Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [139]
This was not personal sycophancy so much as general party style, which tends to be overripe even by the flavourful standards of South Asia. A book by a PPP supporter, The Ideals of Bhutto, reads in part as follows:
What is Bhuttoism? It is a clarion call to establish a welfare democratic state. It is the power of people. It is an enlightened, modern, moderate and egalitarian society. It is the end of religious extremism, sectarianism, parochialism and terrorism ...
Jeeay Bhutto [Long Live Bhutto, or Victory to Bhutto] is a banging slogan raising the dead to life. It awakens the slumbered souls. It has a meaning. Long live Bhutto signifies his unending mission. This mission can never die. It is a permanent principle of paramount importance. It reminds us of democracy. It cuts the roots of fascism. It severs the branches of feudalism, militarism and mullahism ...23
Benazir Bhutto herself described the slogan as follows:
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 originally 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 alliances with great ‘feudal’ families in Sindh and southern Punjab.
Not merely was it naturally out of the question for members of this class to pursue economically progressive agendas on the part of the PPP, but the nature of their local power also made it impossible for them to support socially progressive agendas (especially 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; literally a cudgel]. So we have to think which candidates can pull in votes along these lines. All the same, it is only the PPP of all the parties which can mobilize voters at all along any other lines than biradiri, tribes, force and money.25
The PPP still 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 will recount, little has changed in