- National gender voter gap widens to over 12 million
The Election Commission of Pakistan, National Database Registration Authority, mainstream political parties, concerned NGOs and civil society should be genuinely perturbed at recently released statistics about growing women disenfranchisement from the political process. While Pakistan’s population, the world’s sixth largest, marches merrily on at a steady average 2 percent annual rate, the ECP’s registration lists show a mysterious decline of 12.54 million between male and female registered voters, with the former naturally ascendant. What is even more alarming is that many large cities mirror this gender voter anomaly; an embarrassing ground reality previously confined to backward areas of south Punjab, rural Sindh and parts of K-P, specially the former FATA, and tribal Balochistan. The ECP’s latest district-wise statistics paint an alarming picture of male voters increasing roughly correspondingly to their population ratio, but women registered voters lagging far behind their actual population numbers, even in urban centres.
Twenty districts, surprisingly 17 of them in Punjab, 2 in K-P and one in Sindh manifest these excessive gender gaps in their lists of registered voters. Lahore district (registered male voters 3.05m, female voters 2.43m), Faisalabad (2.47m and 2m), Gujranwala (1.57m and 1.2m) and Sialkot (1.32m and 1.06m) are prime examples in a long list also comprising Kasur, Multan, Bahawalpur, Okara, Peshawar, Mardan, Bannu, North Waziristan, Dera Bugti and South Waziristan. The 2017 census showed the country’s population at 207 million, with 106 million males (51 percent) and 101 million females (48.76 percent), but the number of registered female voters before 2018 general elections (42.4m) was far less than the corresponding male voters (54.5m). Behind this slower pace of women registration unfortunately lie a host of factors, either financial, or of bureaucratic red tape (difficulty in issuance of national identity cards) and other far more formidable social, cultural and religious constraints, imposed by dominant patriarchal codes. Political parties need to mobilise women vote banks, facilitate and encourage female registration as voters, award them more party tickets, while the women too must develop confidence and self-belief that their vote can make a difference in their lives. Emmeline Pankhurst’ ‘deeds not words’, the suffragette’s motto, should be their watchword, as also, ‘Trust in God—she will provide’.