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| Invisible leaders highlight PPP’s loss of confidence as poll nears | | |
Islamabad: But instead of shouting himself hoarse at the hustings, the invisible Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who has inherited the leadership of the Pakistan People’s party (PPP), is reported to be in Dubai. Pakistani voters and political analysts have started to ask whether this is the beginning of the end for a party founded in 1967 under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was later ousted from the premiership and executed on the orders of General Zia ul-Haq – the first of several violent deaths for a family that once personified the country’s democracy. On Thursday, tyre repairer Tahir Jameel stood solemnly at the spot in Rawalpindi where Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar, was assassinated in December 2007. He said he had come on the last day of campaigning to offer prayers to a leader famed for her defence of democracy. But, he said, he would not be voting for the PPP.
“The party which carried hope for Pakistan’s poor people is unfortunately dead,” lamented the 60-year-old Mr Jameel, declaring an end to three generations of loyalty in his family to the Bhutto dynasty.
He, his wife and their four children would vote for the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf – Pakistan Justice Movement – of Imran Khan, the cricket star turned politician, in the hope that the untried leader, his offer of a new style of politics and a “new Pakistan” would improve life for ordinary people, Mr Jameel said.
Even a few months ago, the country’s political pundits assumed that the PPP – led by President Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s wealthy widower, and Bilawal, their son – would easily come second in the election behind the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) of Nawaz Sharif.
PPP candidates are still likely to prevail in the party’s heartland of rural Sindh province, but the PPP’s feeble campaigning elsewhere and Mr Khan’s resurgence have prompted some forecasters to put the PPP in third place nationwide.
The party’s biggest problem is its performance at the head of a coalition government over the past five years. Elected in 2008 on a wave of sympathy following Ms Bhutto’s murder, the PPP is credited with reforming the constitution and entrenching electoral democracy, but roundly condemned for corruption and its failure to rescue the economy or provide regular electricity.
“The outgoing government is a completely useless bunch of crooks,” is the blunt verdict of one factory owner in Lahore.
Then there is the lack of a plausible leader. At the age of 24, Bilawal, the only son, is too young to qualify as a member of parliament, and is said to have been kept away from public meetings by his father for fear of another assassination attempt against the family. The fear is justified: on Thursday, suspected Taliban militants attacked PPP campaigners in Multan and abducted candidate Ali Haider Gilani, the son of a former prime minister.
But Mr Zardari himself is so unpopular that the party dare not use his face in their campaign material, restricting themselves to the absent Bilawal and the iconography of martyrdom: long TV advertisements set to music and showing the tragic deaths of Benazir and her father and the subsequent grieving.
“The advertising is all about the past, not the future,” says Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the US and the UK, noting the absence of a visible national leader and calling the organisation rudderless. “The big mystery is why the People’s party never even campaigned in much of Punjab [where 60 per cent of Pakistanis live]. I think they just lost it.”
The PPP’s apparent loss of confidence is all a far cry from the heady times of previous decades when the Bhuttos – in spite of their patrician origins – headed a leftwing party that promised food, clothing and shelter to all. When Benazir returned from exile in 1986 to launch a campaign against Gen Zia, she landed in Lahore to be greeted by huge crowds in what is still remembered as one of the country’s largest ever political protests.
“Pakistanis saw Benazir Bhutto as a symbol of defiance and hope. Under her rule, the government cared about the common people,” says Raja Shahid Zafar, a former PPP politician who has now joined Mr Sharif’s PML-N. “Now, Pakistanis don’t see any difference between the PPP and others.”
For Mr Jameel, the tyre repairer whose father and grandfather both joined Ms Bhutto’s anti-military protests in the 1980s, the message is clear. “President Zardari and other PPP leaders have destroyed Benazir Bhutto’s PPP. This is not the same party.”
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