Daily Times

LAHORE: The time to persuade voters in NA-120 Lahore for the upcoming by-election ended at midnight on Friday.

All the political parties and candidates including the ones contesting independently have wrapped up their election campaigns. Polling for by-election in NA-120 will be held on Sunday and the Pakistan Army and Punjab Rangers will also deploy their troops for the purpose, as 220 polling stations in the constituency have been declared sensitive. On the campaign’s last day, the candidates and workers of the political parties went from door to door, persuading residents of the constituency to vote for them. They also held meetings with the polling agents to map out a plan to keep check on the activities inside and outside the polling stations.

The parties put their influence on display and held rallies to attract voters. All the candidates participating in the by-election did their best to impress the voters of the area.

Interestingly, the candidates of popular political parties such Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) do not live anywhere in the consistency, nor do they have a direct link with the area, since all three of them belong to Kashmiri families.

PPP’s candidate Faisal Mir tried to impress the people of the area by picking up garbage from the streets himself, while Maryam Nawaz, the daughter of disqualified prime minister Nawaz Sharif, visited different areas within the constituency along with the workers of her party who set off fireworks to attract people. PTI’s candidate Dr Yasmin Rashid and newly formed Milli Muslim League (MML) workers worked hard on their campaign and did not disregard a single street in the constituency while campaigning for votes. An observation of the political inclination of the people in the constituency: it seems that PML-N’s candidate Begum Kulsoom Nawaz has an edge over her opponents.

Published in Daily Times, September 16^th 2017.