Lesser known candidate beats a well-known politic

PESHAWAR: Awami National Party (ANP)’s Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, well-known all over Pakistan, lost his National Assembly seat to a largely unknown Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) candidate Shaukat Ali in the general election.

Shaukat Ali, a former Town Nazim in Peshawar, had quit the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) a few months before the election and joined the PTI. At the time, it was said that Shaukat Ali had specifically joined the PTI to seek its ticket for contesting the election for the Peshawar city seat. Invariably, this would have meant confronting the elderly Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, now 79 years old.

Shaukat Ali polled an impressive 72,822 votes against Ghulam Ahmad Bilour’s 40,372. Other candidates, including those from the PPP and MMA, weren’t really in the race.

In the 2013 general election, PTI head Imran Khan had won the seat polling more than 90,000 votes, Ghulam Ahmad Bilour lagged far behind. When Imran Khan vacated the Peshawar seat, Ghulam Ahmad Bilour bounced back and won against the weak PTI candidate Gul Badshah.

Before the July 25 election, Ghulam Ahmad Bilour had contested for the Peshawar seat eight times and won six. He had lost to Imran Khan in 2013 and to Aftab Sherpao in 1988. He had also defeated Benazir Bhutto in this constituency. On the two occasions that he lost, he made a comeback by winning the by-elections.

There was apparently no sympathy wave for the Bilour family or the ANP as was being predicted after the martyrdom of the party candidate Haroon Bashir Bilour in a suicide bombing on July 10 in Peshawar. If there had been a sympathy wave, he would have won the election.