Violence casts shadow over Pak polls

Reuters

Former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif (left), the frontrunner in Pakistan's landmark election casts his vote at a polling station, in Lahore, on Sunday.

REUTERS

ISLAMABAD: A string of militant attacks and gunfights that killed at least 17 people cast a long shadow over Pakistan’s general election today, but millions still turned out to vote in a landmark test of the troubled country’s democracy.

The poll will bring the first transition between civilian governments in a country ruled by the military for more than

half of its turbulent history.

But in the commercial centre, Karachi, the country’s biggest city, several voters complained of irregularities and intimidation and the election commission said the process was flawed. “We have been unable to carry out free and fair elections inKarachi,” it said in a statement. Polls were extended by one hour because many people still had not voted.

Despite the searing heat, many went to the polls excited about the prospect of change in a country plagued with Taliban militancy, a near-failed economy, endemic corruption, chronic power cuts and crumbling infrastructure.

However, opinion polls have suggested that disenchantment with the two main parties, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), could mean that no one group emerges with a parliamentary majority, making the next government unstable and too weak to push through much-needed reform.

A late surge of support for the party of former cricket star Imran Khan has made a split mandate all the more likely.

A bomb attack on the office of the Awami National Party (ANP) in Karachi killed 11 people and wounded about 40. At least two were wounded in three blasts that followed, and media reported gunfire in the city. Four died in a gunbattle in Baluchistan. Several were injured in an explosion that destroyed an ANP office in the insurgency-infected northwest, and there were further casualties in a blast in the city of Peshawar.

Pakistan’s Taliban regards the elections as un-Islamic and have focused their anger on secular-leaning parties like the ruling coalition led by the PPP and ANP. Many candidates, fearful of being assassinated, avoided open campaigning before the election.

Voters will elect 272 members of the National Assembly and to win a simple majority, a party would have to take 137 seats. However, the election is complicated by the fact that a further 70 seats, most reserved for women and members of non-Muslim minorities, are allocated to parties on the basis of their performance in the contested constituencies. To have a majority of the total of 342, a party would need 172.

Despite Pakistan’s history of coups, the army stayed out of politics during the five years of the last government. It still sets the country’s foreign and security policy and will steer the thorny relationship with Washington as NATO troops withdraw from neighbouring Afghanistan in 2014.