GILGIT: The Diamer district returning officer on Saturday served show-cause notice on five candidates of Deral constituency for agreeing to not allow women to cast vote in the upcoming elections to the Gilgit-Baltistan Legislative Assembly being held on June 8.

In the show-cause notice, DRO Mushtaq Ahmed asked the five candidates of Deral constituency of Diamer to explain that under which law they had decided to bar women from casting vote in their constituency.

The candidates, including PML-N’s Haider Khan, PPP’s Dafar Khan, JUI-F’s Rahmat Khaliq, Dr Zaman of PTI and independent candidate, Shamsur Rahman, were served the notices.

Read: Govt asked to ensure women participation in polls

It noted that stopping women from participating in the polls was violation of the GB Election Commission’s code of conduct.

On Thursday, a local jirga of Deral valley comprising ulema and the candidates had decided unanimously to not allow women in the area to cast votes in the upcoming GBLA elections, justifying that women were never allowed to take part in the polls process in the past because it was “against the local norms”.

It is to be recalled that in the two constituencies of district Diamer -- GBLA-3 Deral and GBLA-4 Tangir -- women have never cast vote in any election in the past. A total of 12,550 women voters are registered in the Deral constituency. The civil society and political activists condemned the jirga decision.

Riaz Akbar, a political activist and representative of the Institute for Democracy, told Dawn that the decision to exclude women from the election process stemmed from the predominant conservatism that engulfed the Diamer district.

Published in Dawn, May 3rd, 2015

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