Symbols matter in Pakistan politics

ALMOST TIME: Campaign posters hang along a main road in Rawalpindi.

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The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of slain Benazir Bhutto has an arrow. A tiger symbolizes the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) of former premier Nawaz Sharif.

And the former ruling party Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q) carries a cycle.

Pakistan first became acquainted with election symbols in the general elections of 1935, when it was still called British India, said Dr Ijaz Shafi Gilani, chairman of marketing research bureau Gallup Pakistan.

"They choose this, because the literacy rate was only 15 percent," Gilani said. But voting rights was only for landowners, he says. The symbol's political relevance began with Pakistan's first general elections in 1970, he says.

Taking on the elephant

Political symbols inspire slogans and cartoons, Gilani said.

"There are cartoons in which Nawaz Sharif says that the cycle (of the ruling PML-Q) will be punctured and others say that the tiger (of Sharif's party) is a jackal."

The 54-year old electrician Abdul Khan says that workers of the Awami National Party (ANP), an ethnic Pashtun party, in his area actively use its lantern symbol. "They say it will bring light into the darkness and into your family."

Aid worker Naveed Khan says that election symbols are used in daily language.

His family, for example, will vote for the lantern of the ANP, but his brother will vote for a deeva, a traditional Pakistani lantern without a protectionist casket from the wind.

"My father told me that my brother is bringing the deeva. But the deeva blows out with a little wind, so I bring a lantern for him," he said.

The psychological importance of a symbol can help a candidate win or lose a vote, said Jan, the university lecturer.

"An independent candidate in my area has the symbol elephant. He said I have ... an election symbol, which is impossible to throw over."

"There is a saying in Pastho that you can't take on an elephant," Jan said, referring to the local language of the Pashtuns in the western border provinces alongside Afghanistan.

For some children the election symbols are pure enjoyment. Mohammed Nabil, 10, says he is in favor of Nawaz Sharif.

Asked why, he says: "I like the tiger." Then he goes onto selling sweet potatoes to his young, some barefooted customers, from behind a wooden pull-cart of nearly half his height in the small street.

Khan, the rickshaw driver, said he is convinced the symbol used by the MMA is a religious book, an important factor for him for deciding political allegiance. As head of his conservative family, Khan said he decided that the rest of his family should also vote for it.