Plain Words
How decisive is Bhutto charisma?
National elections are again scheduled for February 18. How will 40 years old PPP fare in them? Many think that love and admiration for Benazir Bhutto have been heightened by her tragic death. This may have strengthened the Bhutto mystique. Some say it should enable the PPP to win power, based mainly on its successes in Sindh and Punjab, while NWFP too will return a few deputies. Some others are less sanguine.
As for the Bhutto legend, it has had a remarkable record. Just three years old, PPP won a resounding victory in West Pakistan but with no presence in East Pakistan. Ruling generals had to make Zulfikar Ali Bhutto a Chief Martial Law Administrator, with untrammeled power. But seven years later, they deposed him. While retaining enough popular support to win the 1977 elections, he needlessly became ambitious to rig them for a two-thirds majority. But he had alienated powerful interests and, thus, could be overthrown.
Which powerful forces were these? A foreign journalist has put it pithily: Allah, army and America. By Allah was meant those who claimed authority to interpret divine injunctions, the mullahs; army included the powerful coalition of the economic and social elite that has been sustaining the military's domination since early 1950s; and America supports this elite-cum-military rule. Let no one forget that this troika was what removed and hanged Bhutto senior, thus embellishing the Bhutto legend.
Bhutto diehards in Punjab and Sindh, with regionalists' help, kept the flame of resistance alive under Movement for Restoration of Democracy through the long and dark night of Zia Martial Law. Zia's repression was intense, and aimed at killing PPP. That PPP survived was due more to its jialas, the committed Bhuttoites, and not so much to Benazir's charisma.
The latter emerged through jialas' need for a symbol to love and cherish; they simply assumed high qualities of head and heart in a largely timid young girl under arrest or in refuge in London until 1986. Many democrats too needed a civilian leader in their endless struggle against military's despotism. The combined efforts of these made Benazir a Joan of Arc.
Long residence abroad made Benazir a pragmatic leader ready to cooperate with the troika of Allah, army and America on assumption that the road to Islamabad passed through Washington, and cooperate she did. She became the PM twice, and left a trail of accusations of corruption.
In 1999, arrived another strongman and made her a refugee again, only to return under another America-brokered deal with Gen. Pervez Musharraf in October last. But, in the meantime, she completed what her father had begun in 1973: to transform a radical party with a supposed left-of-centre program -- inferred from its rhetoric about roti-kapra-aur-makan -- into an America-loving rightwing party that believed in enlightened moderation, pragmatism and realpolitik. Who can accuse PPP of being a left-leaning party now?
The UK and US quickly readopted her as a reinforcement for Gen. Musharraf in his war effort against Islamic extremism represented by al-Qaeda, Taliban and assorted Islamic militants. How will PPP behave if it wins in the February 18 elections? Despite Benazir's reiteration of roti-kapra-aur-makan slogan since her second arrival from exile, who expected any nationalisation of industries or land reforms or institution of social security (a reform consistent with capitalism) from the fourth PPP government? Washington and Musharraf needed PPP only to promote their agenda.
Why forget that no one is born with charisma? It is acquired when a leader presents a program that immediately clicks with his target audience at a given time. Take Quaid-i-Azam. This ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity was a failed politician in India, and by the early years of 1930s he had decided to settle down in UK and practice law. Then, he was persuaded to return.
He took up the cause of the Muslim community in 1937 in earnest when Congress had formed governments in more than half of the Indian provinces and Muslims and their landlord leaders were apprehensive about their future under the Congress. He verbalised what the Muslim Leaguers wanted to hear, and instantly clicked. The rest is history.
Take Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. He was a second rank Awami League leader. That is, until the whole of East Pakistan became filled with anti-Ayub feelings, and he presented his six-point program. It worked like magic in East Pakistan.
In West Pakistan, Zulfy Bhutto was one of Ayub Khan's minister of not much consequence. The 1965 war and Altaf Gauhar's propaganda extravaganza burnished his image as a militant nationalist, with his thousand years war with India rhetoric. Soon he exploited the Tashkent Crisis and cashed in on anti-Ayub feelings: he formed PPP in 1967 on the roti-kapra-aur-makan slogan, and within three years PPP won big in West Pakistan (1970). But by 1977 he had become controversial in cities and invited an agitation of rare intensity against his party. The army could safely overthrow (and hang) him, despite his fairly wide acceptability in villages, largely because of his defiance of America on the nuclear program and his foreign policy.
Even so, the Bhutto legend has lived for 30 years of struggle after him. Can it now be transmitted to Asif Zardari and later to Bilawal, like any family heirloom? The modern and moderate Islam of Musharraf, laced with Benazir's pragmatism and realpolitik, is thin gruel to sustain a 1960s-originated charisma. Time will show whether PPP now has what it takes to challenge the so well entrenched army-led coalition of social and economic elites. Does it want to?
Maybe PPP's new leadership, like Benazir herself, will happily be accepted as a junior partner in power with the army chief. If so, it will dissipate what remains of the Bhutto-Benazir charisma. Can it grow out of the narrow confines of a family?
Factually, 160 million people are searching for requisite leadership. True, Nawaz Sharif has emerged as a leader of men, though mainly in Punjab. Will he grow further, as he may if he continues to support the lawyers' demands for a democracy free from the military's stranglehold, with a charisma of his own? Who knows how deep his new liberalism is ? But the possibility is there -- more so if he can work with the new leadership thrown up by lawyers and judges.
But if a true regime change is required after so long to replace the military-led coalition of vested interests, a much larger coalition is needed. Unless PML-N closely cooperates with PPP, and the two together co-opt the leaders of the legal fraternity, it will be impossible to unhorse the military-backed politicians. That will cement the alliance of the middle class with the common people -- an irresistible force if it is aroused. But this will require concrete measures for better education, healthcare etc. Would this composite leadership have the imagination to unitedly work and take Pakistan by storm?
M.B. Naqvi is a leading Pakistani columnist.
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