ISLAMABAD, May 11: As young followers of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf roared through the streets of Rawalpindi and Islamabad on Saturday, they seemed to be making a revolution.

With their election symbol of cricket bat, they battered in the twin cities both the traditional rivals – the PPP the PML-N, which contested with arrow and tiger as their symbols.

While Imran Khan was convalescing at hospital after a critical fall from a forklift during a campaign rally in Lahore early this week, the PTI’s first target was breaking a prolonged PML-N stranglehold of Punjab.

And as initial count of votes for the National Assembly and the four provincial assemblies started pouring in, other parties also seemed to have been badly suffered.

Though it was still unclear how far Imran Khan’s early promise of a “tsunami” had materialised, never such a vibrant show of support for a new political party was witnessed here after the heady 1970s when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s PPP held sway on the basis of its dominance in Punjab and Sindh provinces.

That PPP’s grip was broken by then military dictator Gen Ziaul Haq and his minions in the 1980s, paving the way for a prolonged dominance by what is now PML-N.

On Saturday, the PTI seemed intent to topple the PML-N from that position, with the party’s chairman himself eyeing for a National Assembly seat in Rawalpindi and its figurehead president, Javed Hashmi, for one of the two seats in the federal capital.

PTI supporters, flying their party flag bearing its election symbol on motorcycles, cars and vans seemed everywhere around Rawalpindi and Islamabad, outnumbering their competitors as were larger crowds at their election camps set up near polling stations.

The PPP’s was comparatively a depressing show, apparently for two reasons: security threat from the banned Taliban along with the Awami National Party and Muttahida Qaumi Movement – its partners in the previous coalition government – and little campaigning by what proved to be an inefficient leadership in the region.

PTI’s strong emergence on the political forefront following a bleak period after it boycotted the 2008 election and won a single seat for Imran Khan in 2002 seemed to baffle both the previous traditional rivals — the PPP and PML-N.

It not only divided the traditional right wing vote bank, on which the PML-N banked, but seemed to have divided family loyalties as well.

An old woman at a polling station in Rawalpindi’s NA-56 constituency, where Imran Khan contested against PML-N’s Hanif Abbasi, told Dawn she would vote for the PML-N though her young daughter, who was accompanying her, was intent to vote for Imran.

Two young men wearing T-shirts bearing the PML-N election symbol at the same constituency said their dress reflected only their family affiliation with the party but they would vote for Imran Khan. “He is a good man,” said one. A hakim who described himself as a traditional PML-N voter in Rawalpindi’s NA-55 constituency said he would vote for PTI-supported Sheikh Rashid Ahmed of Awami Muslim League, who was information minister in former president retired Pervez Musharraf’s government, because he did not like PML-N candidate Shakil Awan. But his son said he would still vote for the PML-N.

The PTI seemed to draw larger support than its competitors from young voters and women and its appeal was the main contributor to what residents in some Rawalpindi localities said were the largest queues of voters they had seen after the 1970s as in Rawalpindi’s Tench Bhata area where PPP’s Zamarrud Khan seemed putting up the party’s best show in the city.