FAISALABAD, May 6: The Pakistan People’s Party’s women workers engaged in door-to-door campaign in various constituencies here have to answer some tough questions by female voters.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz has also pitched female campaigners who are going door to door and find them relatively comfortable in urban areas.
The PPP women in groups of five to six carrying party candidates’ posters knock at the voters’ doors and prefer going inside their houses to canvassing on their doorsteps as it makes it easier for them to answer mostly bitter questions put to them by women voters. Mostly they have to hear gripes of housewives about power outages that had been a bane of the five-year PPP rule.
They also distribute PPP candidates’ pamphlets, particularly among children asking them to paste them on walls and doors inside their houses.
A worker was observed asking a child that he should force his parents to vote for arrow, the PPP election symbol. She also gave toffees to children, suggesting some slogans in favour of ‘arrow’.
“Bucha bane ga wazeer jado jite ga teer (the kid will become a minister if the wins,” was one of the Punjabi slogans that struck a cord with the children.
Rabia Shehzadi, a PPP worker involved in the door-to-door campaign of the party candidate in NA-85, said mostly housewives were giving them a patient listening, but they were repeatedly asked why their party failed to resolve power crisis.
But she felt rather proud to run the door-to-door campaign in the localities right amid power outages.
Another question which was frequently asked by women was about tracing and punishing the killers of party’s slain chairperson and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Ms Shehzadi said.
However, she said, the party’s television advertisements had generated a lot of sympathy among women voters.
PPP women’s wing district president Sakian Chaudhary claimed it was a wrong ‘perception’ that female activists were being criticised over electricity crisis.
She said the females were supporting the PPP vehemently because of its initiatives like the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP).
She said duties had been assigned to female workers across the district to woo voters by approaching them at their doorstep. And the PML-N and other parties were also following this approach of the PPP, she added.