These women had no idea about who their votes were being cast for.

Meanwhile in Punjab, the police have registered nine cases against workers from the PPP after they began protesting against what they described as blatant rigging by activists belonging to the PML-N. Ghulam Abbas Mir, a PML-N candidate, however, claimed that only one of the cases was against the PPP’s workers, and that involved vote rigging.

The violence caused the election commission to postpone the election in the constituency. PML-N MNA Khawaja Saad Rafique, however, claimed that the election was postponed after it emerged that the PPP’s candidate would lose the seat. PPP MPA Raja Riaz, however, said that the PML-N could not win the AJK Legislative Assembly seats in Punjab without the help of the police, implying that the province’s ruling party was involved in rigging the vote.

Sources told The Express Tribune, however, that the PML-N had formulated committees in every constituency where the Kashmiri diaspora was voting in a bid to influence election officials to allow manipulation of the voting and election results to suit the PML-N. Allegations of bribery were also levelled against several officers manning the polling booths.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 27^th, 2011.