Source: Guardian via Wasim Sr.
As Pakistan’s election campaign enters its dying days, no town has escaped the attention of the country’s politicians as they crisscross the country, plastering every spare billboard, lamp-post and shop-front with posters bearing their heavily airbrushed faces.
Except Rabwah, a sleepy riverside settlement in the critical battleground province of Punjab. It is home to 40,000 potential voters who could safely be relied upon to vote whichever way the town’s elders recommend – a particularly large and reliable example of what Pakistani politicians call “vote banks”. And yet, in a constituency where the result could go either way, not a single party banner flutters anywhere in the town.
No one has tried to hold a rally on the wide, tree-lined avenues or make the promises heard everywhere else in Punjab of more development, less corruption and an end to electricity shortages.
All of the candidates have given the town a wide berth because the vast majority of its 60,000 inhabitants are Ahmadis, a religious minority vilified by extremists, who regard them as heretics, and shunned even by mainstream politicians such as Imran Khan.
Last week, Khan, the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI), vigorously denied he had ever asked members of Pakistan’s roughly 4 million-strong Ahmadiyya community to vote for him.
In an impassioned video statement, Khan promised to protect anti-Ahmadi laws and articles of Pakistan’s constitution that human rights groups have long criticised as deeply discriminatory.