KASUR: The successful candidates in the recent general election were all old and traditional faces with the exception of one candidate in the provincial assembly and though he was the new entry in 2018 election but he also belonged to the family that had a political background.

Retired bureaucrats, independent candidates and rebels of various political parties as well as those contesting the election relying on the religious, sectarian or clan votes were rejected.

The only new entrant was retired Col Muhammad Hashim Dogar of the PTI who remained the winner in PP-177. He is the brother of former MPA Javaid Ashiq Dogar. His father Ashiq Dogar had been MNA from Kasur in the 1990s.

Under the new delimitation, there were four seats of the national assembly in Kasur while nine seats were for the provincial assembly. The PML-N won three national assembly seats and six in the provincial assembly. The remaining four seats were grabbed by the PTI.

The political parties, including the PPP and MMA, according to the local analysts, have been wiped out of Kasur forever as the PML-N won the seats under the circumstances when the party was on the decline on the political horizon of the country. Both the parties lack electable candidates despite contesting several previous elections.

Religious parties could bag only a few thousand votes in all the constituencies and in some of them even a few hundred votes while the vote counting for the PML-N and PTI crossed even the figure of 100,000.

Two female candidates, namely Mrs. Muzammil Masood Bhatti of the PTI in for PP-175 and Nasira Mayo, independent candidate for NA-137, also lost the election.

Former foreign minister Sardar Aseff Ahmed Ali of the PTI, PPP central executive member Chaudhry Manzoor Ahmed and former district nazim Rana Muhammad Hayat Khan were the heavyweight politicians but they failed.

Over half of the seats in the national and provincial assembly were clinched by three political families of Kasur, including those by the Malik, Rana and Nakai families.

The Malik family turned up as the most powerful as it secured three seats; one seat in the national assembly and two seats in the provincial assembly. Rana and Nakai family seized two seats each; one in national assembly and one in provincial assembly.

The PML-N grabbed three seats out of four in NA-137, 138 and 139 while the PTI carried the day in NA-140.

In NA-137, the PML-N’s Saad Waseem bagged 121,207 votes while PTI Sardar Aseff Ahmed Ali could secure only 42,930 votes. In NA-138, Malik Rasheed Ahmed of the PML-N carried the day by getting 109,386 votes against his rival Rashid Tufail of the PTI got 78,458 votes. In NA-139, Rana Muhammad Ishaq of the PML-N won with 121,767 votes while his PTI rival Azeemudin Lakhvi secured 112,893 votes. After a nerve-breaking contest in NA-140, Sardar Talib Nakai of the PTI carried the day with a narrow margin of 326 votes against the PML-N’s Rana Muhammad Hayat.

The PML-N occupied six seats of the provincial assembly out of nine in the district while three seats were won by the PTI. The PML-N carried the day in PP-174,175,176, 178, 181 and 182. The PTI won in PP-177, 179 and 180.

The vote bank of the winning candidates also did not change much while the clan factor also was not that effective. The PML-N’s Naeem Safdar Ansari got 55,470 votes PP-174 against PTI rival Maqsood Sabir Ansari who bagged 24,822 votes. In the last general election, Naeem Safdar Ansari also bagged over 50,000 votes.

This time, four candidates from the Ansari clan were contesting for various political parties, including the PTI, Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) and the PPP, apprehending that the clan vote would be divided among the candidates, leaving Naeem Safdar in troubled waters. Political observers say Naeem Safdar, acquitted in the anti-judiciary tirade case, failed the division of the clan.

The PML-N former MPA Nadeem Yaqoob Sethi who was contesting as an independent candidate from PP-175 was also from the Ansari clan which turned its back on him as he had left the PML-N. He secured only 11,921 votes and was the second runner-up. The clan, instead, supported Malik Ahmed Saeed who carried the day by securing 42,136 votes with the PTI’s Mrs Masood Bhatti who got 28,055 votes and was the runner-up.

In the opinion of political analysts, in Kasur, national politics hardly matters as majority of the constituencies are in the rural areas where politics of families and groups reign supreme.

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2018