ailed former Premier Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party-backed independents were Thursday posing a tough challenge to candidates from three-time former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s party in the crucial Punjab province, according to initial trends of the general elections marred by sporadic violence.
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) had deprived the jailed 71-year-old former cricketer-turned-politician’s party of the electoral symbol of bat over its failure to hold intra-party polls according to its Constitution, forcing it to field independent candidates.
The polling started at 8am (local time) and continued without any break till 5pm. A countrywide public holiday was declared to enable more than 12 crore voters to cast their ballots. The polling percentage is not yet known. In the 2018 elections, overall voter turnout across the nation was 51.7 per cent.
Counting of votes began following the conclusion of the polling and the results of individual polling stations started to pour in after the mandatory one-hour restriction ended. But it may take a couple of hours before the complete result of any constituency is available.
Soon after the voting started, mobile services in Pakistan were suspended because of the “deteriorating security situation”, a day after twin terror attacks killed at least 30 people in Balochistan province.
Despite the suspension of cellular and Internet services, a large number of people across Pakistan exercised their right to vote to elect lawmakers for national and provincial assemblies — on 855 constituencies.
Amnesty International criticised the decision to suspend mobile phone and Internet service on the day of the election, calling it “a blunt attack on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly”.
In the evening, the interior ministry said mobile phone services have been partially restored in parts of the country.
In total 266 National Assembly seats were up for grabs out of 336, but polling was postponed on at least one seat after a candidate was killed in a gun attack in Bajaur. Another 60 seats are reserved for women and 10 for minorities and are allotted to the winning parties based on proportional representation.
A party must win 133 seats out of 265 being contested to form the next government.
Private TV channels began reporting results on the basis of partial counting, which showed that Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and PTI-supported independent candidates were neck-to-neck in the most populous Punjab province, which sends almost half of the representatives to the National Assembly. In most of the constituencies, the candidates of the two parties were either leading or in second place.
Sharif and his younger brother Shehbaz were leading in their respective seats from Lahore.
In Sindh, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) candidates were leading in most of the constituencies, with its leaders Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and Asif Ali Zardari ahead in their constituencies. But the situation in Karachi, the capital of Sindh with 22 National Assembly seats, was different and Muttahida Qaumi Movement and PTI candidates were performing better.
In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, independent candidates supported by the PTI were leading in several constituencies. Former PTI minister Ali Muhammad Khan was leading in the Mardan area, while former PTI Speaker of the National Assembly, Asad Qaisar, was leading in Swabi. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl of Maulana Fazlur Rehman was also doing well in some districts.
Balochistan, which is the largest province but sends only 15 lawmakers to the parliament, showed mixed results and none of the party was in the clear lead. All the results so far reported by the media channels are unofficial and may drastically change as counting progresses.
