Islamabad:
Days before Pakistan's elections on February 8, a masked and headscarf-clad Komal Asghar led a team of similarly dressed women through alleys in the eastern city of Lahore.
Their mission: knock on doors and distribute campaign leaflets decorated with photos of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
Asghar, a 25-year-old insurance company employee, left her job for a month to campaign for Khan's controversial Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.
Khan has been in prison since August. Scores of PTI candidates are behind bars or on the run from criminal and terrorism charges they say are politically motivated. A Reuters reporter witnessed one of several rallies that PTI supporters said were disrupted.
“I am with Khan. I don't care about my life. My God is with me,” Asghar said, adding that the former prime minister's opponents “can do anything.”
Asghar said the face and hair coverings – which not all women usually wore – made it easier for them to recruit without attracting unwanted attention. The public views women as non-threatening, she said, making it less likely that their campaigns would lead to conflict.
The PTI uses a two-pronged campaign strategy: secret campaigns, often led by female volunteers, and generative AI technology, according to interviews with fifteen candidates and supporters, as well as political analysts and IT experts.
The party has used generative AI to create footage of Khan, its founder, reading speeches he gave to lawyers from his prison cell, urging supporters to turn out on election day. According to data from YouTube, it has organized online gatherings on social media that have been viewed by several hundred thousand people at a time.
Khan, who was barred from holding political office by a court last year, is not the first Pakistani leader to be jailed during a campaign. But PTI's ability to tap new technology and the former cricketer's personal popularity have kept him in the headlines.
ONE MAN SHOW?
Khan was sentenced to ten years in prison on January 30 for leaking state secrets. He was then given a fourteen-year prison sentence on Wednesday for illegally selling state gifts. And on Saturday he was sentenced to seven years for unlawful marriage. He denies all charges and his lawyers say they plan to appeal.
The 71-year-old won the last election, in 2018, but was ousted in 2022 after falling out with the country's powerful military, which PTI has accused of trying to drive it out of power.
The military denies the allegations and interim Information Minister Murtaza Solangi told Reuters that PTI was only stopped from campaigning if it did not have the required permits or if supporters clashed with law enforcement.
Usman Anwar, police chief of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, said his troops' job is to provide security: “We have not and will not interfere in any political process.”
Rights groups and rival politicians have accused Khan of undermining democratic norms while in power by cracking down on the media and prosecuting his opponents through the same anti-graft tribunal that convicted him on Wednesday.
PTI and Khan call the allegations baseless.
No reliable opinion polls are publicly available, but PTI employees and independent analysts such as Madiha Afzal of the US-based think tank Brookings Institution say Khan retains strong support, especially among the country's large youth population.
Nevertheless, the restrictions are likely to limit PTI's ability to compete with rivals such as the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), led by its frontrunner, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Afzal said. Sharif returned from exile late last year and his corruption convictions and life-long political ban were recently overturned by the Supreme Court.
A PML-N spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
“The major structural barriers for the PTI in these elections … make it likely that the party will lose despite its popularity,” Afzal said, adding that Khan's committed supporters meant it was too early to write off the party completely.
PTI has not said who it will nominate as prime minister if it emerges victorious on February 8.
VIRTUAL CAMPAIGN
The restrictions on the party have forced it to prioritize digital campaigns, said Jibran Ilyas, head of U.S. social media at PTI, who like the party's other digital leaders is based abroad.
Although only about half of Pakistan's 240 million people have smartphones and internet connectivity is patchy, PTI hopes it can reach enough young people to influence the elections. The voting age is 18 years old and more than two-thirds of the electorate is younger than 45 years old.
Central to this strategy is reminding people who may have voted for PTI because of its famous founder that it is still Khan's party.
“We have never had a political meeting without Imran Khan, so when we were planning the online meeting, we wanted to find a way to present him to the people,” Ilyas said.
His team used generative AI software from US startup ElevenLabs to create three clips of the former prime minister giving speeches. Khan's lawyers exchanged messages between PTI and its founder during prison visits and the party wrote the speeches on his notes.
“We discussed the potential for abuse and decided to stick with audio AI only,” Ilyas said.
ElevenLabs did not immediately return a request for comment.
PTI has also created an app through which Facebook and WhatsApp users can find the party's candidate in their constituency. Many voters had identified PTI with the electoral symbol of the cricket bat, but the Election Commission recently banned PTI from using it on the technical grounds that internal leadership elections were not being held. The decision means that the PTI candidates are running for office without official party affiliation.
The PTI has also been holding online rallies in an attempt to replicate jalsas, the mass Urdu-language gatherings that take place nationwide in parks and major intersections.
But voters have had difficulty gaining access to the rallies. Since Khan's first arrest in May, Netblocks' global internet monitor noted six disruptions in access to social media platforms, including YouTube, X and Facebook, at times when the PTI was holding virtual jalsas.
Information Minister Solangi said the national disruptions were due to technical reasons unrelated to PTI's campaign. Pakistan's IT ministry and telecommunications authority did not return requests for comment.
POLICE PRESENCE
Despite PTI's online reach, elections in Pakistan – where voters live in busy port cities, vast deserts and some of the world's highest mountain ranges – depend on the turnout of election workers.
Banners and posters for parties like PML-N are a common sight nationwide, but Reuters reporters in Karachi and Lahore – home to a combined population of more than 30 million – saw almost no PTI banners.
Lahore-based PTI organizer Naveed Gul said posters were often removed by authorities soon after they were put up, an accusation that Punjab police chief Anwar called “malicious.” Reuters could not independently verify that PTI party material had been removed.
The ongoing crackdown came to a head on January 28, when PTI planned to hold nationwide rallies on a cool Sunday morning.
But in Karachi, Pakistan's most populous city, police and Khan's supporters clashed violently. According to television images, police fired tear gas canisters. A police spokesman said 72 arrests were made in the three days after the clashes.
In Lahore, hundreds of PTI workers and supporters gathered at the house of Khan's chief lawyer, Salman Akram Raja, who is also a PTI legislative candidate. As he left his home, Reuters reporters saw him being met by a large police contingent.
Raja said he was threatened with arrest if he did not cancel the planned rally, and Reuters reporters heard a police official tell him they had received “orders from above.”
Asked about the incident, police chief Anwar said he would investigate if a formal complaint was filed.
After consulting with his aides, Raja told his supporters to disperse peacefully. He told Reuters it was important to be free from detention and be able to campaign, even on a limited basis, in the immediate run-up to the election.
“Every time we campaign, there is fear hanging over most of our candidates,” he said. “Everyone feels like every campaign day… is a war.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)