How PMLN doubled its Vote Bank

Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) Chairman has been raising some extremely invalid points for the last few months in order to prove that the Elections 2013 were rigged. Some of those arguments go something like “Why former Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry addressed the Returning Officers (ROs)?”, “Why Nawaz Sharif addressed his workers at 10 p.m. on May 11 when only 18 or 19 per cent of results had arrived?” and some others like these. The funniest of these arguments, however, is “How PMLN doubled its vote bank?”. While I can answer all of his questions, I will stick to the funniest one here.

But first take a look at the other two that I have mentioned.

Why ex-CJP addressed the Returning Officers?

Though the CJ may have had a thousand and one reasons for addressing the ROs, I simply have one question to counter this argument of Imran Khan’s i.e. “What difference does that make?”.

Let me explain it a bit.

Pakistan Muslim League (N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) were the dominant parliamentary political parties during the last tenure. These two, along with other parliamentary forces including Awami National Party (ANP), Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQ), Jamiat Uleam-i-Islam (F) and others, carved out the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th amendments. While 18^th amendment was a master-piece in which more than 100 new amendments were passed unanimously by the Parliament it also answered many of the long-standing questions. 17^th amendment barred every person who had become two times Prime Minister from assuming the position for the third time, 18^th amendment annulled this article. Khyber Pakhtunkhawa (KPK) finally got its name as it was being called as North West Frontier Province for the last 63 years (1947-2010). It took away the power of imposing 58 – 2(b) from the President and made it the sole discretion of the Prime Minister to decide whether he wanted his assemblies to be dissolved or not.

20^th amendment was even bigger an achievement when all the parliamentary political forces of the country joined hands to carve out a plan for empowering the election commission. These parties never even mentioned the role of ROs. However, it was Imran Khan himself who asked the judiciary to be a part of the elections and said that he did not trust the ‘government machinery’. That is how the infamous ROs got inducted into our electoral process. The government and the opposition parties wanted the system to be as transparent as it could be and that is why request of a party, which was not even in the parliament, was granted. ROs from judiciary were not the part of the scheme formed by the elected representatives. They were there because Imran Khan asked for them.

Now let’s come back to our original question.

What difference does anyone addressing anyone before the elections make? If Chief Justice addressed the ROs, does it mean he asked them to rig the elections in PMLN’s favor while addressing them? This is ridiculous. OR if PTI thinks that CJ gave them an impression by addressing them that he was the boss and they must obey him in future, then they need to prove that CJ gave them instructions later on. Besides, ROs always were a part of the judiciary. So even if CJ hadn’t addressed them, they already knew he was their boss. What difference then addressing them makes?

The second argument Imran Khan always proudly puts forward is that of Nawaz Sharif addressing his workers at PMLN Central Secretariat in Model Town, Lahore at 10 p.m.

I want to clarify it first that Nawaz Sharif did not address the workers at 10 p.m. He did that at around 11:20 p.m.

Secondly, even the results being shown during his speech portrayed an entirely different picture compared to the one that Khan is trying to portray for the last several months. Watch closely the video embedded below. It clearly shows that results of several of the constituencies had already been decided whereas most of them had had more than 30% results.

Nawaz Sharif Victory Speech by moremag Thirdly, political parties (the good ones I mean here, not the ones whose candidate did not even know the exact locations of their constituencies) are always better equipped than the media when it comes to election results. Candidates remain in touch with their polling agents at all polling stations and get to know about the results immediately after they get decided. On the other hand, media has several other factors to consider. For example, if TV channels showed the result of NA-125 at about 11 p.m. nobody would have been interested in watching the TV anymore. PMLN workers already knew Khawaja Saad Rafique was way ahead of Hamid Khan when the TV channels were showing that Hamid Khan was leading by around 20,000 votes.

So, whining about Nawaz Sharif’s speech can only be a hoax as Imran Khan knows well enough that he is just trying to keep his workers and voters confused. I will come back to it later. Let me first handle the funniest question.

The Funniest Question: How PMLN doubled its lead?

Imran Khan is an amazing character. He assumes some things at times and gets so much convinced about his assumptions that he starts believing them to be facts. He has had dreams, which later turned out to be nightmares, he was going to become the Prime Minister. He mentioned the dream during his March 23, 2013 speech in Lahore. And he was so sure of the truthfulness of his dream that he started considering it to be a divine message. Imran Khan wrote it on a paper that he was going to become the Prime Minister and gave it to Shahzeb Khanzada on a live show after signing it.

I have mentioned the dreams and the other act only to give you a feeling of how Imran is an impossible person to deal with. He has said it on various occasions that he is a ‘solitary animal’. I’m sure that all the fuss is mainly because he day-dreamed of becoming the Prime Minister a bit too much. It seems he has dreamed of this government coming to an end this August and has, therefore, decided to march on to the federal capital on August 14.

These assumptions of his lead him to believe in myths, the realities that never existed, the ghosts that he thinks are real. His parallel universe, the one that he had created for himself, gives him sleepless nights now and makes him believe in things that have nothing to do with facts.

One of those beliefs is that of PMLN doubling its vote bank without a reason. First of all, I will not get into the debate why PMLN was good or why people loved it or why people turned out in massive numbers wherever Nawaz Sharif visited during the election campaign. Here, I will just compare the situation that the PMLN was in during the two elections i.e. 2008 and 2013.

In 2008, Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif had returned from exile just one day before the last date of filing the nomination papers. Both the leaders landed in Lahore on 25^th of November, 2007, while 26^th was the last date of filing the nomination papers. They never got a chance to decide their candidates. Pakistan Muslim League (Q) was in power and had all the big candidates from rural Punjab with it.

Supreme Court of Pakistan, headed by Musharraf’s crony Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar barred Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif from contesting the election. So even if there was some sort of PMLN’s wind in urban Punjab it got blew away as the voters realized that their vote will not be able to make Nawaz Sharif the Prime Minister of Pakistan. It is Pakistanis’ psyche and Imran Khan knows it well enough. And if he doesn’t I would challenge him to announce that he won’t be contesting an election in future but will continue to chair PTI and see how his voters react to it.

In 2008, PMLN had been in power for the last five years in Punjab. Its leadership was in Pakistan and was constantly in touch with the workers and the public trend. PMLN started to hunt for the best candidates in the province way before the announcement of the election. By the end of September, 2012, PMLN had decided over 90% of its candidates and even their alternatives and covering candidates were decided.

On the other hand, PTI was busy conducting its intra-party elections as late as March, 2013 when the election was just two months away. PMLN, on the contrary, had got its intra-party elections conducted in 2010. So, it was much better equipped than PTI to understand which candidates were better suited for holding its ticket in the election.

Strong candidates in rural areas were yet another positive for the PMLN. Just for an example, consider Danyal Aziz contesting in Narowal from his local constituency on PMLN ticket. The man has 50,000 votes of his own. During the previous election, the same vote bank went to PML (Q) because his family was aligned with the PML-Q then. Sardar Sikander Hayat Bosan who has beaten former Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani during these elections contested on PML (Q)’s ticket during the 2008 election. He has a personal vote bank of around 60000 votes. His votes, this time, went to PMLN.

PML-Q had secured more than 8 million votes during the previous election. In 2013, their vote-bank has shrunk to less than half of what they got in 2008. Why Imran Khan thinks that PMLQ’s vote bank did not convert to PMLN? After all, it always was Muslim League’s vote bank.

The number of candidates that PMLN filed in 2008 was almost half of the candidates it was able to file in 2013. For the first time, PMLN contested the elections from Pakhtoon areas, where it merely gave support to certain candidates or parties during all the previous elections. In fact PMLN only stood behind PTI during these elections in KPK (PTI’s strongest constituency) with only a difference of around hundred and fifty thousand votes.

Most importantly, Imran Khan said it more than once during his TV interviews and public speeches that 35 million new voters have been added in the electoral process. Though he assumed that all those votes would go to PTI this time, he was quite ill-informed while assuming this because most of these voters lived in rural areas of Punjab and Sindh. His party was never able to reach those areas whereas PML and PPP have been continuously winning the elections in the same areas for several decades.

So if PTI can multiply its vote bank with 45 (it secured around 1.5 lakh votes during 2002 elections and boycotted the 2008 elections) why could PMLN not multiply its vote by only 2?

And finally, I would like to remind Imran Khan that he knew well enough that he was losing the elections from Punjab. Not only Asad Umar, PTI’s showboy and its MNA from NA-48, welcomed the election results just half an hour after Nawaz Sharif’s victory speech but also Senior Vice President PTI Makhdoom Javed Hashmi said after elections that he knew that results would be same and that he had informed PTI leadership as well about it.

But most importantlty, Imran Khan himself said in his lastspeech before Elections 2013 something that shows he knew he was losing in Punjab. His words were “I think KPK has realized, I want you people to understand also that Change is a must”.

And finally, Imran Khan says that PMLN performed so poorly in its tenure, how could it get so many votes.

I will simply ask him to go and check what PMLN did in its tenure from 2008 to 2013 in the field of Education, Health, Infrastructure, Energy and Economic progress on my other post:
What PMLN did from 2008 to 2013