NEW YORK TIMES
FEBRUARY 17, 2008
Hired gunmen walk past the Chaudhry family residence in Gujrat, Pakistan, on Friday.
The nationwide parliamentary elections are intended to usher in an era of democracy in Pakistan after months of political turmoil and nearly a decade of military rule under President Pervez Musharraf.
But here in Punjab Province, the biggest prize, the bare-knuckle election fight has included charges of armed intimidation by the police and private militias, as well as bribes through government favors. The threat of violence and the suspicion of rigging hang thick in the air. There has even been bickering over who should operate the polling stations.
A street-level view of the campaign, in fact, reveals the many stubborn shortcomings of Pakistan’s politics, where the parties are organized less around policies than people, often from feudal families who have held sway for generations.
This election battle is especially sharp because Punjab is the home of the political patrons of Mr. Musharraf, the powerful and hard-nosed Chaudhry clan, which is working hard to keep its grip across the province, Pakistan’s most populous. The scion of the family, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, a confidant of Mr. Musharraf, is the president’s choice to be the next prime minister should his party win.
On the other side, Asif Ali Zardari, husband of the assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, and now the leader of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, asserts that his forces will sweep much of Punjab’s rich harvest of 147 parliamentary seats, ensuring a victory for his party, if the voting is free and fair.
The question on everyone’s minds is how free and fair will the elections be.
Ahmad Mukhtar, a wealthy businessman and longtime stalwart of Ms. Bhutto’s, has made a special fuss about guns.
The Chaudhrys, he asserts, use a private family militia and the Punjab police to intimidate voters. The intention, he said, is to keep his supporters away from the polls and tip the vote in favor of the incumbent, Chaudhry Shujaat, the chairman of Mr. Musharraf’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q.
An independent group, the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency visited Gujrat this month and said in a report on Monday that “a general atmosphere of fear was detected among candidates and workers of parties opposed to Chaudhry Shujaat and his group.”
The group recommended that the army be deployed in Gujrat on election day because that was the best way to prevent “a major threat of violence.”
To counter the Chaudhry forces, Mr. Mukhtar, who has run against Mr. Shujaat five times, and won once, said he felt compelled to organize his own election day security force. It has 160 armed men from a private security company.
If the army fails to keep the peace on Monday and Chaudhry forces arrive at polling stations, Mr. Mukhtar will deploy his force. He is especially worried that the Chaudhrys will try to stop voting at polling stations where his support is particularly strong, a time-tested technique in Pakistan, Mr. Mukhtar said.
As well, Mr. Mukhtar has readied a flotilla of young men on motorcycles, armed with long sticks and cellphones. They will be dispatched on election day at the first sign of disturbances from the opposing side, he said.
Most upsetting, Mr. Mukhtar said, are the armed men — “goons” he called them — who operate as the “Wajahat force.” Chaudhry Wajahat, the younger brother of his election rival, Mr. Shujaat, is advertised on banners around Gujrat as the “commander of the Wajahat force,” a group that Mr. Mukhtar says is an “illegal army.”
A photograph submitted by Mr. Mukhtar, the opposition candidate, in a complaint to the Election Commission of Pakistan showed Mr. Wajahat’s force at a rally. Mr. Mukhtar said he had not received a reply from the commission.
“When we first went to villages, they were not prepared to invite us in, they were so scared that there would be retaliation,” Mr. Mukhtar said. “But then we went with 14 or 15 people with guns, and they did a lot of aerial firing to show we are with you. It was to say if the Chaudhrys have guns we will protect you with guns.”
So at a rally for Mr. Mukhtar last week in the village of Khojanwali, six miles south of Gujrat, a group of young men sat beside the red carpeted stage with AK-47s at their sides.
At the microphone, a man introduced as the “people’s general” revved up the crowd. “We’re not scared of anybody,” he shouted. “The Chaudhrys have taken land from you. When we win we will return the land — and the buffalos.”
Mr. Shujaat, the governing party candidate, scoffed at the notion that he or his family would use weapons during the campaign.
“People are not children anymore,” Mr. Shujaat said over a lunch he provided to hundreds of party workers at his country place, a replica of an antebellum mansion, known as the Nat House (pronounced Nut) in the village of Nat on the outskirts of Gujrat. “How can you convince someone to vote at gunpoint?”
Mr. Shujaat is so powerful that when Mr. Wajahat, his brother, was arrested by British antiterrorist police officers as a terrorism suspect at Gatwick Airport on Jan. 22, President Musharraf brought the matter up during his meeting in London with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Mr. Shujaat, who said he flew to London to secure his brother’s release, met with the political director of the Foreign Office, Mark Lyall Grant, who came to his hotel. Mr. Shujaat said it took the Foreign Office two attempts to write a news release sufficiently apologetic for the humiliation suffered by his brother.
Mr. Wajahat turned up at one of his recent election rallies with a caravan of dozens of sport utility vehicles, and a pickup truck of half a dozen members of the Punjab elite police force. A local policeman guarding the rally had a sticker of Mr. Wajahat on his bullet belt.
Although he had not managed to ban the Wajahat force, Mr. Mukhtar said he had won some concessions from the Election Commission. He had protested that the Chaudhrys had selected polling supervisors who were not legally qualified to do the job. He believed, Mr. Mukhtar said, that the people had been chosen so they could be manipulated to influence the vote in favor of the Chaudhrys.
The stakes are so high in Gujrat that even on Friday the Chaudhry camp had challenged the personnel revisions made in favor of Mr. Mukhtar. The two sides were haggling at the courthouse as Monday drew ever nearer.
An estimated 15 members of the Chaudhry clan are running for the national and provincial assemblies in Punjab, some of them in duplicate seats. If a candidate wins two seats, another election is held to fill one of them.
One of the newcomers to the Chaudhry political roster is Chaudhry Moonis, 30, the American-educated son of Mr. Elahi, the family scion.
Mr. Moonis, who is running for a parliamentary seat from Lahore, the political and intellectual capital of Punjab, has been caught up in his own campaign controversies. Huge billboards of Mr. Moonis’s face, framed with a swathe of black hair, have been plastered over the city’s main streets, far in excess of the spending limits, according to his opponent from the Pakistan Peoples Party.
The most potent criticism of Mr. Moonis revolves around the mailing of money orders from government funds worth 1,500 rupees, about $38, to all the homes in his constituency.
The orders were signed by his father, who until Nov. 20 was the chief minister of Punjab, the most important post in the province.
According to provincial government documents, the money came from a program intended for disaster victims that calls for means testing of recipients. The dates on the money orders shows they were signed by Mr. Elahi on Nov. 29, nine days after he left office. Mr. Moonis’s opponent, Ashraf Ejaz Gill of the Peoples Party, said he had complained to the Election Commission to no avail.
During an interview in his lavish campaign headquarters in Lahore, Mr. Moonis said the mailing of the money orders was a mistake. “Someone in the government decided to put the whole constituency down instead of the poorest of the poor,” Mr. Moonis said. “It was some bureaucratic mess-up.”
As the elections approach, Mr. Mukhtar said, he is leaving little to chance.
At the district court in Gujrat on Monday night when the crucial counting will take place, Mr. Mukhtar plans a commanding presence. “We plan to have 4,000 to 5,000 people outside,” he said. “The intention is to have so much pressure they can’t change the result.”
CIVIL SOCIETY PAKISTAN 
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