One of the laziest post-election analyses undertaken thus far has been that of the results that emerged in the Sindh province.

This analytical laziness that simply brushed aside the election results in the province as an outcome of‘traditional voting’ was most probably due to the somewhat over-imaginative observations made by the electronic media regarding the election prospects in Sindh.

The following was what a number of TV channels were suggesting: Sindh’s leading party, the PPP, was in for a surprise and set to lose a number of seats in the province.

The anti-PPP sentiment that was all too apparent in Pakistan’s largest province, the Punjab, was presumptuously projected across the Sindh as well by the media.

The ‘pro-establishment’party in Sindh, the PML-F, that enjoys a vote-bank in certain pockets of the province, began to be proposed as the force that would be able to significantly cut the PPP’s electoral hold in the province.

Just what was informing the electronic media’s predictions in this regard is anybody’s guess, but one can suggest that such projections were mostly being made by analysts whose understanding of the country’s electoral politics is more rooted in the dynamics of the politics of the Punjab and the capital, Islamabad.

Though many of the same quite correctly predicted a tougher fight for the MQM — the largest party in Sindh’s capital, Karachi — almost none of them saw this fight coming from Imran Khan’s centre-right PTI.

Karachi has been the electoral bastion of the MQM ever since the 1988 election. In terms of votes and seats, the PPP has usually risen to become the city’s second largest party. Till the late 1970s, the religious outfit, the Jamat-i-Islami (JI), used to have a significant vote-bank in this sprawling metropolis. And this time many media pundits were of the view that the JI might actually be able to dislodge the MQM from at least some of the party’s strong constituencies in the city.

Reasons given for the predicted weak performance of the PPP and MQM in Sindh ranged from the fact that both were coalition partners in the outgoing Federal and Sindh governments that had allegedly presided over incidents of corruption and nepotism and had failed to curb the rising rates of crime and violence in Karachi.

But as the moderate PML-N routed out the PPP from the Punjab, it could hardly make a dent in Sindh. Here it depended on the PML-F and Sindhi nationalist groups to cash-in on the perceived unpopularity of the outgoing coalition government and hand the PPP its worst electoral performance in Sindh in decades.

Nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, the PPP convincingly swept the NA and PA elections in Sindh outside Karachi. The PML-F was able to win a mere five NA seats (out of 60) and seven PA seats (out of 130). The Sindhi nationalists won none. The PPP romped home with 65 PA seats.

Considering the negative fallout of the incumbency factor that most outgoing governments usually face, the PPP actually did remarkably well in Sindh.

So what happened?

One theory attributes the PPP’s victory in the province to its former government's ambitious social welfare scheme, the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP).

The scheme had largely benefitted peasant and working-class women. Consequently, these women ventured out (many for the first time) to vote. Voting in droves for the PPP, their votes strengthened the party’s traditional vote-bank in the province and gave it the edge that it needed to ward-off the PML-F challenge.

But if the BISP helped the PPP bag big votes in Sindh, what happened in the Punjab, where the scheme was also implemented by the outgoing PPP-led coalition regime?

Observers believe that BISP was implemented in a more affective and transparent manner in Sindh. In the Punjab, though it benefitted a lot of men and women from the peasant and the working classes, the province was swept by a PML-N wave during the election, mainly due to the fact that the onus of the crippling energy crises faced by the province fell squarely on the outgoing PPP government.

Another observation suggests that by voting heavily for the PPP, the Sindhis voted rationally, because they are aware that their best access to mainstream centres of decision-making and influence still lies by way of the PPP.

This observation also goes on to add an ethic dimension to it by further suggesting that to most Sindhis the PPP offers the best balance between the Sindhis’practical need to remain attached to Federalism and their inherent Sindhi nationalist sentiment. PML-N is still viewed as an extension of ‘Punjabi hegemony’ here.

In Karachi there were 20 NA and 41 PA seats. The MQM won 16 NA and 32 PA seats. Historically the PPP has usually been the second largest winner in Karachi. But in 2013, the PTI emerged as the second largest party in the city.

Though there is some indication that the PTI achieved this by attracting a portion of the MQM vote, the bulk of the PTI votes came from three sources: Many disgruntled PPP voters in Karachi switched to voting for PTI; a lot of JI votes too went to the PTI, and so did the votes of the Pashtuns living in the city who had formerly voted for the secular ANP.

PTI also benefitted from the votes of the first-timers, most of who belonged to affluent classes. Even though it won just one NA seat and three PA seats in Karachi, it bagged the second highest number of votes.

As the voters in the Punjab further consolidated the province’s continuous shift towards the right, and KP also moved squarely towards the right by voting out ANP and PPP, and bringing in PTI and JI, Sindh and its capital Karachi however, voted to keep the province firmly in the hands of secular and left-liberal parties. Sindh was the only province where religious parties failed to bag even a single seat.

PPP and MQM have gone on to once again enjoy majorities here.