Daily Times

Ordinarily, one would assume that people who have been hogging airtime on the idiot box for almost two months now would be rambling; most people are perhaps up to their ears with the rhetoric. The dear, darling government, in an effort to give its adversaries a dose of sensibility, tries to refrain from the rhetorical but that would be asking for too much. One would assume that people will be so bored of these two extremes that they will welcome any other alternative voice that at least provides them with a semblance of some logic, some solution and, of course, some sense.

My write ups over the last one year, post-elections 2013, stated that the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is now challenged with not only the usual army of right wingers but that they have a new challenge in the centre-right called the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) staring them in the face. The party that once claimed to be the chain of all four provinces was battered heavily and technically reduced to being the party of only rural Sindh.

Enter the young budding chairman of the PPP, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. The meter of hope rose to the highest degree when his sensible and clear stance against the scourge of terrorism made national headlines. The people were ecstatic that finally someone in the house knew the truth when most were shying away from the obvious or biting their lips on this contentious subject for the sake of their personal safety. The novice chairman was seen expressing himself in a leader-like fashion on the Twittersphere. Then came the rain and the usual floods and once again people saw him in action, in the midst of the affected. The people were delighted to see an energised young man, half the age of an average leader, showing twice the maturity and character. That was when most people thanked their stars, including this scribe, for a reasonable and sensible voice. A ray of hope from the left, who was going to give strength to the otherwise disgruntled people, sick to their eyeballs of the revolutionaries and their equally dim adversaries.

The vacuum and the inertia created by the warring politicos needed some tapping and some real, sensible handling. Most folks, including this scribe, felt that the PPP was ready to fill that void. The PPP was able to reinvent itself with new ideas, new blood, a new commitment of dedication and clear and concise solutions to the issues plaguing common Pakistanis.

Instead what people are witnessing lately is a 20-something chairman charging at all and sundry, and spewing similar rhetoric that has alienated most folks from the complacent government and their overly charged nemesis. First and foremost, whoever is writing his speeches has to tone down the rhetoric against political opponents and refrain from the sling shot jibes.

Some very sincere advice to him: if he wants to ever become the Prime Minister (PM) of this country, he needs to give the soul of the poor Hosh Muhammad Sheedi some rest. For those of you who are a bit deficient in knowledge about this gentleman, he was a Sindhi freedom fighter who fought against the British and coined the slogan, “Marsoon marsoon Sindh na daisoon” (will die before giving Sindh away). Mr Chairman has been chanting this on rosemary beads and with such delivery that it has really lost its essence. Unless he wants to limit himself to being just the leader of a single province, he has all the right to go on nonstop.

Next, a true leader is a uniter. His party claims to be the only party with roots and following in all four provinces, so he needs to be talking about the entire country in a way that other folks outside Sindh can get the right vibes and signals. His jibes at Mr Altaf Hussain and his ethnic party, the Mutthahidda Qaumi Movement (MQM), are in poor taste. As they say: when you are the new kid on the block, you tour the block, make as many friends as possible and create a space for yourself in the neighbourhood. At this point, the country needs a person who is different from the current lot yet one who has the abilities of forging alliances, building consensus and extending hands. To point fingers at Mr Hussain and accuse him of harbouring “unknown people” is amateurish. Constantly associating Mr Imran Khan with being a Taliban sympathiser and ridiculing the current prime minister for not sacrificing much for democracy will not carry him far. Then came the firing from the other side at the Line of Control (LoC) and the young cub charged at Mr Modi with taunts referencing the Gujarat riots. This is a very poor show of diplomacy from a grandson of the greatest diplomat that this country has produced so far.

Someone ought to tell the budding chairman that the days of victimhood honeymoon are over. No disrespect to his martyred mother and grandfather but they are now a part of history. The generation that he represents never saw Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and, for that matter, did not see his mother for long either. So, to them, when he parrots their sacrifices for this feeble, crippled and extremely fragile democracy, it does not mean much. It does not carry much weight either. To them he comes across like a wailing, grief stricken prince.

We are in the electronic age where the electorate is perhaps as aware as the leader standing in front of them. The people want tangibles, the hows, the road maps, the believable vision to rid them of their miseries. They do not want the same old story that the PPP has been repeating ever since Benazir was martyred.

It is about time that the PPP come to grips with the reality that it has been reduced to being an ethnic party with limited strength in a single province. Unless it reinvigorates itself, rebrands itself, re-energises itself with ideas and solutions that resonate with the entire country, it may lose its significance to even its own die hard followers. I Hope Mr Chairman turns a new leaf in his approach and come October 18, we see a different Bilawal with a different vision and, yes, an entirely different pitch.

The writer is a Pakistani-American mortgage banker. He blogs at http://dasghar.blogspot.com and can be reached at dasghar@aol.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar