MUZAFFARGARH, Feb 16: While Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) hired the services of orators (maulvis or zakireen) to give impetus to their electioneering, Pakistan Muslim League-Q candidates were so ‘confident’ of their victory that they started abhorring seeking votes from the electorate in the last days of their campaigning, making the mockery of the whole polling process.

The business of professional cooks is also touching its heights as a number of candidates, especially of the PPP, have hired them to prepare food for a large number of people visiting their election offices. The PML-Q candidates seem disinterested in this practice too after some of their food shows got spoiled due to meagre attendance.

“You give us vote or not, but we will win with thumping majority,” Khalid Gurmani, a PML-Q candidate for NA-177 told an audience in Thatta Gurmani the other day.

Gurmani and his younger brother Tariq Gurmani, a PML-Q aspirant for PP-255, are openly saying in their campaigning that the 2002 general elections were massively rigged in favour of the PML-Q and this time they were the ‘luckiest’ ones holding the PML-Q colours to success.

Quoting his own defeat as an independent candidate in the 2002 polls, Khalid Gurmani said he lost to Hina Rabbani Khar only because she was a PML-Q candidate at that time. He said that election results were so manipulated that despite his having a convincing lead of around 10,000 votes against Hina on Oct 10, 2002, he was declared unsuccessful.

“But now it’s an altogether different situation,” Gurmani was reported as telling his supporters, assuring them that owing to his affiliation with the PML-Q he was going to win the Feb 18 elections even if anybody casts his or her vote in his favour or not.

He said Hina, who is contesting against Gurmani on the PPP ticket this time, would raise hue and cry after the announcement of results, but it would be of no significance after ‘the powers that be’ had already decided her fate to lose the polls with a margin of 10,000 to 15,000 votes.

Gurmani said that the PML-Q leadership wanted winning two constituencies in Muzaffargarh district at any cost. The one was his own, NA-177, while the other was NA-180 where former district nazim Abdul Qayyum Jatoi was contesting on a PPP ticket against PML-Q’s Sardar Ashiq Gopang.

He said that former chief minister Pervaiz Elahi’s visiting these constituencies manifested his keen interest in the poll results.

Similarly, addressing a public meeting in Budh locality, another PML-Q leader Malik Farooq Khar, who is the uncle of PML-Q candidate for PP-255 Jawad Kamran, shouted the same rhetoric, saying without any ambiguity that he had the results of Feb 18 elections in the palm of his hand even if somebody voted to the PML-Q or not. “We have been told by our party leadership that we will win the elections,” he claimed quite categorically.

Contrary to sheer haughtiness shown by the PML-Q leaders, PPP workers are leaving not stone unturned to woo the masses to vote for them on Monday.

Hina Khar, who had virtually gone into hiding as a ‘purda nashin woman’ after leaving the Shaukat Aziz’s cabinet and joining the PPP to the extent that she did not even attend the public meeting addressed by Benzir Bhutto in Muzaffargarh a couple of days prior to her assassination, has ended her hibernation and has herself started campaigning. Earlier, her father Noor Rabbani Khar was canvassing for her. Hina has started meeting people of her constituency, especially the women.

Talking to Dawn, Hina showed her determination to deal with her electorate directly in the days to come.

She lamented that she could not meet Benazir Bhutto when she visited her constituency on Dec 25. “It was my mistake,” remorseful Hina told this correspondent.

Hina also disapproved of the changing of political tracks by candidates. “We are not in the habit of changing parties. It was the PML-Q, which left me in the lurch. But, now I’m happy that I am in the people’s party and now I will never leave it,” Hina said resolutely.

PPP candidates have introduced yet another style of wooing the masses. They have hired the services of orators (zakireen), who generally have immense convincing abilities. A renowned zakir, Madah Husain Shah, is mesmerising the masses and attracting a large number of people, prominently of Shia community, while urging them to vote for PPP candidate in PP-255 Rana Mehboob Akhtar.

PPP candidates are also playing the speeches of Benazir Bhutto at their public meetings. The last speech of Benazir Bhutto in audio compact discs and audiocassettes is selling like a hot cake in this remote district.

Besides all this, the candidates have hired services of cooks to prepare meals for their visitors. This has given their career a new lifeline after a large number of cooks have been hired especially by PPP candidates to continuously prepare meals for a large number of their visitors at their election offices.

PML-Q candidate for NA-176, Malik Qasim Hunjra, who is contesting against PPP’s Mian Mohsin Qureshi and PML-N’s Mian Arshad Qureshi, got a meeting arranged in a Kot Addu locality where a large quantity of food was prepared and the people were requested to come and participate in his corner meeting in the garb of a ‘dua’ ceremony, but to his utter disappointment the trick did not work and a very thin attendance was witnessed attending what the sources called ‘spiritual’ ceremony. A large quantity of food spoiled as a number of people far behind expectations turned up, which also spoiled the very taste of the ceremony itself.