Daily Times

Where are all the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) supporters in Punjab who once gave Zulfikar Ali Bhutto a political mandate in 1970 and even provided his daughter with significant support in 1988 and thereafter? That is a question often asked these days. As a supporter of the PPP in 1970, who voted for Zulfikar Bhutto in the Lahore constituencies where he contested from, it has become progressively difficult for me to vote for PPP candidates now. As far as my generation of PPP supporters is concerned, many of us have grown up, grown older and most have become much less ‘progressive’ in our outlook towards life and politics. I can say that I might not have changed all that much but the PPP is definitely not the same party it was in 1970 and it is not even the party it was 10 years ago.

First of all, I think it is important to remember that during the 1970 elections, other than a few religious parties and some regional parties, almost all the different supposedly prominent parties were Muslim League clones. There were almost as many different Muslim Leagues then as there are now. The PPP was the only major political party that presented a real left of centre political platform. Of course, after Jinnah there has been no politician in Pakistan with Zulfikar Bhutto’s charisma. Modern PPP supporters might forget that in 1970 the PPP presented itself as an Islamic socialist party. Its tricolour flag had black for democracy, green for Islam and red for socialism. After Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the socialism part was left to the wayside and by the time Mohtrama Benazir Bhutto Shaheed took over the PPP it was basically a liberal centre left party that had accepted free market economics. Benazir was also an extremely charismatic leader and was able to hold together a party that, by the time she took over, included members who ranged from the left to almost the right of centre ideas.

Then came the martyrdom of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and the subsequent takeover of the PPP by her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. Zardari. He was never a political activist and definitely did not subscribe to any leftist ideology. Under Zardari, the PPP soon became a Muslim League clone. By the time the 2013 general elections came around, the PPP had lost its centre left role in politics and was at best thought of as a regional party. In Punjab, whatever political opposition existed to the policies of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) was expressed in the support for Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI). Today, it is the general impression that the Zardari-led PPP functions as the PML-N’s B team. As such, in Punjab, it is now obvious that voting for the PPP is like voting for the PML-N, so might as well vote for the real deal. The PPP now survives only as a regional rural party of the feudal lords in Sindh. This was amply demonstrated in the recent local body elections.

Now a word or three about the old time PPP supporters, better known as jiyalas, a word hard to translate into English. I was a supporter but never a true jiyala. Most of the original jiyalas eventually grew up. As the old saying goes, when young if you were not a radical or a progressive or a leftist or a socialist/communist, you were never young. And if you grew up and remained that, you never really grew up. Before I go on to write a few words about which way some of my contemporary jiyalas went off with age, I do want to make an important point that over the last few decades socialism has gone out of fashion. Much of the old left has fragmented into single-issue politics almost the world over. In Pakistan, for instance, the old left is now wedded to a rather narrow liberal concept of personal, social and religious freedom. Mainstream ideas about financial and social security networks along with support for trade unions that were once the ‘bedrock’ of leftist politics have almost entirely been taken over by the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). If the JI did not have a rather archaic attitude towards sovereignty, I would be forced to call it the only truly ‘democratic’ and leftist party in Pakistan today.

Coming now to what happened to the jiyalas of my time: many of the older jiyalas just got old, some became single-issue liberals and some among them found religion. A dear friend from around the time of the 1970 general elections is a perfect example of the Islamisation of the jiyalas. He was a hardcore leftist, vacillating between Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist and Maoist ideation with a total and complete belief in the inevitability of the trends foretold by Marx. When last heard from he was attempting to develop expertise in Quranic exegesis (tafseer). Being a person of superlative cognitive abilities I am sure that he will be as brilliant a proponent of the Quran as he once was of Marx, Lenin and Mao. But why this descent into Quranic exegesis? Pascal’s wager perhaps. However, the way some old leftists move into Islam is an interesting phenomenon and deserves an entire discussion.

PPP supporters from the 1970s and 1980s were probably never ideologically committed to leftist politics and have, over the years, drifted to Imran Khan and some even to the PML-N. This drift was accelerated by the PPP becoming just another centrist party albeit with some liberal personae. The problem, if one can call it that, is that the PPP is no longer identified in the minds of most voters with a particular populist ideology. The left that is now left in the party is just too old and possibly powerless to attract popular support. The frequently mentioned cure for what ails the PPP is to bring in the third generation of Bhuttos. That is unlikely to rejuvenate a party that has lost its purpose.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians of
North America (APPNA)