In a first, over 550 women contested local government elections in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Sunday.
The election commission said, in what is the first time that local polls are being held in districts that used to be part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
Polling started at 8 a.m. and closed at 5 p.m. in the first phase of the polls in 17 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Elections are being held in Charsadda, Nowshera, Mardan, Peshawar as well as in Khyber, Mohmand Agency, Swabi, Kohat, Karak, Hangu, Bannu, Lakki Marwat, Tank, Haripur, Buner, Bajaur, and DI Khan, with more than 35,700 candidates in the run for tehsil council, village council and neighborhood councils.
About 3,900 women candidates are in the contest, including from FATA, which was merged with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in 2018. Before the merger, the movement of women and girls in the tribal belt was largely restricted, they rarely left their homes, and were overwhelmingly denied the right to vote. But as the region went to local polls on Sunday, some nine percent of nearly 6,380 candidates in three districts were female.
“For the first time, 557 women are contesting from three districts of erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), including Khyber, Mohmand and Bajaur,” Sohail Ahmad, a provincial spokesperson for the Election Commission of Pakistan, told Arab News.
The women candidates said they were taking part in the polls to fight for their rights in a deeply patriarchal region.
