Internal rift in PTI surfaces after Zehra’s death

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Sunday, 19 May 2013

20-05-2013
Some reports have surfaced about mysterious killing of PTI’s slain leader, Zahra Shahid Hussain. It is being discussed with in PTI circles that Zahra Shahid Hussain had serious disagreements with Dr Arif Alvi over party's ticket and his soft corner with religious extremist groups mainly Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The bone of contention had become strong between the two and Alvi, who had political tilt towards JI and TTP, developed a strong dislike for late Ms Hussain in the aftermath of this issue.

Vice-President of Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf’s Sindh chapter, Zahra Shahid Hussain, was killed late on Saturday in an attempted robbery incident on the eve of re-polls in Karachi’s NA-250 constituency.

Remember, Ms Hussain was a vocal voice of women freedom and known to be a lady with secular and moderate ideology.

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Arif Alvi’s twitter handle exposed

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Saturday, 18 May 2013

18-05-2013
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is one of the most active political parties on social media networks, and its leadership is active on social media sites too.

Today a same tweet from two different twitter handles at the same time has exposed the credibility of social media profiles of its politicians. Twitter handle of Arif Alvi’s son Awab Alvi and Arif Alvi tweeted the same tweet at the same time. The question is this that who is operating twitter account of Arif Alvi? Either his son Awab Alvi or some one else who is operating both handles simultaneously.

Several months ago, X-reports has also exposed the reality of Imran Khan’s twitter handle that it is not being operated by himself.

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Rigging by PTI? - PTI’s Ishaq Khakwani loses after re-count

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Friday, 17 May 2013

17-05-2013 | Pakistan Today
Senior Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader Ishaq Khan Khakwani lost to a PML-N candidate after re-count for the National Assembly seat from Vehari, NA-168.

Speaking to media persons, Khaqwani expressed lack of trust over performance of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).

He said that he had got 55, 000 votes, but returning officers did not cooperate and refused to show votes.

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FAFEN: Punjab leads in the list of polling stations with over 100% turnout

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Monday, 13 May 2013

14-05-2013 | FAFEN
ISLAMABAD, May 13, 2013 – Based on data gathered by Free and Fair Election Network observers at polling stations showing impossible voter turnout greater than 100%, FAFEN called on the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to release all polling station Statements of the Count (Form XIV) to the public on its website before certifying any final election results in any constituency.

The voter turnout was more than 100% in at least 49 polling stations out of 8,119 polling stations sampled by FAFEN across Pakistan, according to Statements of the Count delivered so far by FAFEN observers.
ECP must not include votes from these polling stations in calculations of constituency election results, and should consider re-polling in these stations.

At least 32 polling stations with greater than 100% turnout were in Punjab, 10 in Sindh, six in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and one in Balochistan. The polling stations with impossible voter turnout figures included 19 female polling stations, 16 male stations and 14 combined (male and female) stations.

Voter turnout is calculated on the basis of the registered voters for each polling station as given on the ECP website http://ecp.gov.pk/PollingScheme.aspx. Polling stations included in the analysis are only those in which presiding officers accurately calculated the total number of ballots as recorded on the Statement of the Count (Form XIV).

FAFEN has recommended since 2008 that ECP should void the results from any polling station where more ballots are cast than the number of registered voters, and should investigate highly improbable cases of voter turnout, such as those greater than 80%.

Best practice for election transparency requires that polling station ballot counts and vote counts should be posted as quickly as possible on the ECP website, both as scans of the original forms and in data tables that can be scrutinized. This information was made public by ECP for the first time many months after General Election 2008, based on persistent FAFEN advocacy.

Polling Stations with Greater than 100% Voter Turnout

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Muttahida-PTI ‘accord’ keeps ties cordial

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Thursday, 9 May 2013

09-05-2013 | Dawn News
KARACHI, May 7: Though both the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) have dismissed that there is a ‘tacit agreement’ between the two that Imran Khan will not mobilise his election campaign in the urban centres of Sindh, analysts believe that the camaraderie could be significant in the post-election scenario, it emerged on Tuesday.

Mr Khan made a brief visit to Karachi on Tuesday before going back to Lahore and getting injured in a fall at an election rally. Here his most significant activity was a visit to the Quaid’s mausoleum, besides his meetings with local party leaders and cadres.

He had cancelled his rally in Karachi at the eleventh hour citing security reasons, fuelling speculation that his party did not want to upset the apple cart in Karachi, unlike the way the PTI was crossing swords with Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League in Punjab, and that the PTI and the MQM had a ‘tacit deal’ vis-à-vis elections in urban Sindh, Karachi in particular.

The speculations are rife despite a statement by Mr Khan upon his arrival in Karachi in which he said the MQM was the PTI’s ‘key rival’ in Karachi and the Pakistan Peoples Party in the rest of Sindh.“Here in Karachi the MQM is the PTI’s main rival and the PPP in the rest of Sindh,” he told reporters at Quaid-i-Azam International Airport on his arrival.

Insiders in both parties dispelled the impression about the speculated deal. However, it emerged that they had no hard feelings against each other as they had a few years ago. 

Sources did not rule out that the leadership of the two parties ‘understandably’ avoided to criticise each other as both eyed the post-election scenario, which could bring a lot of surprises in an anticipated hung parliament. Analysts said for the PTI, Punjab was much more important than Sindh, where the party had little hope to win even a single seat, which was also a reason for its chief to spend its energies in the constituency where it could make the most.

“In fact, Imran’s visit to Karachi had a political notion to woo the voters in Punjab,” said Syed Jaffar Ahmed, a professor in the Pakistan Study Centre, University of Karachi.

He said the Quaid’s mausoleum had great importance for the people in Punjab and Mr Khan’s visit here was bound to make an impact on his constituents in the country’s most populous province where more than half of the National Assembly seats were up for grabs.

“Going to the Quaid-i-Azam’s mausoleum counts a lot for anyone coming here from Punjab. And at a time when Imran promises that he will make it the Pakistan of the Quaid and Allama Iqbal, it was highly important for him to make a visit here,” said Mr Ahmed.

He said the MQM had no danger, whatsoever, from the PTI in Karachi and if it had any danger to two or three constituencies, it was from the PPP or the Jamaat-i-Islami.
“The PTI has no prospect of winning any seat in Karachi, that’s why the MQM has no reason to get worried about it. However, the post-election scenario is certainly very important for both of them,” he said.

Sources in the parties confirmed that though both parties had no tacit agreement during elections, yet they had an unwritten understanding to maintain the ‘level of acceptance’ when it matters the most.

Though Mr Khan parried a query about his possible future allies, it is understood that every political force would search for allies after the general elections and so far every party has kept its doors open for each other except for a political wedding between the PTI and the PML-N.

“The MQM has a great amount of political pragmatism; it has been an ally twice with the PPP and the PML-N. So the MQM has every reason to keep its options open for all the parties,” said Mr Ahmed.

“No one should rule out the possibility of the MQM’s joining a PML-N-led future coalition, which could be conducive for the party when we see Sindhi and Baloch nationalists are also aligned with Nawaz Sharif, which could bring the MQM closer to those forces.”

Imran on Karachi

Mr Khan said he had to cancel his rally in Karachi because of the poor law and order situation. He said any untoward incident could have marred the party’s entire election campaign.

Talking to reporters upon his arrival at Karachi airport, he said his party had given a choice to the people of Karachi to decide whether they wanted to change their future from an ‘uncertain present’.

He asked the people not to vote for political parties, which had their own militant wings. He said once he grabbed power a ban on the militant wings of the political parties would be a top priority.

“The political parties, which run their own militant wings, will never reform the police as they realise that it would amount to shooting in their own foot,” he said.

He said the deteriorating law and order situation in Karachi had made its youth’s future uncertain.
“Kidnapping for ransom is the only business which is booming,” he said.

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In Orangi, a 100-year-old diehard fan of two Quaids

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Sunday, 5 May 2013

05-05-2013 | The News
Karachi: A few months short of his 100th birthday, Aseeruddin Ahmed, makes a fraction of the 0.225 percent of Pakistani voters, who have lived for more than 91 years.

Clad in a white kurta and a chequered dhoti, he holds in his right hand a walking stick, which, when it does not support his frail body, is used to hit anyone who speaks against Mohammad Ali Jinnah or Altaf Hussain – the two Quaids he refuses to hear ill of.

“Till my last breath,” he vows, “I will vote for the Muttahida Qaumi Movement.”

Such is his loyalty toward the party that he still remembers the number plate of Hussain’s motorcycle (KAJ-161), on which the MQM chief came to Orangi Town.

“Bhai would sit on the floor with us and hold meetings,” Ahmed recalls. “Those were the good days, filled with hope.”

In his neighbourhood, where he has lived most of his life, people lovingly call him Chacha. And though he cannot walk around the streets anymore, his grandsons also find it impossible to move around with him in a car because passersby keep stopping them, to invite their beloved Chacha for a cup of tea.

Till the last elections in 2008, his health allowed him to walk door to door in Orangi Town to motivate the people to come out and vote but wisely “for the person who gave you your identity” he would hint.

He struggles to remember the infamous Operation Cleanup against the MQM in the 90s that forced many of the party leaders to escape but then drifts off to the days before partition.

An employee at the British Railways, Ahmed was 35 at the time of Partition. “I remember filling a form, writing I am a Muslim and in favour of Pakistan,” he recalls.

Back then, he lived in Saidpur, where the largest railway workshop for Assam-Bengal province was established by the British. After Partition, Saidpur came under East Pakistan – now Bangladesh. Ahmed remembers the massive bloodshed forced the Hindus to flee to the Indian border while the Muslims migrated to the other side of the border. “But there was hope. We were ready to sacrifice everything for the homeland our leaders had carved out for us.”

Not yet had the emotions of living in a Muslim homeland fizzled away, when there was the second partition, as Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan.

Every now and then, Chacha brings up a town called Munger in his conversation. His son explains Munger was mainly an Urdu-speaking town of Bihar, India. When Bangladesh was created, the Urdu-speaking community there fled to East Pakistan fearing for their lives in communal violence.

Ahmed became a migrant for the second time. He landed in Quetta. Much later, in 1974, he arrived in Karachi and made it his permanent residence. But if there is anything that he winds up after all his struggles, it is the fact that he had lost two homes. “We were two nations before Partition based on the two-nation theory. Then we became three when Bangladesh was carved out. Now four or five nations inhabit Pakistan. There will be more partitions,” Ahmed warns.

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