Like the rest of Pakistan, the voters in the erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan will vote tomorrow (July 25) to elect 12 members of the National Assembly.

It will be the last general election in FATA under the existing electoral system as this largely mountainous region has been merged with the adjoining Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province after the passage of the Constitution (25th Amendment) Act 2018 in parliament on May 24.

In the next general election, the number of National Assembly seats in the former FATA, now known as tribal districts, will be reduced. These seats will henceforth be counted among those from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The current eight seats for FATA in the Senate will remain intact until the completion of the senators’ term. Subsequently, the number of seats in the Upper House of Parliament will also decrease as the strength of the senators from Pakistan’s four federating units – Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan — has to remain equal.

As promised by the government, the tribal districts will also be given representation in the provincial assembly of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the total number of seats will increase from 126 to 147. The polls in FATA for the 23 seats in the provincial assembly will be held in 2019. These include 18 general seats and, for the first time, four reserved for women and one for religious minorities living in the seven tribal districts and six sub-divisions. The promise was to organize the election for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly in a year’s time after July 25 general election, but no firm dates have been mentioned.

It remains to be seen if this promise can be fulfilled considering the fact that successive governments since Pakistan’s independence in 1947 neglected FATA and deprived its people of their political, legal and economic rights. This neglect meant that FATA remained the least developed place in Pakistan with the lowest socio-economic indicators. Armed groups exploited the situation and challenged the state’s writ, prompting the Pakistan Army to undertake more than a dozen military operations against local and foreign militants since 2003 to regain control of lost territory. Most militants escaped across the border to Afghanistan in 2009 and continue to pose a threat to Pakistan from their hideouts in the eastern and southern Afghan provinces straddling the Durand Line border.

Questions are being asked as to when the new administrative, judicial and local government system will be put in place in the tribal districts to complete the merger.

Rahimullah Yusufzai

FATA’s mainstreaming is also being keenly watched by the US and Afghan governments because they have been asking Pakistan to deny space to militants undertaking attacks against the US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan.

According to Pakistan’s 2017 census, FATA’s population was roughly 5 million with an annual growth rate of 2.41 percent. Its population was 3.18 million when the last census was held in 1998. Lawmakers from FATA disputed the census findings, arguing that a significant number of tribal people who shifted to the settled districts all over Pakistan owing to militancy and military operations weren’t properly counted.

The Election Commission of Pakistan has set up 1,884 polling stations in the 12 National Assembly constituencies to enable the 2.509 million voters to cast their ballots. The gender disparity in this culturally conservative tribal region is evident from the fact that 1.507 million (60 percent) of the voters are male and 1.001 million (39.91 percent) are female. The families tend to discourage their female members from voting.

It is not that elections are being held in FATA for the first time, though the setting is different following its merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Until 1997, only the few thousand privileged tribal Maliks (elders) were empowered to vote and contest elections. In the 1997 general election, the tribespeople for the first time got the right to vote on the basis of universal adult franchise.

Though there were security concerns about the 2018 election campaign in the tribal districts, only one incident of violence has been reported so far, and that from North Waziristan, which before the Zarb-e-Azb military operation in June 2014 was known as the sanctuary for a host of local and foreign militant groups, including Al-Qaeda, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, East Turkestan Islamic Movement, Haqqani network and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

Almost all political parties have fielded candidates in the tribal districts, though independents are also a force to reckon with because of tribal affiliations and the use of money. Most parties that supported FATA’s merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are claiming credit for this landmark decision, while Maulana Fazlur Rahman’s Islamic-rooted JUI-F still opposes it on the basis that the tribal people weren’t consulted about it.

Another election issue is whether the former FATA will get the special funds amounting to 100 billion rupees ($0.77 billion) a year, as promised by the government for 10 years to expedite development work and bring it on a par with the rest of Pakistan. Questions are also being asked as to when the new administrative, judicial and local government system will be put in place in the tribal districts to complete the merger.

— Rahimullah Yusufzai is a senior political and security analyst of Pakistan.  He was the first to interview Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and twice interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1998.

Twitter: @rahimyusufzai1