Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [140]
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 killed. 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 well) and has continued unchanged under both civilian and military governments.
Despite all 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 all, they still remember him with respect, and even love, and something of this still 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 intelligentsia (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, politically 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 will, the original of which neither the party nor the public was allowed to see!
As of 2010, Zardari was widely viewed by PPP politicians and party workers as a potentially