Pakistan: A Hard Country (42 page)

Benazir Bhutto herself described the slogan as fol ows: Jeeay Bhutto. It’s a lovely word. It’s warm and wonderful. It lifts the heart. It gives strength under the whip lash ... It means so much to us, it drives us on. It makes us reach for the stars and the moon.24

As described in Chapter 1, the basic elements of the party’s style and image were established by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, with his combination of a populist appeal to the masses in politics with the personal style of a rich Westernized aristocrat. This combination was not original y hypocritical, for Bhutto had a love – hate relationship with his own ‘feudal’ class. However, as far as the landowners were concerned, his initial brief radicalism did not last long and was soon replaced by political al iances with great ‘feudal’ families in Sindh and southern Punjab.

Not merely was it natural y out of the question for members of this class to pursue economical y progressive agendas on the part of the PPP, but the nature of their local power also made it impossible for them to support social y progressive agendas (especial y in the area of women’s rights), even if they had wanted to – since this would have offended the deeply conservative kinship networks on which they depend for support. In fact, the uttermost limit of the progressivism of many PPP landowner-politicians in this regard is that they keep one younger Westernized wife for public show at their home in Karachi or Lahore – while two or more wives from arranged marriages with first cousins are kept firmly in purdah back on their estates.

A Sindhi PPP leader whom I interviewed in 1990, Dr Ashraf Abbasi (a doctor by profession), was candid about the political realities: We have no choice but to adopt candidates like U. Khan and A.

T. [names disguised for obvious reasons], though of course we know that they are both murderers. Who else can we work with here in the interior of Sindh? Of course we don’t want them, when we have good, loyal party workers on hand. But the voters themselves support them and demand that we take them, because they are the heads of powerful clans and because people here respect men who have danda [armed force; literal y a cudgel]. So we have to think which candidates can pul in votes along these lines. Al the same, it is only the PPP of al the parties which can mobilize voters at al along any other lines than biradiri, tribes, force and money.25

The PPP stil contains middle-class professional party workers like Dr Abbasi – for example, the former president of the Sindh party, Taj Haider, and the president of the Punjab party (as of 2010), Rana Aftab Ahmed. Without men like this to hold together some party organization, the party could not have survived its long years out of power.

However, as far as rural Sindh is concerned, nothing has changed in the PPP over the past twenty years – because, as later chapters wil recount, little has changed in the economy, society, culture and politics of the Sindhi countryside, which is the PPP’s most essential base. For example, as of 2010, the PPP Federal Education Minister, Azar Khan Bijrani, a Sindhi tribal chief and landowner, had been charged in the Supreme Court because a tribal jirga over which he presided had handed three minor girls over in marriage to another tribe as part of the settlement of a dispute; but the case against him had been suspended indefinitely.

The tribal court of another local sardar and PPP politician, Abid Husain Jatoi, had declared that a Jatoi girl and a Soomro man who eloped together should both be kil ed. The Sindh High Court intervened to protect them, but the resulting scandal did not prevent Jatoi from becoming Provincial Minister of Fisheries and Livestock.

None of this differed in any way from the stories I had heard about PPP ministers and other politicians during my visits to the province more than twenty years earlier.26

As a journalist in the Bhutto stronghold of Larkana said to me, with commendable restraint: ‘It is surprising for the civil society of Pakistan that people like this are inducted into the federal and provincial cabinets.’ This is not to say that the PPP is any worse in this regard than the other parties – but it is also no better. Such behaviour is part of the stuff of local society in Sindh (and most other regions of Pakistan as wel ) and has continued unchanged under both civilian and military governments.

Despite al this, a certain romance between the Bhuttos and many Pakistanis has continued. As far as the poor are concerned, a journalist friend told me, it is because Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is the only Pakistani leader who has ever spoken to the poor as if they mattered, and made them feel that they mattered. No one else has done that. So though in fact he did little for them, and Benazir nothing at al , they stil remember him with respect, and even love, and something of this stil sticks to the Bhutto name.

But for many ordinary Pakistanis, the identification between Z. A.

Bhutto’s heroic image and that of the Pakistan People’s Party, which he founded, was cemented by his death. His daughter Benazir’s beauty and combination of feminine vulnerability with personal autocracy confirmed the Bhutto image. Meanwhile, the Westernized intel igentsia (who are tiny in proportion to the population, but influential in the elite media, and in their effect on perceptions in the West) largely stick with the party because they have nowhere else to go, political y speaking – and often, because they have family or marital links to leading PPP families. Sherry Rehman, the PPP Information Minister in 2008 – 9, gave me her reasons for supporting the party, which are those of many educated women I have met (excluding the bit about helping the poor, which most no longer bother to claim): I am with the PPP because it is the only mainstream federal party that has consistently maintained the secular ideals of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. And the PPP addresses first the needs of the oppressed, poor, vulnerable and minorities including women. The party was led by a woman who gave her life for her ideals, and women in the party are regularly involved in top decision-making. This is a major appeal for women. The PPP

is the only party which has not been ambiguous about their rights.27

The question facing the party after Benazir’s assassination is whether it can survive the leadership of her distinctly less charismatic widower, Asif Ali Zardari (who is also of course not a Bhutto by blood) – at least long enough for their son or daughter to grow up and inherit the family mantle. Zardari had never held any party position, and inherited the co-leadership of the party (jointly with their underage son Bilawal, born in 1988 and so aged twenty in 2008) in the strictest sense of the word inherited – according to the terms of Ms Bhutto’s wil , the original of which neither the party nor the public was al owed to see!

As of 2010, Zardari was widely viewed by PPP politicians and party workers as a potential y disastrous liability, owing to the circumstances of his inheritance, a lack of legitimacy stemming from the fact that he is not a Bhutto, his reputation for kleptocracy, his personal arrogance and his reliance on a coterie of personal friends and advisers rather than on established leading figures in the party. A crushing additional blow was given by his government’s miserable record during the floods of 2010, and especial y the fact that at the height of the crisis he visited his family’s chateau in France rather than returning home to take charge of the relief effort. The eclipse of the ‘party stalwarts’ has also undermined the party’s reputation for physical courage – a highly valued quality in Pakistan – in the face of persecution. This had done much to maintain the party’s image.

The unpopularity of Zardari in the PPP is leading to frantic attempts to build up the image of his son Bilawal (who, interestingly, is often described by PPP supporters as if he were Benazir’s son only and not Zardari’s too). Repeatedly from PPP politicians and workers in Sindh I heard extremely improbable stories about his courage, intel igence, openness to ordinary people, and even close resemblance to Z. A.

Bhutto.

Who knows, al of this might even come to be true in future. Bashar al-Assad, Rajiv Gandhi and even more improbably Sonia Gandhi al inherited political positions very much against their wil , and for which they appeared completely unsuited – and yet proved good at them.

However, the PPP may not have the time. As one PPP female politician said: ‘Our problem is that we need Bilawal to grow up ten years in one year, and that isn’t physical y possible, unfortunately.’ As of 2010, because of his parents’ exile and his education in the West, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari does not even speak enough Urdu to give public speeches in that language, let alone in Sindhi; and the ability to give speeches in the language of ordinary people is perhaps the one thing a populist party cannot do without.

However, until 2010 at least, outright revolt against Zardari within the PPP had been kept in check partly by the flow of US aid, some of which he was able to distribute as patronage, but more importantly by the fact that with Benazir’s children not yet in a position to succeed, getting rid of him would leave the party with no dynastic leadership at al – at which point it would risk disintegrating altogether as a result of feuds between rival factions.

Zardari aside, the PPP suffers from certain potential y disastrous long-term weaknesses, but also from some enduring strengths. These latter could mean that even if it suffers a crushing defeat at the next elections due in 2013 it may wel eventual y bounce back again, as it has done several times in the past.

The first PPP weakness is that its socialist policies, on which Z. A.

Bhutto founded the party’s appeal, have become a completely empty shel , no longer even seriously veiled by populist rhetoric. The PPP is in fact the most distinctly ‘feudal’ in its composition of any of the major parties. This does not necessarily matter much as long as none of the other parties is offering anything better in terms of economic change, but it does mean that the party has lost a great deal of ground among what used to be a key constituency, the working classes of Punjab.

With kinship politics somewhat less important among them, little realistic access to patronage and major cultural differences with the Jamaat Islami, this section of the population does not general y vote for the PPP’s opponents, but rather is less and less likely to vote at al . I found this to be true of the workers I met in the great industrial city of Faisalabad, described in the next chapter.

On the other hand, another major Punjabi urban constituency in terms of numbers, the traditional lower middle classes, does vote heavily – and in general votes heavily anti-PPP. It does so because of the traditional hostility of business to the PPP, but even more importantly because this class is the heartland of Deobandi Islamist culture, which tends to detest the Westernized style of the PPP

leadership.

If this class grows continuously, at the expense of the rural classes, as a result of urbanization and social change, then the PPP in Punjab may be doomed to inexorable electoral decline. This has already been the case in Lahore. During my stay in the late 1980s the PPP had a great deal of support there, but in 2008 and 2009 it was hard to find a single would-be PPP voter on the street, even in former PPP

strongholds.

This is not at al certain, however. As already stressed, because of links to the countryside and because of the informal nature of much of the economy, the growth of urban populations does not necessarily mean the urbanization of culture, or the extension of traditional lower-middle-class culture to the new lower middle classes. What would terribly damage the PPP among these classes as a whole, and indeed among much of the Pakistani population, is if the perception of the Westernized culture of its top leadership becomes permanently linked to a perception of subservience to the US. This would also mark a complete break from the legacy of Z. A. Bhutto, whose popularity was founded on a mixture of populism and ardent nationalism, with a strong anti-American tinge.

As repeatedly emphasized in this book, while radical Islamism in Pakistan is very limited, hostility to the US is overwhelming, even among PPP politicians who are benefiting from US aid. As a PPP

member of the National Assembly from Sindh told me in Hyderabad in April 2009:

We used to be very liberal, pro-Western people, but American behaviour and attitudes are forcing us to develop our own identity, because we cannot simply be your servants. The Taleban are religious fanatics but so is Bush and many Americans. Worst of al , the Americans are forcing us to make mistakes and we are suffering as a result, and yet stil they are blaming us for not doing enough. America faced only one 9/11.

Due to our helping America, we in Pakistan are now facing 9/11s continuously with so many dead, and American policies are continuously making things worse, kil ing people, helping the Taleban and spreading disorder ... Many people here think the reason can only be that the Americans are creating al this disorder deliberately because they want to establish military bases here against China and Iran.

President Zardari’s al iance with the US has proved lucrative in terms of aid, but is widely detested by the population. On the other hand, a government of Nawaz Sharif and the PML(N) would probably have little choice but to fol ow essential y the same policies, so that over time this perception of the PPP might fade.

The PPP also has certain long-term strengths, though they are not those featured in party propaganda. Despite a decline in Punjab, it stil remains more of a national party than its chief rival the Muslim League (N), and far more than any other party but the Jamaat – whose limitations have already been described. While the Muslim League in power can always pick up some Sindhi al ies by offering patronage to local ‘feudals’, Sindhi feeling as such has nowhere to go but the PPP