Former federal minister and PTI leader Shehryar Afridi was incensed when he was issued the bottle symbol, AFP reports.

“Most of the PTI candidates, including myself, were given symbols that were meant to create a negative bias,” said the 45-year-old candidate for Kohat.

“We were deliberately given symbols that could be used to ridicule us.” Afridi took his case to the Peshawar High Court but won no relief.

“When we entered the field during the election campaign, we received so much backlash regarding the bottle symbol that it sabotaged our campaign automatically,” he said.

But the canny operator has tweaked his symbol. “A bottle doesn’t only represent alcohol, it also represents medicine,” he said. “That’s why we’ve transformed our electoral symbol into a medicine bottle — so that we can address all societal ailments.”