ISLAMABAD, Feb 13: With the polling day only five days away, Arrow and Tiger are riding high for two National Assembly seats in Islamabad, where the parties the two emblems represent are also eying for the reins of power after the Feb 18 elections.

Arrow is the election symbol of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Tiger of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), and both parties seem to have outshone till recently the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) in the capital.

A drive through Islamabad and adjoining rural areas of the two constituencies on Tuesday showed the two major opposition parties — PPP and PML-N — more in evidence, in line with a prevailing perception that the PML, whose election symbol is Bicycle, has lost much ground thanks to both political and non- political reasons.

As some recent opinion surveys say about the possible nationwide result of the elections, in Islamabad too, PPP appears to be the front-runner with PML-N as second best, and PML struggling for the two seats it could not grab even in the most favourable conditions of the last general elections in 2002.

But things changed a lot after Islamabad became a major battle-ground in the struggle for the independence of judiciary and the media last year and this year as a consequence of assaults mounted on the two institutions after the bloody spectacle of Lal Masjid. And then came the price hike with food and energy shortages of the kind that Pakistan’s most modern city had not experienced before and the shock of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in nearby Rawalpindi on Dec 27.

While the entire civil society in the capital is already up in arms, any journalist’s attempt for a chat about elections with a shopkeeper, office worker, a labourer or a housewife often provokes only anger against the regime and its loyalists in the PML.

“Who will vote for Bicycle?” asked a motor mechanic at a workshop in Islamabad’s F-10 markaz. “What cyclewalas have done in five years.”

“Cyclewalas will not be seen (after elections),” said another.

Though opposition candidates can hardly take credit for any development work Islamabad, they face little hostility, and there is a great sympathy Ms Bhutto’s followers after her killing.

Many working class establishments display PPP and PML-N posters as taxi vehicles fly flags of the two parties with pictures of the candidates along with their leaders’. One hardly finds the same honour for a PML flag. PML candidates appear on their posters and banners only with Bicycle and nowhere the pictures of their leaders or of President Musharraf are to be seen.

PML also has no overt support from the Islamabad’s Capital Development Authority because the bureaucracy has not yet allowed the local government law that created nazims to be applicable here.

Party flags fly on rooftops of private houses in villages falling in Islamabad’s electoral constituencies, where once little known Dr Israr Shah, the PPP candidate for NA-48 has become a household name for campaigning on a wheelchair after losing both his legs any getting a hand injured in a bomb attack on a party camp that arranged to welcome deposed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry on July 17 last year.

Shah, a veterinary doctor, is facing, among a total of 22 other candidates, PML’s Rizwan Sadiq, a big landlord with considerable influence among rural votes and claiming an undeclared support from the area’s major shrine of Golra Sharif, and PML-N’s Anjum Aqeel, a senior vice-president of the party’s Islamabad chapter whose main strength lies his choice by Nawaz Sharif and likely votes from the supporters of the Jamaat-i- Islami, whose own previous MNA from the same constituency, Mian Mohammad Aslam, is boycotting the election in line with the party decision.

PPP’s Nayyer Hussain Bokhari appears to be in a strong position in his bid for re-election from NA-49 constituency against his second-time rival Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar of the PML and PML-N’s Chaudhry Tariq Fazal.

Khokhar, a lawyer like Bokhari and the son of a former National Assembly deputy speaker, Nawaz Khokhar, had been a formidable challenge in a PPP stronghold. But his position has been dented by the frequent change of political loyalties by his father by siding with PPP, PML-N and PML whenever they were in power, and the blame of a gunfire on a PML-N procession on Dec 27 that killed five people only a few hours before Ms Bhutto was killed in the gun-and-bomb attack at Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh park.