The right to vote

Despite constitutional rights granted to them as equal citizens, orders issued by the Supreme Court and by the Election Commission of Pakistan, women in certain parts of the country are still denied their basic right to franchise. The women of Lower Dir were denied this during the May 7 by-election for PK-95 with, astonishingly, none of the over 53,000 registered women voters in the constituency coming out to cast their vote. Male political leaders say this was their (the women’s) choice. Evidence collected by women’s rights activists and the National Commission on the Status of Women, which is one of the complainants in the case put forward to the ECP, say otherwise. They maintain that political parties reached a verbal agreement among themselves barring women from casting votes. This was essentially done to prevent the criticisms that came up after the May 2013 general election when a written agreement, signed even by so-called liberal parties such as the PPP, the ANP and the PTI, was put forward in which it was declared that women would not vote. Such agreements are a violation of SC orders on the matter. Now a jirga in Hangu has ordered that women not be allowed to vote in local bodies polls.
The ECP ruling on the matter will be significant. The PK-95 election should be declared null and void and women’s participation in LB polls ensured so that a clear message is sent out and political parties know they need to abide by the decision of the courts and the ECP. An election in which half the citizens of a constituency are disfranchised is not an election at all. It is instead a throwback to medieval times when the vote was available only to selected groups. Such a situation cannot be permitted to continue. The upcoming local bodies elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and other areas of the country are an occasion to drive this home without any room for doubt. It is best if a meeting of political parties is held ahead of these to lay the rules out clearly before them. The NCSW should be a part of this process. The only way to move on is to ensure that during future polls, women will indeed be permitted to turn out. Each time women have been given this liberty, and right, they have taken part enthusiastically in balloting and even put themselves up as candidates. We saw this in the last general election. It amounts to a violation of the basic law of our land to continue to hold them in their homes, apparently in the case of Dir by baton-wielding men, and thereby snatch away from them a right that must belong to every adult woman in the country no matter where she lives.