Bhutto Holds 2-1 Early Lead in Pakistan Vote

Benazir Bhutto’s opposition party took a dramatic and surprising 2-1 lead today over Pakistan’s ruling political alliance in crucial national elections, but it was unclear whether she would win enough legislative seats to control the government.

Speaking through an aide from her family’s ancestral home in the southern town of Larkana, the 35-year-old Bhutto stressed this morning that she “is not claiming or grabbing victory” in her bid to defeat a nine-party alliance led by supporters of the late military ruler, Gen. Zia ul-Haq. The general overthrew her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and allowed him to be executed a decade ago.

Bhutto estimated early today that her party had won at least 88 of the 205 legislative seats at stake in Wednesday’s voting. Government officials and ruling party members said she would need at least 110 seats to form a government.

State TV Agrees

Even state-run television, which Zia built and ran for more than a decade, gave Bhutto a huge margin over the ruling alliance in official results reported throughout the night.

With more than half the vote counted today, the government said Bhutto’s party had won 65 seats and the alliance 34 seats, with a total of 45 seats going to the assortment of dozens of independent parties and candidates who are likely to play a major role in forming the new government.

Inexplicably, though, government television sharply slowed in announcing the results as today’s edition of the government-owned newspaper, the Pakistan Times, reported without any attribution that the ruling alliance was leading Bhutto’s party 92 seats to 70.

At the same time, Pakistan’s Urdu-language press was quoting alliance leader Mian Nawaz Sharif, who won his seat and also is aspiring to the prime ministership, as claiming today that the ruling group will get enough of a majority to form a government after creating further coalitions with splinter groups.

Most independent media reported that the race was too close to call.

With some 60 seats in the key province of Punjab still unannounced at mid-morning, government television temporarily halted the count and broke into entertainment shows, announcing additional results only occasionally and most of them in favor of the ruling alliance.

The official returns already announced, however, indicated a crushing defeat for the Zia-inspired ruling Islamic Democratic Alliance coalition, losses that were both symbolic and strategic.

Mohammed Khan Junejo, who served as Zia’s handpicked prime minister until last May and was considered a possible candidate for the premiership if the alliance won, was defeated badly by a powerful landlord who ran on Bhutto’s slate. And Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, who was said to be the leading prime ministerial candidate of the conservatives and of the powerful Pakistan military, also lost.

Symbolic Loss

Bhutto and her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, both won their races for legislative seats. The only apparent setback for Bhutto was the loss of three key members of her party’s central committee. Bhutto’s only apparent setback was symbolic. Her party secretary general, retired army Gen. Tikka Khan, was beaten by a populist Tammany Hall-style ward heeler who ran on the ruling party alliance ticket.

As of this morning, it was too early to predict whether Bhutto’s party would win enough seats to make her the world’s first female prime minister of an Islamic nation.

It was clear, though, that Pakistan, a nation with a history of corrupt and bloody elections, had held the cleanest and most peaceful election in its 41-year history, laying the groundwork for a return to democracy after more than a decade of dictatorial rule.

As tens of millions of voters filed into polling stations, journalists and independent international poll watchers reported only a handful of incidents of registered voters being barred from the polls. And unofficial reports said that only two people had died in election-related violence.

‘Smooth, Peaceful’

Wednesday night, before the returns started coming in, a smiling President Ghulam Ishaq Khan told reporters he was “satisfied that the elections have gone so smoothly, so peacefully and in such an orderly manner.”

Ishaq Khan, who is empowered to nominate the prime minister from among assembly winners, tried to underscore his personal political independence when asked his opinion of a female prime minister.

“I think it would be a good change,” declared the president, who is known to have secretly opposed many of Zia’s policies despite his role as the late military ruler’s closest civilian adviser.

The ruling alliance of Zia followers conducted a vicious anti-Bhutto campaign focused on her gender, asserting that a female prime minister not only would be against Pakistan’s predominant Islamic religion but also against the constitution. But Ishaq Khan, who was once a member of the alliance’s main political party, made it clear Wednesday that he disagreed.

“There is nothing in the constitution to debar a lady from becoming either the prime minister or the president,” he said, without naming Bhutto.

Vague on Nomination

He was vague, however, on when he will nominate the new prime minister, which political analysts said could take days or weeks if no single party emerges with a clear victory.

“I don’t want to delay. I will expedite,” he said, adding that complete, official returns may not be in for as long as two weeks. “But it may take some time to assess.”

Ishaq Khan hailed Wednesday’s vote as “a process designed to bring a democratic government into existence in Pakistan.” He added, “My duty will be done once the derailed train is back on its tracks.”

Pakistan was ruled by Zia under martial law for eight years after the 1977 coup ousted Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whose party had won Pakistan’s last free and open election earlier that year. Zia held a national election in 1985, but political parties were barred and major opposition groups boycotted the voting.

Junejo was designated prime minister, but the new government proved less tractable than Zia wanted. Last May, he dismissed the Junejo government and dissolved the National Assembly, accusing it of corruption and failure to maintain law and order. After some delay, Zia called an election for Nov. 16. He died in a plane crash Aug. 17.

Fair Balloting

Although Wednesday’s election was unprecedentedly fair and honest, analysts said early returns indicated that Pakistanis had voted largely along traditional lines, even when voting for Bhutto’s more progressive party.

Most of the officially declared winners as of this morning were members of powerful landlord families who traditionally have held sway over Pakistan’s overwhelmingly illiterate and impoverished masses.

Even victors from Bhutto’s People’s Party, which departed from the socialist policies of her late father in selecting candidates it believed could win regardless of their backgrounds, were wealthy landowners and local political bosses.

There were, however, isolated exceptions that analysts said indicated Pakistan may be on the verge of changing its feudal ways.

The Pir of Pagaro, a larger-than-life Islamic godfather to Zia and many of his supporters who was long considered a messenger of God with mystical powers, lost badly Wednesday to a young People’s Party candidate who had spent many years in prison under Zia.

In Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, populist Mayor Mohammed Farooq Sattar, running as an independent, crushed both of his closest rivals from the ruling alliance and the People’s Party in a wave of regional victories by the Mohajir National Movement, a three-year-old political party of Muslim refugees who fled neighboring India during partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The movement is now considered one of the country’s most powerful blocs because it will help determine which of the two major parties can form a majority in the assembly.

Analysts in Karachi, site of terrorist-inspired ethnic violence that left hundreds dead last month and led the army to patrol on election day with armored personnel carriers and flak vests, said they were surprised that no clashes took place there Wednesday.

Despite the peacefulness of Wednesday’s voting, many senior members of the ruling alliance continued to warn today that the threat of serious violence remains.

Fazle Haq, a retired general and close Zia aide who has been serving as appointed ruler of Pakistan’s key North-West Frontier province since Zia dissolved the elected government, told The Times, “My anxiety has always been about post-election violence.

“If (Bhutto’s party) doesn’t get the number of seats that Benazir believes she should get, then she’s going to cry foul and say there has been rigging. Once she does that, her people will come out into the streets. My anxiety is from Nov. 20 onward.”

But the retired general said his ruling alliance is likely to take a similar course if it loses, adding that in none of the four other elections in Pakistani history has the loser accepted defeat gracefully.

There was no indication this morning, though, that Bhutto or her party had any complaints with the voting. Several local People’s Party workers told reporters at polling stations that the voting was clean and that they were aware of no serious violations.

The nation’s staunchest anti-government opposition leader, the leftist Frontier province politician Khan Abdul Wali Khan, also told The Times on Wednesday that he had heard of no major cheating and that regardless of the outcome, he would abide by the election results.

Speaking in his sprawling, peaceful back yard garden 11 miles from the Afghan border, Wali Khan, whose party symbol is a red flag with a star and whose party workers wear red uniforms and often carried high-powered AK-47 assault rifles into the polling stations, insisted that he will instruct his followers not to take to the streets if they fail to win the half-dozen seats he expects.

‘Trigger-Happy People’

“There are trigger-happy people all over the place,” explained Wali Khan, who is deeply mistrusted by the U.S. government and the Pakistani military for his staunch support for the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. “And we are not Christians who turn the other cheek. But if my people get very agitated, I will be there to make sure they do not get onto the streets.”

Still, in apparent support of Fazle Haq’s theory of future violence, Wali Khan, who easily won his own seat in the new assembly Wednesday, added, “If people lose confidence in democracy and their faith in a ballot, then naturally they will go to a bullet.”

Throughout the country, though, it appeared that voters had confidence in the polling process. Voting lines were orderly, and the only disagreements came from registered voters who did not have their required national identity cards.