By the look of it Moonis’s is one of the most expensive election drives in the history of the city. The rent of the kind of hoarding promoting Moonis at the Liberty Chowk can set you back by up to Rs700,000 a month.
“Unlike what may be the case with other candidates who are dependent on donors, those seeking to join Moonis’s campaign do not have to spend a penny out of their pocket. They have to just ask. The next day they get all kinds of hoardings and banners et al bearing their names as supporters,” says a man from his campaign.
This may be the most prominent example of its kind, but it is by no means an isolated one. Lahore is besieged by huge and costly hoardings and innovative banners and posters with the Pakistan Muslim League-Q candidates leading the pack of spenders. With their excessive presence in their constituencies through hoardings etc, they make sure that they are visible to the voters even if they are unable to reach out to people personally.
“Visibility matters a lot in an election,” says PML-Q leader and former information minister Mohammad Ali Durrani. “Our party’s electronic and media and outdoor campaign gives us an edge over our opponents — the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz,” he maintains.
The city’s advertising industry is abuzz with reports that the PML-Q has set aside a billion-rupee budget — some put the figure at Rs6 billion — for the party’s campaign, which projects its Punjab president, Pervaiz Elahi, as the next prime minister for the upcoming election. “The PML-Q had already spent around Rs2 billion on its campaign before Dec 27 when all the election related activities around the country came to a halt due to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto,” says a source familiar with advertising business. However, such reports are hard to confirm because the advertisers are never open to sharing financial side of a campaign with the press.
“If you do a survey of the city, you’d find that most prized outdoor sights available have already been taken up by the PML-Q men for their election hoardings,” an advertiser says.
Though the three major political parties — PPP, PML-N and PML-Q — who have staked their claims for the city’s 13 National Assembly and 26 Punjab Assembly seats had been running a hectic campaign before Ms Bhutto was gunned down in Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh and the election postponed until Feb 18 from Jan 8, their campaigns lacked the lustre of the previous contests. With the election just a few days away, the campaign is yet to pick up.
Several reasons are given out for this year’s lacklustre election campaign — fear of suicide bombing and terror attacks, harsh winter, uncertainty about the holding of polls, etc.
While the PML-Q men have been relying on their expensive campaigns allowing them “greater visibility”, some PML-N candidates, too, have started spending money on their publicity. Most PPP men are, however, still hesitant on this count.
“We don’t have the resources to match the publicity of the PML-Q. They have plundered this country for five years and now can afford to spend a lot of money on their campaign,” says PPP Secretary-General Jehangir Badr. “Besides, it is not the trees and poles that vote. It is the people who matter, and we are going to them and getting extremely encouraging response from them.”
Durrani admits that some of the PML-Q men contesting the election from the city are weak and a few of them are depending more on outdoor publicity than contacting the voters. But, he says, many of the PML-Q election aspirants are going door to door and running a good campaign. “The chances of our party from this city have improved over time. Now the people do talk about the PML-Q winning a substantial number of seats in Lahore and improving our previous tally. The development work our government carried out in the last five years will help us win a bigger number of seats this year.”
In 2002 two PML-Q men returned to the National Assembly from the city while PML-N won four seats. Jamaat-i-Islami fighting under the banner of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal won three seats, a number matched by the PPP. The thirteenth seat, grabbed by Dr Tahirul Qadri, was secured by the PML-Q’s Farooq Amjad Mir in a by-election while one of the PPP members, Zaheer Abbas Khokhar, crossed the floor to join the PPP-Patriots.
“This was and remains Nawaz Sharif’s city. No-one can deny this fact. Billboards, banners and TV ads don’t matter much. We are going to win this city,” says a PML-N sympathiser from Gowalmandi. The party’s leadership is trying to whip up public sentiments against the PML-Q and President Pervez Musharraf for sacking superior judiciary and lawlessness, and raising issues like persisting flour and electricity shortages.
Although Jahangir Badr says the PPP candidates are raising public issues like flour shortages, power blackouts and lawlessness in their campaigns, the party has so far been unable to put together a coherent poll strategy. Most PPP candidates are hoping to benefit from the wave of ‘sympathy vote’ in the wake of Ms Bhutto’s murder.
“The sympathy wave is there, but it is not going to play as strong a role in the election as it would have had the polls been held on Jan 8,” says a PPP provincial assembly candidate. But, he insists, “The contest for most of the city’s national and provincial assembly seats is going to be between the PPP and the PML-N.”