Daily Times

For the last 35 years, the anniversary of Chairman Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s brutal murder by the vicious Zia regime is commemorated with reverence and a big gathering of PPP workers and leaders at his tomb in Ghari Khuda Buksh near Larkana on April 4. However, the essence and the message that comes from its commemoration has been altered and manipulated by subsequent leaders and today it barely resembles the PPP’s founding programme, its goals, destiny or the fervour, passion and commitment to take on the might of the oppressive system and its repressive state. Working classes, activists and the youth historically congregated at Bhutto’s final resting place by defying all odds, transforming the anniversary into a festival of ideas, unity of purpose and struggle against oppression. There was a desire to learn the lessons behind the military coup and the unleashing of a vicious dictatorship, Bhutto’s assassination and, more importantly, to reconnect with the original ideas and programme of the party. By the mid 1980s, even the masses were beginning to question the prevailing state set up, its ideology and its crippling, oppressive system.
The return of Benazir Bhutto from exile in 1986 opened the floodgates, turning the streets of Lahore, Peshawar and Karachi into a mass sea of people. This mass surge on the streets was not just about defeating military dictatorship and restoration of a capitalist democracy. The state and the elite were forced to embrace Benazir and the PPP, and consequently ended up derailing the movement, with Benazir being installed as a weak prime minister with Zia’s cronies still in crucial positions and calling the shots in foreign policy, security and other important areas of governance. This was the beginning of Benazir’s and the PPP’s policy of reconciliation and capitulation to the state, its system and US imperialism. Compromise and reconciliation with the capitalist system and imperialism started to replace the socialist and revolutionary origins of the party.
In a television interview in1993, Benazir said, “Ideology has now taken a back seat.” And when ideology takes a back seat, the front seats are taken over by opportunism, corruption and lust for power and money. The PPP under Benazir continued to drift more and more to the right. Policies like privatisation, public-private partnership and accommodation with imperialists impregnated the party. The gates were opened to the capitalists and landlords. The party hierarchy became the refuge of business dealers, agents of corporate capital and most of the party activity was based on business covenants, financial favours and awarding of contracts, etc. This process of personal gain and greed for more seeped to the lower ranks of the party. The rich and the mighty bought and bribed their way up into the higher echelons of the party that hardly had any democratic structures or practises in the internal affairs of the party.
With the deep burial of the ashes of the party’s ideological foundations, abandonment of political debates and ideological discussions to formulate party policies, the leadership succeeded in transforming the party in its own image. Socialism, the cornerstone of the party’s birth and meteoric rise, became a forbidden word in the party. To execute this policy, the leadership embarked to erase the tradition of the 1968-69 revolution, which gave birth to the PPP, and the lessons learned by Bhutto in his death cell, which embarked on the road to propel his policies of nationalism, which he had advocated during his stint as foreign minister under the Ayub regime and those he adopted after coming to power in the clutches of the bourgeois state. These included the Islamic Conference, the nuclear programme and even his actions at the behest of the military of the operation in Balochistan. These were not the policies that the masses had come to the PPP and Bhutto for, but those that repulsed mass aspirations.
The radical positions that Bhutto had taken as a consequence of the 1968-69 revolution were expunged from the party’s programme and documents that were now being produced. Nor were the sayings of Bhutto in his last testament If I am assassinated allowed to circulate in the party circles. The lessons of his life and death, which he wrote in his book such as “class struggle is irreconcilable” and his conclusion, “the victory of one class over the other” as the only way out of the crisis facing society were eliminated and even ridiculed. Instead of Bhutto being a mass leader with a revolutionary programme of scientific socialism, his personality and his memory has been mystified into him being a saint or a Sufi with religious and obscurantist overtones. His anniversary nowadays is commemorated more as the urs of a pir (annual anniversary of mystic and religious saints) rather than a politician who was propelled to challenge the state and the system with his radical position.
This is the greatest injustice to a man who was modern and scientific, and claimed to believe in socialism. On one of his birthdays, while studying at Harvard, his father, Shah Nawaz Bhutto, sent him two books. These were the Communist Manifesto and a biography of Napoleon. His father was the prime minister of a princely state and yet he had the audacity to send his son the most important book to comprehend a socialist revolution, the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. This drift to the right by his heirs in the party leadership has not just badly damaged the party as is clear from its current dire state but it is also endangering the very survival of the PPP as a tradition of the oppressed in Pakistan.
The irony for the masses is that they did not have an alternative to the PPP while this degeneration was going on. They still do not have one. However, there is heightened disillusionment in its support base. With this continuum of successive leaders capitulating before the system that is devastating society, the masses are yearning for an alternative. However, mass alternatives do not spring up instantaneously. There are specific periods of revolutionary ferment when new mass traditions develop. Such periods are historical exceptions and not daily occurrences but their eruption does come. This is the law of society and history. Here it may come sooner rather than later. In normal times, the masses do converge toward their political traditions in elections and other political mass events but in extraordinary times of mass upheavals and revolts they can transform their traditions into instruments of revolution or create new ones. Such stormy events impend on the horizon. The challenge for honest and genuine political activists of the new generation is to prepare for such volcanic eruptions in society to redeem the struggle their ancestors had started in 1968. That is the real essence of the April 4 anniversary and will be the real revenge of the fatal blow of the counter-revolution by the imperialist stooge Ziaul Haq.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com