Election bells are ringing as former president General (r) Pervez Musharraf threw his hat in the ring announcing that he will be contesting the upcoming general elections from the NA-1 Chitral constituency.
Even as former premier Nawaz Sharif stews in his own ineligibility, Musharraf is enjoying the Supreme Court’s permission allowing him to contest the polls even though he is accused of treason. And while Mian Nawaz smoulders, Musharraf has become the first national leader, so to speak, to take on the new NA-1 constituency, which was moved to Chitral from Peshawar after delimitation.
But for Musharraf, it isn’t just about the NA-1 tag, which has proven important in the past, but also regarding a strange concentration of support he has in Chitral. While he is backed by a number of locals, the support may also be residual of the Lowari Tunnel that he reinitiated in 2005 after the project took a 30-year hiatus.
Speaking about the delimitation, the newly inducted Chief Minister of Balochistan, Allaudin Maari, has said that a delay in elections may be desirable given that people are still not sure about what their new constituencies are after the electoral maps were redrawn in accordance with the census. And while the controversial ECP choice of Professor Hassan Askari Rizvi has been chanting ‘free and fair elections’ with every breath since being named, he too seemed to indicate that he would not be completely opposed to a delay in the polls, saying that in certain circumstances it may be pertinent to postpone the election. Take note, one of the PML-N’s litany of complaints against Askari has been that he has expressed a desire for delaying the polls, something the ECP seems to have ignored in choosing him. This is going on right under the nose of Prime Minister Nasirul Mulk, who has from day one insisted that the elections will be on July 25. For two chief ministers that took the longest time to take charge, the men at the helms of Punjab and Balochistan have proven on their first day that they are not out of the headlines yet.
Delay or not, PTI and PML-N both are preparing at full throttle, and have issued lists of candidates. While the PML-N has only revealed their candidates from Lahore, including some of their top brass, the PTI has issued a much more comprehensive list of candidates from all over the country. But interestingly enough, there seems to be a strange omission of any candidate contesting from Lodhran. As the reader might recall, that is the constituency that Jehangir Khan Tareen was disqualified from and that his son lost out on in the by-election. Whether it is out of respect for the fallen general secretary, or the PTI is rethinking their stance on nepotism after the upset win that the PML-N scored on him is yet to be seen. But it might just mean that Ali Tareen has seen the last of electoral politics.
Meanwhile, another entry to those contesting the polls was human rights activist and lawyer Jibran Nasir, who filed papers for both a national and provincial seat in Karachi. This is not the first time the independent candidate is taking part in the elections, whether he fares better this time, only time will tell. But how much time, that the caretaker setup seems to be at odds about.
