Requiem for the People’s Party?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Canada

This scribe has no fancy pretensions of being a clairvoyant, ever, or a pundit to star gaze and prophecy for the future to come. No, never.

However, writing for a major Pakistani paper, some years ago when Asif Ali Zardari was at the pinnacle of his power as Pakistan’s President-by-sheer-accident, I’d predicted that AAZ will bury the party his late father-in-law, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (ZAB) had founded with so much fanfare.

Come to think of it, it wasn’t such a rash hunch, or a flight of fancy of a jaded hack that had seen a lot of the flimsy, gaudy and dishonest characters then flaunting their undeserved credentials at the helm of Pakistan.

No, I wasn’t guilty of taking a leap in the dark but had solid reasons to question AAZ’s stewardship of the PPP. I’d his track record in front of me and that had enough black marks on it—some big enough to swallow all of Pakistan—to warn me that the Johnny-cum-lucky wasn’t in the game to carry on the mission of ZAB. He was there to pillage and plunder Pakistan, with the office of the president coming in handy as a perfect foil to hide his loot.

That’s exactly what Zardari has kept himself doing, relentlessly, all these years. Divested of the top office of the state, the province of Sindh has been there, all the time, to serve his capricious designs to the hilt. With a nincompoop, par excellence, like Qaim Ali Shah as CM of Sindh to do his biddings, without question or demur, Zardari has had a field day in sacking Sindh, literally, to enrich his coffers to the brim.

AAZ was never in the game of politics for anything other than making money—tons of it. PPP came in handy to him to be the vehicle for his favourite sport. The party was there to cater to his whims and give him a platform for sloganeering. He larded its ranks with acolytes who would never even squeak against his rampage. Naïve aficionados who still thought of PPP as an agent of change in Pakistan were given short shrift and left to rot by the wayside, while the Zardari juggernaut rumbled on.

PPP was never a people’s party, to begin with. It wasn’t meant to be by its founder, ZAB, who wasn’t a people’s man, despite his pretensions to the contrary. A wadera to boot, he’d no time or regard for the common man of Pakistan. But his upbringing of a feudal baron served him well in using slogans for substance to befool the simpletons who thought of him as a messiah from heavens to lead them to the promised-land.

ZAB used the magic of his innate demagoguery ( he was a good actor, give him credit for his antics on the rostrum) to grab power, even if it came at the cost of Pakistan’s dismemberment. But once in power, all pretensions were gone out the window. ZAB wanted power for power’s sake. His agenda was dictated by his incontinent proclivity to rule Pakistan forever. How sad that his reading of history didn’t serve him well, or else he’d have known that no demagogue succeeded in making fools of his people all the time.

ZAB’s insatiable appetite for absolute power paved his passage to the gallows.

AAZ’ unquenchable thirst for pelf has brought ZAB’s PPP to the edge of the precipice. It just needs a push to plunge it into the abyss of anonymity and oblivion.

Zardari’s unbridled lust for money had alienated a number of ZAB loyalists from the party’s ranks. The last elections, of 2013, had reduced PPP largely to Sindh—there, too, in rural Sindh only where the culture of servitude is a great affliction for grass-roots democracy but a bonanza for waderas and feudal barons.

The 2013 elections had driven PPP, ignominiously, from what was once its heartland, Punjab. ZAB had shot to stardom and political eminence largely because of Punjab standing four-square behind him. Zardari’s antics made short work of that and paved the way for Mian Nawaz Sharif’s PML (N) to bounce back to Punjab’s center-stage.

The recent wholesale defection of a number of prominent Punjabi leaders of PPP to Imran Khan’s PTI is a pointer to PPP getting so much closer to being written off Punjab. It wasn’t in KPK or Baluchistan. So, it’s now, for all intents and purposes a party representing the feudal barons of rural Sindh who, in turn, represent nobody else but themselves.

In lock-step with PPP’s last rites of a political movement , or party, Zardari’s unbridled plunder of Sindh is also coming to a close, not because his lust for money has waned but because of the military establishment finally realising that without calling his bluff there would never be peace and normalcy in Karachi.

The Rangers’ report on Karachi’s parallel economy—taking a whopping toll of 280 billion Rupees from the wretched people of the beleaguered city—puts the spotlight on the city’s major power-brokers and stake-holders for making the city into a haven for law-breakers and terrorists.

The mafias raking in this exorbitant tranche of money are in the service of either PPP or MQM. They extort money from Karachi’s denizens, big or small, wealthy or poor. MQM has been notorious, in particular, for extorting money out of even the poorest of the poor. Several of its goons have been arrested in recent days for forcing poor citizens to part with their fitra of Ramadan. Zardari, on the other hand, has enriched himself, and his cohorts, through the notorious land-mafia or the water-tanker-mafia that has the spigots of water in their thrall and can deprive even the wealthy of their water unless paid their demanded price.

Zardari initially tried to shoot his way out of trouble by bluster and bluff. He called names to generals and threatened to bare the skeletons in their closets. He was borrowing a leaf out of ZAB’s book of antics; he, too, had conjured up the ruse of ‘secret clauses’ in the Tashkent Agreement, of January, 1966, to beguile the people of Pakistan and blackmail his mentor, Ayub Khan.

However, the current military leadership of Pakistan was in no mood to make the same mistake that led Ayub to ruin: giving a long rope to a loud-mouthed adversary. Zardari knew that his bluff was being called. So he fled to his sanctuary in Dubai. Thieves of Pakistan are making the best of Dubai’s proximity to Karachi to take that route when in trouble with the law of the land. You bet the rulers of Dubai couldn’t have imagined, for a moment that the paradise they were crafting within hailing distance of Karachi, would become a haven to Pakistan’s rogues and scoundrels.

Zardari has left the future of PPP in the hands of his playboy prince Bilawal, the effeminate lad with all the vices of his dad’s but none of the virtues of his mother in his genes. So, PPP is on a very slippery slope, in tumultuous waters, proverbially, with a very inexperienced and unwilling skipper at the helm. The party is as good as over for the People’s Party.

On the other hand, MQM, PPP’s partner in the plunder of the city, is in hot waters of its own. The noose around its absentee Quaid is being tightened by the London Police as well as by his own minions. The law of UK’s land is catching up with the elusive demagogue that Altaf is. The charges against him—in money laundering alone, not to mention his suspected involvement in the 2010 murder of Dr Imran Farooq on a street of London—are serious enough to cause sleepless nights to him and his henchmen, both in London and Karachi.

MQM has always been a one-man show. Its social crimes in Karachi are plenty and the Rangers crackdown on those committing those crimes under its patronage is threatening to undo the mafia at its roots. The MQM tent is about to be folded.

So what political panorama the pundit’s crystal ball has to offer in the distinct likelihood of PPP’s demise as an all-Pakistan political party and MQM being disbanded as a power-broker in Karachi, in particular, and Sindh, in general?

PTI’s Shah Mehmood Qureshi—not a romantic visionary by any definition—recently articulated that his party is now the only all-Pakistan political force. He wasn’t boasting, given that PTI has presence in all four units of the federation. Its popularity graph is on an upswing, despite its many detractors making it a profession of theirs to sling mud at Imran on any excuse.

From its rock-solid base in KPK, PTI hasn’t stopped making inroads into other provinces. In Punjab it is second-best and is in a position to give PML (N) a run for their money at the next polls, whenever undertaken. It has to work harder in Baluchistan and rural Sindh to stake its claim.

Karachi would fall into PTI’s lap like a ripened plum once MQM has its day at the bar of justice and is meted out the treatment it richly deserves because of its black deeds. The old dictum, that you can’t make fools of all the people all the time, is coming so very true for the bigots and charlatans larding its ranks. The few good ones should think of seeking refuge in PTI.

So, it looks like that Pakistan is inching closer to a two-party state — PTI and PML-N — all for the good of its people. The people of Pakistan have suffered long at the hands of exploiters, robbers and thieves. It’s their democratic right to have political parties that have a healthy mix of builders and cheaters, more of the former than latter. (The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat) - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com