Whilst the heavy defeat of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s party has dominated news coverage of the election results, there is also interesting news from the elections in the North West Frontier.
The secular Pashtun nationalist party, the Awami National Party*, appears to be doing well, defeating several Islamist incumbents. This marks a move away from extremists toward moderate secularists in an area that has been widely characterised as a hot-bed of Islamic terrorism and support for terrorism.
* Their website is rather incongrously currently displaying both the latest election results and a “This site is under construction” sign.
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One Comment
The political history of the North-West Frontier is not all what you might expect from the cliches about warlike Pathans. For example at Partition the province originally voted to join India not Pakistan, and the provincial government was the only Moslem-majority area of British India to have Hindus in its cabinet. The dominant political force was the Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) which raised an ‘army’ of 100,000 Pathan men equipped without guns or other weapons to carry out non-violent opposition to the British. They wished to go nto India to build up a multi-faith nation working with Ghandian ideals. KK leaders spent many years in British prisons before independence and many spent even longer in Pakistani prisons after independence.
See this book for some background on the extraordinary Pathan non-violence movement which has so sadly been betrayed:
A Man to Match His Mountains; Badhsah Khan, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam.
Eknath Easwaram (1984) Nilgiri Press