Daily Times Editorial Dec 2, 2013

PPP’s future The 47th Foundation Day of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) on Saturday, November 30th saw a public meeting of the party in Karachi addressed by Patron-in-chief Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and other leaders. In his address, Bilawal tried to rally the troops through a fighting speech that attempted to deal with some of the serious problems confronting the party and its future. The gist of his remarks revolved around the widespread public perception that the PPP had lost its way and faced a bleak future after the drubbing it received in the May 2013 elections, which saw it shrink from the only countrywide political party with roots and a presence in all the federating units to essentially a Sindh-based entity. Bilawal asserted that the PPP was very much alive and would prove before and by the next elections in 2018 the truth of this assertion. He went on to deny that the party had changed since it still connects people. Pakistan, Bilawal stated, is not the property of any “mullah” or “player”. He criticised the PML-N government for what he called the storm of inflation that has kicked in since it took office six months ago, which had made the life of the common man hell. His party, Bilawal said, would resist the privatisation plans of the government, which he characterised as “personalization” (a reference to alleged cronyism). Bilawal then trotted out the leit motif of the PPP: its leaders and workers’ sacrifices in the cause of democracy, in which he listed the fate of his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his mother, Benazir Bhutto on top. He asserted that the PPP had always challenged the status quo and met his critics’ making fun of his indigenous language skills head on by asserting that his relationship with the people and the party’s workers transcended language issues. As a reflection of one aspect of the PPP’s trajectory over the years, two splinter groups of the PPP also held meetings to commemorate the founding day of the PPP. The first, the PPP-SB, held a meeting in the Lahore residence of Dr Mubashir Hassan, the locale of the original founding convention of the PPP in 1967. Dr Mubashir Hassan, one of the founders of the PPP and its first secretary general, pinned the blame for the dwindling fortunes of the PPP on its deviation from the ideas and programme of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and its original élan as a party of the workers and peasants. He criticized the PPP for falling prey to the zeit geist of our times, abandoning nationalisation and veering towards acceptance of privatisation. Dr Mubashir was sceptical of Bilawal’s claim that the PPP would make a comeback in the 2018 elections. The Naraaz (disaffected) group of the PPP led by Naheed Khan and Dr Safdar Abbassi also convened a separate commemorative meeting on the day. It is an interesting fact that both splinter groups, the PPP-SB and the Naraaz broke away from the mother party in the wake of assassinations of top leaders of the party, PPP-SB after Murtaza Bhutto’s and the Naraaz group after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination respectively. Forty seven years after a group of left wing intellectuals and workers met in 1967 to found the PPP as the party of change, the current state of the party raises more questions than answers. The PPP posited Islamic socialism as its creed, nationalized the commanding heights of the economy after coming to power in the wake of the Bangladesh debacle, carried out land reforms but failed to follow through on the logic of transformation of state and society, premised on the class struggle. As a result of its ‘hesitation’, it inadvertently allowed the reactionary and vested interests to mount a deadly counter-offensive, which cost both Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto their lives, the latter despite her best efforts to allay the establishment and propertied classes’ view of the PPP as a radical left wing party. How the Phoenix of the PPP can emerge from the ashes of the 2013 defeat and the demoralisation of its ranks and supporters is the forbidding challenge facing the next generation of the PPP’s leadership, first and foremost Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.