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Pakhtun party routs Islamists in NWFP

ISLAMABAD: Awami National Party leader Asfandyar Wali Khan said on Tuesday the party’s emergence as the single largest political entity in the North West Frontier Province was a message to the world that not all Pakhtuns were extremist or militant and called for an end to the military operations in the province.

“We Pakhtuns are the children of Badshah Khan’s progressive thoughts and ideals,” said Mr. Khan in a television interview, referring to the ANP founder and his grandfather Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as “Frontier Gandhi”.

Among the most significant result of the Pakistan election, and one likely to have a far-reaching regional impact, was the total rout of the six-party religious coalition called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal in the NWFP. The MMA had 59 seats countrywide, and was the majority party in the NWFP after the 2002 elections. But this time, the party has been roundly defeated, winning only three parliamentary seats.

With only nine provincial seats this time, the MMA has been ousted from the NWFP, where pro-Taliban militancy and extremism have become entrenched over the last six years, and from where it spread inward into other parts of the country.

The party was also badly defeated in Balochistan, where it was in a coalition government with the PML (Q).

This time, the NWFP has returned a hung provincial Assembly with the ANP emerging as the single largest party with 31 seats. The Pakistan People’s Party won 17 seats and independents won 10 seats.

Mr. Wali Khan said Pakhtuns had voted to dispel the “impression that every Pakhtun is a fundamentalist, extremist, militant or terrorist”.

He said as his party had the largest number of seats, the ANP would form the government, but would want its coalition partner to agree on three of its fundamental demands — an end to military operations in the province, real devolution of power, and the renaming of the NWFP as “Pakhtunkhwa”.

One reason for the MMA’s defeat is that the coalition split in all but name ahead of the election after the Jamat-e-Islami decided it would boycott the polls and the Jamat-e-Ulema Islami stood firm on participation. In the NWFP, the JuI was the leading component of the coalition, but still could not overcome the impact of the JI’s boycott.

The MMA’s defeat is also being attributed to the close identification of the JuI leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman with President Pervez Musharraf’s government and consequently, its perceived pro-American tilt, the maximum brunt of which the province took.

Afrasiab Khattak, the ANP provincial leader said the roots of Pakhtun militancy “lie in the policies of the government”, and not in the province.

He rejected fears that the ANP had a Pakhtun separatist agenda, and these were “phobias of the Cold War era, and we need to grow out of them”.

ANP spokesman Zahid Khan said the ANP was against military operations in the province. “We want to end the problem through dialogue, not by military action,” he said. Aside from the NWFP, the provinces of Punjab and Balochistan are also headed for coalition governments. Sindh was the only province where one party won a majority to form the government on its own. The PPP won 68 out of 130 seats in the province, while Muttahida Qaumi Movement won 38.

In Punjab, the Nawaz Sharif-led Pakistan Muslim League (N) won 102 seats out of 307 – far short of the number required to form the government. The PPP won 78 seats and the PML (Q) 66.

Balochistan, where the nationalist parties boycotted the election, was the only province where the PML (Q) found some cheer. The party won 17 seats, with the PPP getting seven, while eight seats went to independents.

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