ANP’s got a ‘Shahi Syed dilemma’ on its hands

After the refusal of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to support Awami National Party (ANP) on getting its Sindh president Shahi Syed elected as a senator from Sindh in the upcoming senate elections, the ANP has decided to put up Syed – a close relative of party’s chief Asfandyar Wali – from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. In the 2008 senate elections, the ANP Sindh president was eager to contest as a candidate from the then North Western Frontier Province, but his party preferred a Dubai-based multibillionaire businessman, Abdul Nabi Bangash, and Syed was dropped. Bangash was later elected as a senator.
A close ally in the PPP-led federal and Sindh government, the ANP had requested the ruling party to elect Syed as a senator from Sindh. However, the PPP high-ups refused, reckoning that the party is already under pressure from Sindhi nationalists, intellectuals and the civil society on the issue of electing five non-Sindhis – Faisal Raza Abidi, Shaukat Tareen, Rehman Malik, Dr Asim and Farooq H Naek – as senators from the votes of Sindh Assembly’s Sindhi-speaking members.
Although the ANP has decided to elect Syed from KP, it is expected to create a problematic situation for the Pakhtun-majority party.
In 2002, when a coalition of religious parties, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), elected Professor Khurshid Ahmed – a resident of Karachi, Sindh – as a senator from the KP, ANP Senator Bashir Bilour not only opposed the move but also complained in written in the Senate that a person from another province shall not be allowed to contest Senate elections in a separate province.
There are a total of 100 senate seats and elections are held every three years for one-half of the senate with each senator having a term of six years. In March, 54 current senators, including 11 from Sindh, will retire after completing their six-year term. Elections on the vacant 50 percent seats will be held on March 2, as per the Election Commission of Pakistan’s announcement.
All provincial assemblies have to elect 14 senators while four seats are reserved for women and four for technocrats. Moreover, eight general seats in the senate are reserved for Federally Administered Tribal Areas and two for the Federal Capital, Islamabad, which also has one dedicated women and technocrat seat.
Currently, the PPP has 27 seats in the senate, followed by the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) with 21 senators. The right-wing Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Fazl group) and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) have 10 and three seats, respectively, while the Pakistan Muslim League-Functional and Jamhoori Watan Party have one senator each.
After the retirement of 54 senators in March, the representation of JI, with three members, and PPP (Sherpao group), with one member, will end in the upper legislative house.
The PML-Q will have to bear the greatest loss as its 20 out of 21 senators will be retired. The major beneficiary in the upcoming senate elections could be the PPP because, according to its present number of seats in the provincial assemblies, it would be in majority in the upper house.