IT WAS a television image that many feared seeing in an election campaign beset by terrorist attacks. A prominent party leader, aspiring to be prime minister, was shown bloodied, unconscious and being carried from a rally. Late on May 7th Imran Khan, the charismatic leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI), was rushed to hospital with injuries inflicted during a campaign event in Lahore.

Yet Mr Khan was the victim of a clumsy accident, not terrorism. He fractured his spine and cut his head after tumbling five metres (roughly 15 feet) from a platform balanced on a forklift truck being used to raise him to a stage, along with an absurd number of flunkies. Though kept in hospital on May 8th, and possibly until voting day on May 11th, Mr Khan was able to give interviews and suggest that his injuries were not too grievous.

Pakistani tradition requires that any politician worth his salt is seen among the people, pressing the flesh at vast gatherings. Yet Mr Khan is one of the few to have shown his face campaigning for this general election. Most candidates are at the mercy of the Pakistani Taliban, whose campaign of bombings against “secular” parties is proving exceptionally bloody. Mercifully, nothing so shocking has taken place as the assassination in December 2007 of Benazir Bhutto, a two-time prime minister, at a campaign rally. Yet over 100 political workers, including some candidates, have been killed in the past few weeks. Three violent attacks on May 7th alone killed 18.

The Pakistani Taliban justify the violence in various ways. They blame targets for backing military operations against militants. One bearded Taliban press man even railed against parties for their wicked alleged sympathies for three European philosophers, Rousseau, Kant and Bentham. That is laughable, but the intimidation that follows is not. Particular targets are the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the Bhutto family vehicle that was propelled into office on a wave of sympathy following Benazir’s murder; the Muttahida Quami Movement, with roots in Karachi; and a venerable outfit for left-wing Pushtuns, the Awami National Party.

Mr Khan, unusually, has been able to hold large public rallies. As a Pushtun who promotes talks with militants rather than military operations against them, he is seen as soft on the Pakistani Taliban. He may have had private assurances from extremists. At any rate, his rallies are not attacked. Other politicians retreat from the people, huddling for “corner meetings” indoors, phoning speeches to small gatherings of voters and relying on television and social media. As swathes of the rural population lack access to either, that may prove ineffective.

The PPP’s campaign looks most enfeebled. Its chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Benazir’s son, is reduced to making utterances from the badlands of Dubai, from where he will not even vote. Policies have been affected, too. Both Mr Khan and the election front-runner, Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), dare not provoke the militants. Condemnations of Taliban attacks on politicians’ opponents have been mealy mouthed when they have been made at all. Mr Khan, a former playboy cricketer, contradicts his reputation abroad as a Western liberal. He says he will not scrap discriminatory laws against the Ahmadiyya, a Muslim sect branded as heretics, even though the laws provide cover for widespread violence against this peaceable community. Mr Khan has also vowed to end what he calls “America’s war”, by pulling all Pakistani soldiers out of the tribal borderlands, including where the Pakistani Taliban are strongest.

Mr Sharif is scarcely more liberal. In recent years the provincial government of his brother, Shahbaz Sharif, in Punjab has been accused of going soft on local militant groups in return for immunity from attack. Some militants have even fielded candidates in the election, through front parties. In this campaign Punjab is unique in largely having been spared violence by the Pakistani Taliban.