Karachi, February 14:

Pakistan’s parliamentary elections are only four days away, but the colour and verve are strangely missing.

People say this is the most lacklustre and pale election they have ever witnessed. The reasons cited are many — fear of increased suicide and bomb attacks at public gatherings, price hikes making ends meet a daily impossibility, the missing face of Benazir Bhutto and lack of confidence in the interim government for holding free and fair elections.

But more than that, the feeling of helplessness and despair that nothing will change and that the winners will be “more of the same” seems all pervading and is keeping people away from poll meetings in the run-up to the elections on February 18.

In Karachi, especially, many have repeatedly pointed to the ‘missing’ Benazir Bhutto factor for this. It’s a vacuum - Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi on December 27 last year — casting a long shadow.

Faisal Siddiqi, an advertising guru, says her “charisma and political acumen” will be missed. And Nasir Panhwar, a conservationist, adds that “for the people of Sindh (her home province) life is just not the same after BB”.

“It’s so dreary, meaningless, empty, shallow and dead,” says Najma Sadeque, a senior journalist who has stopped watching TV debates where “the focus is on out manoeuvring one another, not on the people”. Sadeque said: “The last government had five years in which to wreck the country. And if that weren’t enough, the dynasties are back with a vengeance.”

Even Supreme Court lawyer Zahid Ebrahim, once in the forefront of the lawyer’s movement for reinstatement of the judiciary, finds “there is nothing to celebrate”.

“We are living in a time of cruel darkness and the worst is we don’t know even know the ‘enemy’ who has robbed us off this colour,” he says.

But more than anything it is the fear factor that is keeping the people away from participating in these elections. “There is a palpable sense of foreboding,” Adil Najam, a Pakistani professor of Global Public Policy, Boston University and director of Pardee Centre, said. “Terrible things can happen and this is not just paranoia, this is experience. That has also dampened the pre-election build-up greatly.”

While agreeing that the “fear of violence and the feeling of helplessness in the wake of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto’s assassination” has resulted in zero fervour for the coming elections, Hussain Haqqani, former aide of Benazir Bhutto and now director of the Center for International Relations, Boston University, believes it is the “anger against the regime” that will make the post-election scenario strong.