PPP’s solo flight

On the occasion of the 42nd death anniversary of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on April 4, 2021, Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari carried on the war of words that has broken out in the ranks of the opposition Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) since the Senate elections and the elevation of the PPP’s Yusuf Raza Gilani to the slot of Leader of the Opposition in the upper house. However, he made a departure from the ‘normal’ to-and-fro rhetoric that the two sides have been exchanging since. Bilawal said the PPP is prepared to fight alone if necessary against the ‘selected’ government even without the support of the rest of the opposition. Whether this declaration is merely retaliatory, defensiveness, bravado or illusion, only time will tell.

What is beyond doubt is that the PDM is on the rocks. To add salt to the wounds, the scheduled meeting on April 5, 2021 of the PPP’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) to discuss the controversial issue of en masse resignations from parliament demanded by the other parties of the PDM has been postponed on the plea that the Senate session has been called on that day and not all members of the CEC will be able to make it to the meeting. Since no new date for the CEC meeting has been announced, this possibility must now be considered to have been consigned to the backburner.

Meanwhile, five parties of the opposition, headed by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), have decided to sit as an independent opposition group in the Senate following their refusal to accept Gilani as the Leader of the Opposition on the grounds that he won the slot with the support of so-called independent Senators suspected of belonging to the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP), aligned with the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government. The new opposition group boasts a strength of 27 Senators, not a force therefore to be sneezed at.

Bilawal’s claim that only the PPP knows how to run movements in a democratic manner contrasts sharply with the party’s recent practice. He also claimed the PPP knows how to fight the government and the establishment from both inside and outside parliament. He said the puppet government had been seriously challenged in the PPP’s rallies. One may be forgiven for questioning the veracity of these statements in the light of the PPP’s recent role in disrupting the PDM from within, questioning whether there is space for fighting from within parliament without some level of collaboration with the establishment, and the impact (not visible so far) of its rallies without.

One aspect of the PPP’s strategy within, according to Bilawal, was the ouster of the PTI Punjab government through a no-confidence motion, which would have cascaded into the departure of the PTI federal government. However, the numbers in the Punjab Assembly do not add up for the opposition, so this claim seems more hope than reality. While reiterating the PPP’s willingness to forget everything that has happened of late in the interests of the bigger cause, Bilawal did not shrink from making the case for Gilani’s re-entry into parliament since he was dismissed by the Supreme Court mid-term.

To cut to the chase, the PDM has collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The simple fact is that the PPP has stakes (the Sindh government) in the present dispensation, while the other parties do not. This is the fundamental divide that has now burst forth and arguably ruptured the alliance beyond repair, the expressed hopes for an ill Maulana Fazlur Rehman to patch things up notwithstanding. The maturity and restraint required to keep disparate alliances with a history of mutual recriminations united through thick and thin has been conspicuous by its absence since PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari’s tirade against Nawaz Sharif in a PDM meeting. The past, inevitably, has raised its ugly head in the wake of that exchange to haunt the PDM’s ranks. Clearly, the anti-PTI government bond that brought these parties together in the first place has proved insufficient to negotiate the shoals and reefs in the path of the PDM’s campaign, leading to shipwreck.

The PTI’s expected delight at this turn of events has been surprisingly mild. One expected a tidal wave (tsunami) of exultation, only to witness an unexpectedly soft response. This could be considered the sobering effect of the PTI’s self-inflicted problems, which must be giving the party and its backers nightmares. Whether the sense of drift, punctuated by silly mistakes like announcing the opening of trade with India one day, only to reverse it the next, denotifying the South Punjab secretariat one day and rejecting the notification the next, or appointing a new finance minister one day and undermining him by inducting a banker and former finance minister to oversee the economy the next, can be salvaged remains open to question.

As for the PPP, its long journey betrays a sorry trajectory from the Left of the political spectrum to the Centre-Right, leaving the door open to defend its niche in the present power structure by some level of collaboration with the ubiquitous establishment.

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Copyright Business Recorder, 2021