Pakistani elections: View from outside, looking in

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''We never realised how powerful our vote is. One vote can change our future. I request all my sisters and mothers to move forward, to go to polling stations and vote. It's our right.''

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald
By Ben Doherty | Excerpt | May 11, 2013
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These elections will be less than free and fair. Intimidation, exclusion of women and minorities, and poll violence will mar voting. Regardless, on Saturday morning millions in Pakistan took the rare chance to choose a new government.

In cities and villages, long queues formed at voting centres hours before polls opened at 8am.

Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old girls' education campaigner and Nobel peace prize nominee who was shot by the Taliban, urged her compatriots, especially women, to vote.

''We never realised how powerful our vote is,'' she said. ''One vote can change our future. I request all my sisters and mothers to move forward, to go to polling stations and vote. It's our right.''

But millions were excluded from voting. On election morning, there were reports that political parties had agreed to ban women voting in the religiously conservative Lower Dir region in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in the country's north-west.

A government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed a secret deal had been struck by party chiefs to exclude women.

The million followers of the Ahmadiyya sect - declared non-Muslims by the government - were forced to sign a declaration renouncing their beliefs in order to vote. They were the only religious group so targeted and they announced a boycott.

In Balochistan, in the country's west, millions of nationalist ethnic Baloch also boycotted the election, arguing their demands for autonomy were being ignored by the central government.




Read original post here: Pakistan history in the making


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