Key political parties in Lower Dir District on Friday entered into an informal agreement to bar women for voting in May 11 general elections, official sources and locals told local media.
Sources said that the front men of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Awami National Party (ANP) and the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) candidates had arrived at an informal agreement to stop women from voting in general elections for Lower Dir’s provincial assembly seat PK-94.The JI’s Muzaffar Said, PPP’s Alamzeb Khan and the ANP’s Ayub Khan are the major political parties contesting for the seat.
Sources also confirmed that, due to the Election Commission’s restrictions, the candidates had made the deal through their ‘local operators’ instead of coming forward themselves.
“The decision was taken at village Bandagai in Talash area of Lower Dir district. But there is no written document in this regard and we also do not know that there are such arrangements in other areas as well,” said one source.
Political parties have previously barred women from voting in the same area and adjoining union councils. However, due to the ECP’s strict rules this time, candidates have asked their front-men to carry out the agreement.
It is not uncommon in KP to exclude women from voting in elections, usually through compromises and accords between political parties’ representatives in the region as well as family members.
The ECP had previously tried to make changes to this form of electoral exclusion by suggesting a reform package to the Law Ministry where ECP recommended that it should be empowered to overtly deal with the agreements restraining women from casting their votes and should be given power to declare a polling station’s results null and void where local political parties had entered such agreements or where less than 10 percent of women had voted. [There should also be a] requirement for presiding officers to state the turnout of male and female voters separately and independently.”
Chief Operating Officer of the NGO Aurat Foundation, Naeem Mirza had said that the demand for electoral reforms to address restricted women’s suffrage was not new. Female disenfranchisement, consolidated by disallowing women to cast votes through tactical compromises conceived by political parties or individual candidates, was a blatant violation of rights, he added.
Mirza said that political will was necessary to tackle the issue along with the action taken by ECP, political parties and domestic observer groups.
According to a detailed report compiled by the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN), a number of positive suggestions for legislative proposals addressing women’s exclusion were made by the ECP in 2008 to Senate’s Standing Committee on Human Rights as well, but these did not result in any useful legislative action.
A study carried out by Democracy International Reporting, highlighted various cases in Pakistan in which hardly any women have participated as voters. On 29 January 2011 in Shangla, more than 59,000 women voters were not allowed to vote out of a total of 59,177 registered female voters.
The ECP concluded that 98 votes had been cast in female polling stations, but others stated that several of these ballots were in fact cast by men in the name of women.
