A police officer leads a blindfolded man, suspected of plotting bomb attacks ahead of the elections, to the police headquarters in Hyderabad, Pakistan, on Saturday. (AP)

It’s odd to bring you the first report on an election on the last day of campaigning. But in a sense it’s fitting because there has really been no campaign to speak of.

Lahore should have been a raucous swirl of rival bandwagons today as the deadline ran out; it was merely its daily humdrum self. The babble all belonged to the weekend bazaars; if this campaign ever had a decibel, it was too low to catch the street’s ear.

“Oye, lection te atte-jatte rainge, bauji, Chaman ke angoor le lo, kal is rate pe nai millange,” countered the fruit vendor in the midday mill of Mall Road, perhaps a little irascible that he was having to waste precious time talking politics.

“Hamare paas to na koi vote maangne aaya, na hum kisiko denge.”

(Elections will come and go, buy these grapes from Chaman, you won’t get this rate tomorrow. Nobody came to seek my vote and I am not giving it to anyone.)

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination at a December 27 rally in Rawalpindi pulled a deathly shutter on electioneering that its protagonists have since feared to cast away.

Former Premier Nawaz Sharif and the Bhutto regent, Asif Ali Zardari, were both in Lahore today and you would have imagined them to be on final-bend whistle-stops to shore up support.

Neither hit the trail. They were indoors all day, apparently engrossed in the complex arithmetic of what’s widely predicted to be a hung National Assembly.

“There is too little to gain from campaigning at this hour,” argued a Zardari adviser at Bilawal House, the family mansion newly named after the PPP’s young inheritor. “And too much to lose. Terror has hit us all, no point issuing invitations to death.”

This has been a ghost campaign, forever playing vanishing tricks with those whose support it solicits. Lahore is festooned to suffocation with banners and posters. There are faces looming at you everywhere — charged, animated, exhorting, pledging — but they are all on paper and plastic, fluttering noiselessly.

Mr Candidate is nowhere to be seen. If he presents himself in flesh, there’s always the fear of blood. So he’s eloped to the safety of the television screen; the tube is where the sound and fury of this campaign really resides.

For a month or so now, the channels haven’t needed to take commercial breaks, politics has churned out the profits. Programming has become the interregnum between incessant political publicity.

There’s the piteously airbrushed Bilawal Bhutto — underage yet and ineligible — invoking the spirit of his mother and grandfather; there’s Nawaz Sharif, injured and angry and seeking vengeance for the humiliation of deposition and exile; there’s, of course, the burly Shujaat Hussain, president of the PML(Q), derisively known as the king’s party, proxies of Pervez Musharraf.

The king’s party runs low on street credibility but it must be best bankrolled; it’s gobbling 10 times the advertising space.

“Works well, doesn’t it,” remarked a Punjab bureaucrat sardonically as he punched off the set in his room. “This television campaign is free of risks for all and we always have the choice not to put up with too much bakwas.”

He is not an isolated sceptic over what the February 18 elections might achieve; cynicism is sounding louder here than any campaign call.

Most — including willing participants like Zardari and Nawaz Sharif — are convinced the polls will be rigged.

Many more believe Pakistan is in for greater instability, no matter who wins or loses.

Little wonder that the best attended rally on the campaign’s last day was one called by a rag-tag alliance that want the election boycotted and whose star lead is Imran Khan.

“This is an illegal election conducted by an illegal President who wants to perpetuate himself,” he told a boisterous gathering of 5,000-odd — huge by the standards of this campaign — in the fading shadows of the Minar-e-Pakistan this evening. “Don’t contribute to this slur on Pakistan.”

The red-green of his party, the Tehrik-e-Insaaf, went up in happy uproar.

Carefully unkempt in a rumpled white Pathan suit, Khan sat flanked by the influential Jamaat leader Qazi Hussein Ahmed, as speaker after speaker flayed Monday’s election as a fraud and resolved to press on with “the real struggle” for democracy.

Were you to ask those who are part of this exercise, you’d probably hear the same — this election isn’t going to create any victors, it will at best be a signpost in a battle that will wage on.

At worst… but most Pakistanis would tell you they are already there.