Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [141]
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, intelligence, openness to ordinary people, and even close resemblance to Z. A. Bhutto.
Who knows, all of this might even come to be true in future. Bashar al-Assad, Rajiv Gandhi and even more improbably Sonia Gandhi all inherited political positions very much against their will, 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 physically 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 all – at which point it would risk disintegrating altogether as a result of feuds between rival factions.
Zardari aside, the PPP suffers from certain potentially 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 well eventually 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 shell, 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 generally vote for the PPP’s opponents, but rather is less and less likely to vote at all. 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