The People and the Party

The party that is commonly regarded as the country’s biggest and most popular political entity was founded in Lahore in November 1967. The Pakistan People’s Party was very much a child of the 1960s, a decade known the world over for its non-conformist, anti-Establishment, vitally creative tendencies and its powerful urge towards social justice.
Less than ten years after the party’s creation, its charismatic founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of a usurping tyrant. The party itself is now over 40 years old and has, very recently, suffered the further heart-numbing tragedy of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.
Despite all this, the PPP remains the largest party in the land. And its convincing success in the recently concluded general elections, when it won more seats in the National Assembly than any other party, demonstrates its remarkable continuing vigour.
Or does it? Let’s have another look at those figures.
The PPP was successful in 87 of the 272 seats polled, i.e. a clear 32 percent of the seats. (Winning a higher proportion of seats than any other party is of greater significance than winning a higher percentage of the vote.) Compare this with the party’s performance in its first electoral outing, the 1970 elections, when it was successful in winning as many as 81 seats, a whopping 60 percent of the total of 138 West Wing (present-day Pakistan) seats. By comparison, its current performance — despite all the hype that has accompanied it and all the popular enthusiasm it symbolises — seems much less extraordinary.
In fact, if one looks at the PPP’s performance in successive NA elections over the years, one clearly notes a declining trend:

1970: 81 seats out of 138 = 60 percent
1977: 156 seats out of 200 = 78 percent
1988: 93 seats out of 207 = 45 percent
1990: 44 seats out of 207 = 21 percent
1993: 89 seats out of 207 = 43 percent
1997: 18 seats out of 207 = 9 percent
2008: 87 seats out of 272 = 32 percent

(I have omitted Zia’s ‘party-less’ 1985 ‘elections’ and Musharraf’s 2002 ‘Zameer’ electoral farce).
If we represent these percentages graphically, we get a mathematical trend line that shows a clear decline over the years. Where is this happening and why is this biggest of our parties seemingly losing its electoral hold?
The answer to the first is easy enough. The province of Punjab comprises over 150 NA seats, or 55 percent of the total. It is this province that represents the mainstream of opinion in the country and which can make or break political parties. In 1970, the PPP won as many as 62 of the Punjab’s 82 NA seats — an incredible 76 percent of all Punjab seats. By contrast, in 2008, the PPP’s tally is 43 seats (29 percent) out of 150 Punjab seats.
So, then, what has happened? Why, notwithstanding that it remains the largest single party in the country, has the PPP in fact lost much of its Punjab vote bank? Rigging, of course, could well be part of the answer. After all, as the major perceptually anti-Establishment party, the PPP has continually been a prime target of Establishment forces. But that is not an adequate answer. As with many conspiracy theories that may possess a germ of truth somewhere, this is an intellectual shortcut that cuts off further thought.
So, let us probe a little deeper. If we analyse the 1970 election results in Punjab, we find that, in the populous and relatively developed ‘GT Road’ districts and the Faisalabad district, the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto-led PPP won a hundred percent of the NA seats.
To get an apples-to-apples comparison for 2008, we need to lump together the seat counts for many of the present Punjab districts. As we go down the ‘GT Road’ districts, as they are today, we find that the present districts constituting the former Rawalpindi district gave the PPP only 17 percent of their seats and the former Jhelum district none at all. Former Gujrat district at 67 percent, Gujranwala at 11 percent, Faisalabad at 45 percent, Sheikhupura at 13 percent, Lahore at 17 percent and Sahiwal at 33 percent of total seats, are all a far cry from the 1970 PPP juggernaut that took every single NA seat in these regions.
Instead, the PPP has greatly gained in electoral strength further south, in the Saraiki-speaking belt, and to the west of the Punjab. Thus, the PPP vote bank has shifted away from the relatively more prosperous, comparatively urbanised, better-educated regions, towards the dusty backwardness of the rural south and west. Increasingly, the PPP in Punjab can be seen becoming a party of the rural areas, in general, and the rural poor in particular.
In 1970, it was the relatively favoured Punjab districts that reacted most strongly against the hollow economic boasts of Ayub Khan’s ‘decade of development’. A revolution of rising expectations swept these regions, demanding social justice, real economic progress, political freedom and fundamental rights. Theirs was an extraordinary anti-Establishment upsurge, catalysed in the personality and rhetoric of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his party.
Wind forward to 2007 and we will observe that it has been these very regions that have angrily given the lie to the pseudo-technocratic braggadocio put out by the Musharraf regime, which concealed real economic disaster. No less important, it is the ordinary people of these districts who poured out in their millions to celebrate the now legendary drive to Lahore of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan.
The temper here is powerfully anti-Establishment. But the people here seem less and less to identify with the principal anti-Establishment party. It is Mian Nawaz Sharif, with his less equivocal position on key issues, who seems to have caught the imagination.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet