By Aflatoon
Four seats were contested in Bagh and Haveli on Monday. By Tuesday morning both major parties had a settled position on what had happened, and the two positions were, as usual, incompatible.
The PPP has rejected the elections outright. Three senators called them “the darkest blot” on Kashmir’s electoral history and said describing the polls as peaceful would be a “blatant lie”.
The PML-N says the PPP is dressing up a defeat. Rana Sanaullah observed, with the air of a connoisseur, that this year’s rigging allegations were “not as intense as before” — which I take to be a professional assessment from a man who has heard many.
Meanwhile PML-N workers are sitting outside a returning officer’s office in Haveli demanding a recount, because their candidate lost.
So: the elections are a fraud, except where we won, in which case they are sound; and they are sound, except where we lost, in which case count it again. This is the settled constitutional doctrine of both parties and has been for forty years.
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Underneath all this, in LA-14 Dhirkot, something happened that neither party has said a word about.
Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan — former prime minister of Azad Kashmir, president of the Muslim Conference, son of Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan, which is to say a man whose surname has been on that ballot since before most of its voters were born — was beaten in his home constituency. The seat had returned him at every election since 1985.
Not narrowly. He lost by more than twenty-one thousand votes.
The winner was Sajid Iqbal Abbasi of the Awami Dast-o-Bazu Party, and I will wager a modest sum that you had not heard of it before Tuesday morning. I had not.
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But the number that stopped me was not the winner’s. It was the other two.
The PML-N’s candidate in Dhirkot took about three thousand votes. The PPP’s took about two thousand eight hundred.
Between them, the two parties that govern this country and its Kashmir both — the two whose senators spent Tuesday explaining to us what the electorate had really meant — could not muster six thousand votes in a seat where twenty-one thousand people were busy dismantling a dynasty.
They were not defeated in Dhirkot. They were not present in it.
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I have looked at the coverage and I want to report what I found, which is: almost nothing.
The result appears as a line item, described as “a major upset”, and then the copy moves briskly on to the recount sit-in and the rigging press conference, because those involve parties with press offices and the other thing does not.
Nobody has alleged that Abbasi’s votes were rigged. That is the detail I keep returning to. In an election both major parties agree was compromised — each in the specific places where it lost — the largest margin of the night, by a distance, is the one result nobody has thought to question.
It is possible that the machinery was busy elsewhere. It is also possible that when twenty thousand people in a valley decide they have had enough of a family, no machinery is required.
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I do not want to romanticise the winner. I know nothing about Sajid Iqbal Abbasi’s politics, and in AJK a small party is frequently a waiting room, holding a ticket for whichever bloc forms the government. He may be sitting with the PML-N by the time you read this. That is the ordinary arc and I would not bet against it.
But that is a story about what happens after the count. What happened at the count is that a dynasty was dismissed in its stronghold by a margin that left no room for argument, while both national parties finished in four figures — and the political class has responded by talking about something else.
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Here is why I think it went unmentioned, and it is not a conspiracy.
Both parties are currently invested in a story where the outcome in Bagh was determined by the state — by presiding officers, by delayed polling, by agents kept out of stations 119 and 120, by whatever is happening in Poonch and Sudhnoti, where seven seats have been postponed with no reason given and no new date. That story is useful to the PPP, which lost overall, and useful to the PML-N, which can dismiss it.
An electorate that simply turned on an incumbent family, decisively, without anybody’s help, does not fit either narrative. It is inconvenient to the loser and no use to the winner. So it becomes a line item.
I would only observe that in a week when we have been told the system has collapsed, and told it will last five more years, and told the elections were the darkest blot on our history — twenty thousand people in Western Bagh quietly did the one thing the system is actually for.
Nobody has thanked them. I thought somebody should.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
