Only 6 of 150 women candidates win NA polls in Pakistan

Only six women have won polls to Pakistan`s lower house of Parliament, a two-thirds reduction from the 18 directly-elected members of outgoing National Assembly.

Islamabad: Only six women have won polls to Pakistan`s lower house of Parliament, a two-thirds reduction from the 18 directly-elected members of the outgoing National Assembly.

Polls to 272 seats of the National Assembly were held on May 11. Another 60 seats reserved for women and 10 reserved for non-Muslims will be allocated to political parties according to their performance in the polls. The six women directly elected to the National Assembly are Sumaira Malik, Saira Afzal Tarar and Ghulam Bibi Bharwana of the PML-N and Faryal Talpur, Azra Fazal Pechuho and Fehmida Mirza of the Pakistan People`s Party. None of them are new entrants to politics. Fehmida Mirza was the speaker of the outgoing National Assembly while Talpur and Pechuho are the sisters of President Asif Ali Zardari. The Election Commission has so far announced results for 261 of the 272 directly elected seats and the PML-N is set to form government after emerging as the single largest party with 124 seats. Polls in 11 seats have been terminated, postponed or withheld. A total of 150 had contested the General Election from 111 constituencies across Pakistan. Sixty of them contested as candidates of political parties. No women candidates were successful in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provinces. The successful women candidates of the PML-N all from Punjab while the winning PPP candidates are from Sindh. Four of the successful women candidates have achieved hat-tricks. Talpur won by the largest margin of 64,438 votes while Bharwana had the lowest winning margin of 18,152 votes. The number of women elected to the four provincial assemblies remained unchanged from the figure in the 2008 polls. Only 10 of the 313 women who contested from 213 constituencies of the provincial assemblies were successful. Of the 10, eight belong to Punjab while one candidate each is from Sindh and Balochistan. No woman won a seat in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Assembly. All eight successful candidates in Punjab are from the PML-N as is the sole woman to win a general seat in the Balochistan Assembly. One PPP candidate won from a provincial constituency in Karachi. PTI