Re: Are Musharrafs Days Numbered?
One of the election observers agrees with your Spock:
DAWN
To cite just one example, I visited Hyderabad district in the second phase on August 25.
**The night before polling, one district officer told me helplessly that the administration had received “loud and clear” instructions from the political and military high-ups in the province to extend “full cooperation” to the electoral campaigns of government-sponsored groups. **The same night, I interviewed scores of PPP-backed candidates, their supporters and party activists who had either been receiving threats to change their loyalties or had been the victims of either police or of MQM harassment.
The MQM’s threat to opposition candidates was clear and simple: “betho or laito” (withdraw or die). In the 12 polling stations of Hyderabad city and tehsil Latifabad that I observed on the polling day, it was hard to figure out if the election was being conducted by the hooligans of a political party or the election commission. Most of the “sensitive” stations were virtually under MQM capture with opposition polling agents either forcefully evicted or denied entry under the very nose of the law “enforcing” agencies. The blatant rigging that I witnessed during polling and later in the counting of ballots was quite horrific in itself.
But to cut a long story short, the entire polling process served as a frightening testament to the fact that the government had franchized the election for the MQM. This was only the logical next step following the division of Hyderabad district along ethnic lines under which the city was outsourced to the MQM.
Similar outsourcing of districts to different factions of the PML took place in interior Sindh and Punjab. Even though opposition parties were able to score localized victories throughout Pakistan, their government-sponsored decimation has ensured an “excellent” outcome for the military-led government and his civilian allies. Even as I write these lines, the government is busy laying the groundwork for more arm twisting and manipulation for the third round of indirect elections for tehsil and district nazims.
The writer was an election observer for the International Crisis Group. The views expressed in this article are his own.