PESHAWAR: If you want to know who will make the next government in KhyberPakhtunkhwa watch what happens here on July 25: Peshawar, Charsadda,Nowshera, Mardan and Swabi.
These five are the swing districts—no one knows how they will vote. It ismuch clearer in the other parts of KP.
These five big ones have all voted for different parties since 2002. Theseswing districts are where the real fight will take place. They send up 37MPAs to the KP house of elected representatives, a private televisionchannel reported Saturday.
Peshawar, for example, was considered an ANP stronghold but the party wasbooted out in 2013 much to its shock. Peshawar valley has a high literacyrate. Voters here are not particularly impressed by the tribal system orfeudals.
“Around 30% are undecided or floating voters whose votes matter and canchange the election in these [Peshawar valley] districts,” says Dr SohailKhan, head of Education at Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan.
Then take Charsadda. It is the district of Asfandyar Wali Khan, but hisparty could not win a single seat from there.
If you look at the PPP, it formed the government twice in KP but has beencompletely wiped out from these districts since then.
The Jamaat-e-Islami won a majority of KP seats in 2002. It couldn’t win asingle one from here in the 2008 and 2013 elections.
In 2002, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal won a majority of seats (18 out of37). But after that, it won seven out of 11 KP assembly seats in Peshawardistricts, one each from Charsadda and Nowshera, seven from Mardan and twofrom Swabi.
In 2008, the ANP emerged as the single largest party in the province with48 seats from KP and 23 from Peshawar valley. By 2013, however, the ANPlost all its seats to the PTI. Journalist Haq Nawaz Khan explains this asthe outcome of militancy and bad optics for the ANP, which he feelsotherwise had a good track record of new infrastructure. He gives theexample of it building nine universities and 72 colleges despite themassive displacement of people.
Every political party has strongholds in KP. Lower and Upper Dir belong tothe Jamaat-e-Islami. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam takes the southern districts(Karak, Bannu, DI Khan, Lakki Marwat and Tank). The PML-N has a large votebank in Hazara division. The PTI, ANP and PML-N have vote banks in Swat,Malakand, Shangla and Buner. “The biradari system matters a lot in thesouthern districts where people don’t vote for a candidate outside theircommunity,” says journalist Waseem Ahmad Shah.
What will matter in the swing districts, however, is how social andmainstream media play it out. This will help undecided or swing votersdecide, he argues.
He gives the example of the 2002 and 2008 general elections. In earlierelections the Afghan war was underway and the accountability watchdog wastargeting secular parties. “The field was open for religious parties andthey secured most of the seats in the valley and from the southerndistricts,” he says. But in 2008, secular parties (ANP and PPP) were freeto run their campaigns and everyone knew that these parties would win.Fast-forward to 2013. People had lost trust in religious parties but theANP could not run its campaign and people wanted “change”, so theyoverwhelmingly voted for the PTI.
And so, it is likely that the results would be scattered as we saw in the1993 elections, says Dr Sohail. In the 1990 elections and after 1997 onwardKP has had uniform results in the Peshawar valley where voters voted asingle party to power.