Hold That Tiger: Big Cat's Fate Snarls Campaign

   The Tiger: A Political Symbol in Pakistan

   It has been a tiring campaign ahead of Saturday's Pakistani elections, and equally tiring for the tiger, the electoral symbol of the PML-N party.A tiger stood on a car during a protest in Lahore, Pakistan, in March 2012. The tiger is the electoral symbol of the PML-N party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Pakistan's general elections will be held Saturday.Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

 May 10, 2013

LAHORE, Pakistan—It has been a tiring campaign ahead of Saturday's Pakistani elections, with leading politicians crisscrossing the country to press the flesh. It has been particularly exhausting for Idris Ahmed Ali's pets.

Mr. Ali, a businessman here in Pakistan's second-largest city, owns six tigers and two pumas, in addition to goats, chicken, cows and other livestock. The tiger is also the electoral symbol of the PML-N party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, widely predicted to garner the largest number of votes on Saturday.

Mr. Ali's tigers—particularly a rare, white tiger named Sandra—were a frequent feature at Mr. Sharif's rallies, paraded in front of supporters and attracting the attention of gawkers. In a country with a high illiteracy rate like Pakistan, party-symbol recognition is crucial on election day—and few things sear a memory like a roaring big cat.

Then, disaster struck. A day after Mr. Sharif's leading rival, former cricket star Imran Khan, plunged to the ground during a Lahore campaign rally on Tuesday, fracturing his vertebrae, it seemed as if a bad omen hit Mr. Sharif's campaign, too. Sandra, Pakistani TV stations reported in breathless bulletins on Wednesday night, had taken ill from heat exhaustion at the latest PML-N rally, and died.

It took a day, and a tweet from Mr. Sharif's daughter Maryam, to dispel the report. "Sandra is alive. We raised it like a baby," said a distraught Mr. Ali. "If someone tells you your baby has died, how would you feel?"

"It is all politics," Malik Arshad, a local PML-N activist, chimed in. "They want to hurt us."

During a visit on Thursday, a tiger Mr. Ali identified as Sandra was sleeping in an air-conditioned shed, just as Mr. Ali treated visitors to Coca-Colas in a stuffy room, complaining of frequent power outages.

Another tiger, named Sam, was pacing inside a small enclosure, regularly jumping into a pool of water to refresh herself. Behind her, a giant PML-N poster showed Mr. Sharif and pictures of striped big cats.

Suspicions, however, still persist. Uzma Khan, director of biodiversity at the WWF Pakistan environmentalist group, said she wasn't sure that Sandra is alive. Ms. Khan said she visited the animal on Wednesday night, and found it to be "severely ill" and "very frail."

In any case, she added, parading the tiger during political rallies violated Pakistan's commitments to protect endangered species under international law.

"Such displays are not appropriate or ethical," she said. "Big cats can be very dangerous, even if they are tamed."

Mr. Ali, who runs a cold-storage and agriculture business with his brother, said he has always been passionate about animals. "I am a pet lover—I have donkeys, goats, cows, chicken, pigeons, dogs," Mr. Ali said. "Ever since I was young I have loved them."

The tigers were imported from Canada, said the brother, Mian Muhammad Zia. "These are Bengal tigers, not Siberian," he said. "It is too hot for Siberian tigers here in Pakistan."

Mr. Ali was visibly unnerved by all the media attention focused on his cats. "It's not just us—everyone has got a lion or a tiger in Pakistan. Thousands of people have," Mr. Ali said. "If Nawaz Sharif's symbol were a goat, we would have given him a goat. But it is a tiger, and so we gave him a tiger to go and come back for an hour."

There will be no more campaigning with live tigers, however, Mr. Arshad assured.

"Now, for the rallies, we will campaign with toy tigers," he said.

In fact, there were no real tigers in sight at Mr. Sharif's final campaign rally Thursday night in Lahore. Mr. Sharif is called "sher" by his supporters—an Urdu word that refers to tiger and lion alike.
Instead of a tiger, supporters paraded through the streets a male lion, caged in the back of a flatbed truck, yelling in loudspeakers: "Wake up, wake up, sher is coming!"

The caged lion, impervious to the call, seemed fast asleep.

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