The PPP’s Politics: Reinventing or Recycling?
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) seeks to restore its dwindling political fortunes through formally launching its bright young chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari at a rally at the tomb of Mr Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Bilawal’s mother and the chairperson of the PPP, the late and much lamented Benazir Bhutto, returned home on October 18, 2007 and was on her way to Mr Jinnah’s tomb for a rally when her procession was bombed, killing over 150 PPP workers.
Benazir Bhutto survived that attack but never could address a rally at Mr Jinnah’s tomb. She was martyred in another bombing in Rawalpindi a little over two months later. Bilawal apparently seeks to start where his illustrious mother left off. However, the PPP’s chairman seems to have taken a page from his maternal grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s political playbook rather than his mother’s.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had resigned as General Ayub Khan’s foreign minister in June 1966 and, after a largely positive response from the public, went overseas. He returned in October that same year and after initially toying with the idea of joining an existing political party, including his eventual nemesis the National Awami Party (NAP), he set out in earnest to form his own party. The PPP was eventually founded on November 30, 1967 and 10 foundation documents were presented at the time. According to Zulfikar Bhutto’s close associate, Barrister Rafi Raza, Zulfikar and Dr Mubashir Hasan each wrote one document, ‘Why a New Party’ and ‘The Declaration of the Unity of People’, respectively, while the rest were contributed by the PPP’s leftist ideologue J A Rahim. Rahim also summed up the party’s vision as a four-point dictum, i.e. “Islam is our faith, democracy is our polity, socialism is our economy and all power to the people.” However, unlike almost any other political party in Pakistan, the PPP’s eighth founding document incorporated the Jammu and Kashmir (JK) issue as its core mission. According to Barrister Raza, that document noted, “This JK mission takes precedence over all other internal and external responsibilities of the party...Pakistan without Kashmir is as incomplete as is a body without a head.”
During the PPP’s 1970 election campaign in Punjab, Zulfikar Bhutto honed in on the Kashmir issue. Fully cognizant of then Punjab’s anti-India sentiment, Bhutto went from a nationalistic to highly jingoistic tone in his speeches. He berated the 1966 Tashkent Declaration that helped end the 1965 war and restore bilateral relations, including trade, only to sign the Simla Agreement under worse terms in 1972, salvaging whatever he could for vivisected Pakistan.
Bilawal’s current rhetoric on Kashmir and against India seems to be along the lines of Zulfikar Bhutto promising a “1,000-year-war against India” and a “Glory of Islam Day (Yawm-e-Shaukat-e-Islam)” in Delhi and Srinagar. One wonders whether the PPP is reinventing or merely recycling itself in an attempt to recapture its lost glory in the Punjabi heartland. The Kashmir problem did not sell well as an election issue in Sindh, Balochistan or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (then NWFP) in the 1970 campaign and is unlikely to do so 44 years on. But the question is whether it will be a good pitch to today’s Punjab.
Punjab-based parties like the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) seem to have moved on and hardly bring up Kashmir in zero-sum terms. Both the PML-N and PTI, from whom the PPP has to wrestle back its political space in Punjab, proclaim to focus on economic issues. With its massive active service and retired military population, the Kashmir issue perhaps still resonates in parts of central and upper Punjab but moving it to the top of the PPP’s political agenda may just be overkill, the current Pak-India border tensions notwithstanding.
The PPP’s 1970 electoral success in Punjab was due not merely to the Kashmir issue. The party caught the public’s imagination thanks to Zulfikar Bhutto’s personal charisma, indefatigable campaigning and perhaps a clever and creative adaptation of the Indian leftist slogan: “Maang raha hai har insaan: roti kapra aur makan” (Everyone has but this demand: bread, clothing and shelter).” The PPP’s leftist founding fathers had appropriated and abridged the slogan to just roti, kapra aur makan to communicate their quite overt socialist agenda to people in the catchiest possible terms. The idea is not that the current PPP should fall back on socialist sloganeering but it must put forth an economic program that is in sync with the times, the public’s mood and its needs. But health, education and social welfare are not commodities and market forces will never regulate them equitably. If the PPP has to go back to the basics then why not look at its social democratic origins? The PPP’s 2013 election manifesto was perhaps the most progressive in the socioeconomic realm and could still be a building block for its future campaigns. With millions of people deprived of food, shelter, health and education, an inward focus to make peace within borders rather than a war across them ought to be the PPP’s priority.
Benazir Bhutto laid down the ground rules for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s associates who tried to patronize her like a niece very early in her career. She cut the ‘uncles’ to size and stood tall as a leader on her own with her own style and thought. She built on her father’s legacy but did not necessarily borrow all of it and tempered it where needed. In her last book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West, Benazir Bhutto’s emphasis was on a “composite dialogue” to resolve the Kashmir issue. She wrote, “We cannot go back 60 years to whether the people of Kashmir, pursuant to the terms of partition and to the mandate of UN resolutions, should have been allowed to determine their own future. They were denied that right, and for the last 60 years the state of Jammu and Kashmir has been a catalyst for war, anger and militancy.” She might not have been able to trounce the security establishment but realized fully well that such rhetoric ultimately plays right into their hands as does picking unnecessary battles with political adversaries like the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), which cannot be simply wished away. Zulfikar Bhutto and the NAP’s 1970s conflict weakened both and only strengthened non-political actors. However, in her book Benazir Bhutto also noted that her father’s slogan, roti, kapra aur makan, a call for economic and social development, continues to be at the heart of the program of today’s PPP. One can only wish the PPP’s chairman safety and success, and hope that moving forward he tries to reinvent the PPP’s program and capture the public’s imagination.
(The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki)
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