Polling for the February 1997 election was a low-key, low turnout affair. The traditional throngs of the voters queuing up for hours to vote, a distinctive feature since 1988, were nowhere in sight in Lahore.

The party camps set up to facilitate wore a deserted look. The transport arranged by the candidates for voters’ convenience remained off the road for the better part of the day. Invariably, the number of polling staff and the army men deployed to ‘guard ballot boxes and maintain peace’ (the army had been stationed inside the polling stations for the first time in the country’s history) far surpassed the number of votes cast, at least during the first half of the day. At some places, the ehtesab camps of the Jamaat-i-Islami, which had boycotted the polls, attracted ‘crowds’. Ramazan (the polling day fell on the 24th of the holy month) was the easiest explanation for the low voter turnout given by polling staff as well as candidates.

There were other factors responsible for the low turnout, though. The mood on the polling day was an extension of the lacklustre election campaign run by the parties and their candidates. The curbs on spending by the candidates and the political parties, as well as the fresh restrictions on the size of hoardings, banners and posters had taken the traditional colour out. The parties this time organised smaller gatherings. The Pakistan Peoples Party’s election campaign was particularly uninspiring as its workers were deeply dejected and disillusioned because of the ouster of their party’s government for the second time. They were missing from the scene. The Supreme Court had upheld the presidential order just a few days before the polling day, delaying the hearing of another petition challenging the presidential powers dismissing the government and dissolving assemblies. Even the arrival of Benazir Bhutto in the city on the last day of the campaign failed to cheer them up. At her rally outside the Bhatti Gate, fewer than a thousand people were present. Years later many had difficulty recalling if she had visited the city during that election.

Some traditional festivity related to the polling day was seen when the PML-N activists arrived at the Model Town residence of their leader, Nawaz Sharif, after the voting ended. Certain of their victory they danced and chanted to greet the PML-N leader on his victory. Many bureaucrats — serving and retired both — and other hangers-on had also made a beeline to the house of the Sharifs to welcome the new ruler hours before the election results actually began to come in. The ‘consolidated’ unofficial results took their time to come owing to restrictions on announcement of separate returns from each polling station unlike the past practice. Everyone expected that the PPP was going to lose the election. Still nobody, not even the analysts or the leaders of the victorious PML-N, had anticipated the scale of the shift. When the returns started pouring in, it was clear that the PML-N was headed for a landslide. The PPP was decimated everywhere except in Sindh. The so-called ‘spoiler’, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf, was nowhere to be found. Imran Khan, who ran from eight constituencies from Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, was out for a duck.

In Punjab, Nawaz Sharif’s win was total and complete. He had won all but six national seats that went to the independent candidates. The PPP had to be content with just three provincial seats. More astounding for the political observers was the huge margin with which the PML-N men had defeated their PPP rivals in almost every district in spite of a low voter turnout, and the wide gap in the overall number of votes polled by the two parties in the province. Compared with 7.25 million votes polled by the PML-N in the province, the PPP had got just 2.7 million.

“The poll results are beyond expectation,” Nawaz Sharif told journalists gathered at his residence shortly after his victory became clear. According to his reading, his popularity graph had gone up while the PPP voters didn’t turn out owing to their disillusionment caused by the dismal performance of their government.

In a chat with Dawn a few weeks before the 2008 polls Shahbaz Sharif chose to refer to not the 1997 but the 1993 results as a true measure of his party’s popularity. There is something that still makes everyone, including the victors, uneasy about the 1997 outcome.