KARACHI, Sept 23: If polling is held tomorrow for the presidential election, Gen Pervez Musharraf may easily get over 60 per cent of the votes from the Sindh Assembly.

In Sindh, the total strength of the members of the provincial assembly is 168, but as one of the members belonging to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement had died recently, its actual strength is 167.

In the house of 167, the strength of the ruling coalition, led by the Pakistan Muslim League–Q, stands at 102, including 41 MQM MPAs. Of the other coalition partners, the PML-Q has 47 legislators, PML-F 13, and the PPP-Patriots has one MPA.

On the other hand, the strength of the opposition in the assembly stands at 66 with 57 PPP MPAs, eight MMA legislators and one Mohajir Qaumi Movement MPA.

According to the formula of counting votes as prescribed in the constitution, the total votes acquired by any candidate should be multiplied by 65, (which is the total strength of the smallest provincial assembly, Balochistan) divided by the total strength of the provincial assembly where the votes were cast.

“Under this formula, the ruling coalition gets 39 or 40 out of 65 votes,” Irfanullah Marwat, Chief Whip of the PML-Q, claimed. He added that “unlike in other provinces, where there were ripples among the coalition partners, including within the ruling the party, the Sindh PML-Q solidly stands behind President Musharraf, who would bag 100 per cent of the votes from the ruling coalition.”

He also express his optimism that if members belonging to the opposition parties did not resign, there was every possibility of increasing the number of votes cast in favour of President Musharraf as there were many MPAs who would likely favour him if given the freedom of choice.

Presidential hopefuls

Meanwhile, out of the 35 aspirants who have so far acquired nomination forms to contest the presidential election, scheduled for Oct 6, seven aspirants are from Sindh.

Six of them have received forms from the provincial election commissioner while one hopeful had received the form from the registrar of the Sindh High Court.

The aspirants are: advocate Sohail Hameed, Amir Ali Pattiwala, Lt-Col (retd) Mohammad Tariq, Dr Mohammad Usman, Faqir Husain Leghari, Syed Sakhawat Ali and Mian Nazeer-ur-Rehman.

This was stated by Provincial Election Commissioner, Sindh, Chaudhry Qamar-uz-Zaman. In response to a question he told Dawn that under the rules, there is no fee, nor any condition to fulfil for obtaining the form except that an aspirant should be a Muslim with the minimum age of 45 years.

However, there are conditions in place which are required to be met by the candidate to become eligible to contest the presidential elections.

Political analysts were of the view that apart from the number of aspirants, whose strength could increase till the closing date by noon Sept 27 for filing the papers, over 99 per cent could not be able to find their proposer and seconder as only legislators could meet the condition.

They also pointed out that as far as the opposition parties were concerned, who could easily fulfil the eligibility condition, none of them, including the Pakistan People’s Party, had made up their mind whether to field their own candidate or record their protest by abstaining from the election over the issue of Gen Musharraf contesting the election in uniform.