1965 Pakistani general election
Open-knowledge reference entry
General elections were held in Pakistan on 21 March 1965. The National Assembly was elected indirectly by the basic democracy electoral college system, with electoral college members elected in October and November 1964.
Background
The 1962 constitution provided for an indirectly elected 156-seat National Assembly, of which 150 seats were elected from single-member constituencies by electoral colleges and six seats reserved for women, who were elected by the 150 general members. The seats were divided equally between East and West Pakistan. There were 80,000 members of the electoral college ("basic democrats"), 40,000 in each wing.
The electoral college members were elected between 31 October and 9 November 1964 in West Pakistan and from 10 to 19 November in East Pakistan. A total of 264,254 candidates submitted nomination papers, of which 192,416 were successfully registered after disqualifications, withdrawals and retirements. 11,652 were elected unopposed.
The first task of the basic democrats was to elect the president, which occurred on 2 January 1965.
Results
Several opposition parties, including the Awami League, the Council Muslim League, Jamaat-e-Islami, the National Awami Party and its northwestern Wali faction, as well as the Nizam-e-Islam Party, formed a coalition to contest the elections as the Combined Opposition Parties.
“1965 Pakistani general election” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pakistani, general and election can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “1965 Pakistani general election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.