LAHORE: In politics, hopes never die, but the unofficial result of the latest electoral contest in Punjab province reaffirms that Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) is the new hope for the people of the province, who have all but abandoned the once-popular Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of Bilawal Bhutto to its own machinations.
Political sources say it will be traumatic for the leadership of PPP that its candidate polled just 2,000 votes in the National Assembly electoral constituency NA-154 Lodhran by-election against PTI’s 140,000, and the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N of Nawaz Sharif’s a little over 100,000.
After all, PPP traditionally had a strong presence in the southern districts of Punjab, which its founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the grandfather of Bilawal Bhutto and father of Benazir Bhutto had called “the bastion of power” in his heyday.
It must have been a particularly painful result for the PPP supporters who had been arguing that Bilawal can revive the aura of his slain mother and hanged grandfather and salvage the party’s falling fortunes in Punjab just by showing up.
It has been about two years since former Pakistan president and co-chairman of PPP Asif Zardari thrust his young son into mainstream politics. Sympathetic analysts welcomed it as “infusion of young blood”, though it smacked of hereditary politics practiced by all established parties - except the Jamaat-e-Islami of Sirajul Haq.
The inexperienced Bilawal does not look cut out for what is becoming cutthroat politics. However, the supporters, particularly the most frustrated lot of them in Punjab, can be excused for pinning their hopes on him to breathe new life into PPP.
After all, Zulfiqar had founded the party in Lahore and nurtured it in Punjab, not in Sindh, his native province. Party officials and analysts trace the decline of the party to multiple factors which have almost confined it to rural Sindh.
“What else can one expect at this point of time,” said a senior PPP official of Punjab, who didn’t want to be quoted on record. “We are completely down and out here.”
All politics is local, and “hardcore politicians need to be in contact with people down to village level all the time.”
“Senators Aitzaz Ahsan and Sherry Rehman are impressive when they take swipes at the federal government for its bad governance and corruption inside the Senate, but the rough and tumble of politics lie outside the hallowed parliament halls,” he added.
Even senior PPP leader Khurshid Shah, who is the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly and also chairperson of its powerful Public Accounts Committee, comes to Islamabad only to attend assembly sessions.
“He seems least bothered about how the party is doing in Punjab or elsewhere,” regretted the PPP Punjab official.
Whenever questions are raised about his ineffectiveness in both positions, the explanation offered is that PPP has to be soft on PML-N for the sake of democracy. Same goes for the octogenarian Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Shah.
“We have implored more than once for the top party leadership to visit Punjab, but our requests seem to fall on deaf ears. We and our voters are left in virtual political wilderness,” said the PPP official.
Another leader of PPP in Punjab recalled that Zardari and Bilawal visited Lahore only once, and briefly. “That felt like our leadership has accepted that PPP had no chance elsewhere in the country except Sindh, when Punjab should be the focus of the party,” he said.
“Realistically, we didn’t expect fabulous results in the recent local elections in Punjab, nevertheless it was good opportunity for PPP to launch Bilawal in the province.
Few appearances at election rallies here and there would have been more than enough. However, for reasons best known to it, the party leadership simply ignored us.
“It was embarrassing to see party workers fighting local elections in Punjab as independents even in the constituencies where PPP politicians commanded influence,” he said.
That sounded the death of the PPP in Punjab. “One may differ with the sort of politics Imran Khan conducts but he does remain in touch with his party workers that way.”
Political sources say that it is apparent that if Bilawal is serious in playing national politics, he has to come out of Sindh and spend more time in Punjab than anywhere else in the country.
Internews
