Chakwal, the heart of the army recruiting belt and therefore, one might suppose, natural Musharraf territory. To catch a first glimpse of the polling, I had decided on an early start, in my case 10:30 in the morning, an hour at which I am usually grappling with my newspapers.
The traffic was thin, even the Qingqi rickshaws which make driving such a nuisance were largely off the roads. Clearly something was afoot. Either a rush of people at the polling stations or, dread thought, a repeat of what Habib Jalib said about General Zia's 1984 referendum: "In the city was deathly silence, Was it a djinn or a referendum?"
At the MCB Middle School for Girls a few paces from my house, a forlorn local councillor sitting underneath a shamiana got up to meet me. "This is very embarrassing," he said. "We're having a hard time bringing out the voters." The presiding staff inside looked nervous as if it was their fault people were not turning out to vote.
It was the same story at the Government High School for Boys further up on Talagang Road, where polling booths for both male and female voters had been set up. I could count four or five voters inside although Azadar Shah, the local councillor supervising the voting and looking not a little uncomfortable, said the voting would soon pick up. Wishing him luck I returned home to get some breakfast.
Venturing out again at one p.m. I went to the Govt High School for Girls on Bhown Road. A handful of women were exercising their right of franchise. When I asked the school attendants about the voter turnout in the morning they couldn't suppress their giggles.
I knew ASI Khalil, the policeman on duty. "Where's all the rush?" I asked. "Taking a lunch-break," was the deadpan answer.
At the Islamia High School for Boys, a bit further down the road, the staff were having lunch while not a voter was to be seen. Ali Nasir Bhatti, the son of the Tehsil Nazim and himself a Union Council Nazim, hastened to assure me that voting had been heavy in the morning and would pick up again after lunch. Aslam Badshah, well known in the mohalla and presiding over the fortunes of this polling station, assured me the turnout here would be the highest in the city.
A hundred yards to the left on Circular Road stands the Govt Islamia Primary School for Girls. The councilor there couldn't hide his frustration: it was proving singularly difficult to get out the female vote because the women were saying they had better things to do.
I took in three more polling stations: Sanatzar, or the industrial home for women, the Tehsil office and the Civil Hospital. The same picture everywhere: General Musharraf's sturdy loyalists, the local councilors, trying to put on a brave face but their desperation beginning to show. They were providing transport and food and even music at some polling stations. What more could they do? It was hardly their fault if the great silent majority, resisting temptation, was choosing to stay at home.
By evening, however, the scene changed. As polling boxes began miraculously to fill it was clear that some form of spiritual intervention was taking place. How had this feat been managed?
I asked one of the enthusiasts at the Govt High School for Girls I had visited earlier. "Well," he told me in confidence, "we asked all the women to vote twice, once at this polling booth and then at the other. We also chipped in by stamping votes ourselves."
A bit later a young friend of mine proudly told me that at the MCB School in front of the Municipal Library he had stamped 135 ballots as a mark of his love for General Musharraf. His mother, an active lady, had stamped another hundred, his sister, all of 14 years old, 150. Only fatigue rather than anything else had cut short their exertions.
About the 1984 referendum, Urdu columnist Abdul Qadir Hasan had written that until ten in the morning it was fair and after that it was free. This referendum was free from the start. No voter lists to begin with, little pretence at any form of identification and if you chose to cast more ballots than one you earned the gratitude of the polling staff for making their task lighter.
Pakistan Television of course was at its silliest best, trying to whip up popular enthusiasm and in the process churning out referendum images Goebbels would have rejected. Gen Musharraf was shown casting his vote with his family in Rawalpindi, at a polling station which to my untrained eye looked suspiciously full of servicemen in civvies.
He then drove to the Agricultural Development Bank building at Zero Point where the assembled staff welcomed him with great enthusiasm. Next he stopped at PTV headquarters where a regular tamasha, with singing and dancing, had been rigged up for his benefit. Why have successive rulers in Pakistan allowed themselves to be fooled in this manner?
Foreign TV networks were not immune from the effects of the celebratory mood gripping Islamabad. In the afternoon, a silly Mike Chinoy on CNN was informing the world that Pakistanis in their millions were turning out to vote for President Musharraf.
On Wednesday morning Suzie Price of BBC was managing heroically to say neither this nor that: raising minor questions about the turnout but stopping well short of outright skepticism. If this had been Zimbabwe, and Mugabe instead of Musharraf, there would have been blood all over the place.
The honors, however, go to the Chief Election Commissioner, former Chief Justice Irshad Hasan Khan, who declared the referendum to be neutral, impartial and objective, and to the information minister, Nisar Memon, who said that the turnout had "surpassed expectations". Tough job being an information minister in Pakistan.
Scholars have a task on their hands because the history books must be rewritten. Until now, the great benchmark of Pakistani political fiction was Gen Zia's referendum of 1984. Now it stands dwarfed by a taller achievement.
Who pushed Gen Musharraf into this? 'Dhukka kis ne diya?' Who was the genius who came up with the referendum idea? As the columnist Abbas Athar of Nawai Waqt has succinctly put it: " Gen Musharraf was already president under the PCO. The political parties were ready to contest the elections on his terms. The Supreme Court had given him the right to amend the Constitution.
The impression was common that the blunders of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif had made him popular among the masses. The district governments were his loyal 'mafia' ready to do his bidding in the general elections. The next parliament would easily have elected him president for five years. A patriotic Supreme Court would have allowed no clause of the Constitution to stand in his way. He faced no challenge. The question then is, 'yeh dhukka kis ne diya'?"
Now of course the worst has happened, the emperor shown to be without his clothes, the myth of his popularity exploded. Everything that seemed so neatly tied up before is up in the air. Barring spiritual intervention, or wholesale disqualifications, the October elections promise to be a hotly-contested affair. Question marks thus hang over the future.
All because of a grave miscalculation: the people of Pakistan have never taken kindly to one-sided affairs. General Musharraf's advisers should have known this but not remembering their history lessons they opted for a self-inflicted disaster.
Is there hope for the Pakistani masses? Can they be spared further sermons about real democracy? The prospects are scarcely bright. Go to such lengths to manufacture a lie and you must live with it and carry its burden. In the run-up to the referendum Gen Musharraf had taken to brandishing his fist and saying he wanted the people to strengthen him. How can he bring himself to say he's been disappointed?
So we'll keep hearing about the people's mandate with pipers and drummers like the unfortunate Nisar Memon turning this theme into a resounding chorus.
It was to the same theme that Begum Attiya Enayatullah performed on Wednesday evening when she declared on PTV that the referendum had proved that Gen Musharraf had forged a bond with the common people of Pakistan.
What about the regime's ragtag band of supporters: Leghari, Qadri, Imran Khan, and the assorted heroes of the Q League? Hoping to ride to glory on the General's coattails they are seeing their hopes go up in smoke along with those coattails. They deserve our fullest sympathy.