Battlefield: Independent candidates put up poor performance

43 candidates barely secure 3.4 per cent of the total votes polled.

ISLAMABAD:

Independent candidates contesting two National Assembly seats from the federal capital have failed to dent the performance of major political parties in the recent elections.

A total of 43 independent candidates contested the elections from two constituencies Islamabad-- NA-48, NA-49 -- and except for one, the rest of them could not make a mark.

The 43 independent candidates secured only 3.4 per cent or 12,988 votes of the total valid votes polled at the two constituencies, according to results released by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on its website.

In comparison, other major political parties including Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz ( PML-N), Pakistan Tehree-e-Insaf (PTI), Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Jamat-e-Islami (JI) and others together bagged 95.7 per cent of the total 386,843 votes polled in NA-48 and NA-49, according to the ECP data.

The independent candidates, however, outclassed smaller political parties such as the Christian Progressive Movement and the Pakistan Freedom Party, as these parties received less than one per cent of the votes polled.

Former federal minister and rights activist Julius Salik was the most successful candidate among the independents from NA-48, who secured 5,038 votes -- around 52 per cent of the total votes received by 32 independent candidates in the constituency. Salik, who spent around Rs70,000 on his campaign, used a Suzuki pick-up truck for electioneering. He called the pick-up truck his “mobile election office”.

Another Christian candidate from NA-48, Maqbool Masih Khokhar, received 377 votes, according to the ECP results.

Apart from Salik, Javedullah Khattak advocate was the other independent candidate who performed well by securing 1,897 votes.

While Salik led the race among independent candidates, Naeem Chaudhry’s three votes in NA-48 were the lowest for any candidate. As the popular joke goes, he probably received votes only from his immediate family.

Independents in NA-49 performed even worse. None of the 11 independent candidates in the constituency crossed the 1,000-vote mark.

Dr Muhammad Usman Khan advocate secured highest votes - 881- among the independent candidates from the constituency.

Overall, the four “advocates” or lawyers who ran in the elections from NA-48 and NA-49 received 2,814 votes, according to ECP results.

Raja Aurangzeb Khan, a 51-year-old labourer who used his bicycle with Rs12,000 budget for his election campaign, got 171 votes from NA-49, no mean feat for an ordinary man who had pitted himself against the might of political parties.

SOURCE: ECP WEBSITE

Published in The Express Tribune, May 17^th, 2013.