Our electoral cupboard is bursting with political outfits. Some of them are endangered or moribund while a few have reinvented themselves quite ingeniously. Still others are dull and devoid of ideological fervour, running out of steam but clinging on to the belief that the people need them more than ever. The Herald retraces the political journey of eight such groupings, including two that are boycotting the February 18 election.

Awami National Party

The Awami National Party (ANP) of today is a successor to the National Awami Party (NAP), the first major opposition party formed after Independence. Formed in 1956, the NAP aimed at rallying nationalist and democratic forces on a national platform. Democracy, nationalism and secularism were the main pillars of its programme. However, martial law was imposed only years after the party was formed and came as a first setback to the new party’s political prospects. Its leaders were dealt with an iron hand by General Ayub Khan’s military regime.

When in 1970 political parties were revived and general elections announced, the NAP failed to hold itself together. The bigger faction of the party led by Maulana Abdul Hameed Khan Bhashani, who came from the then East Pakistan, boycotted the 1970 elections but the other faction led by Khan Abdul Wali Khan took part in the elections. The latter was able to win a sizeable number of seats in the provincial assemblies of the Frontier province and Balochistan and formed the provincial governments there with help from Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam.

However, after the assassination of Hayat Mohammad Khan Sherpao in Charsadda, the then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto dissolved the provincial government in the Frontier, banned the NAP and put its entire leadership behind bars. He also launched a military operation in Balochistan, dissolving the provincial government there.

With Wali Khan in jail, Sardar Sher Baz Mazari regrouped the NAP under a new name, the National Democratic Party, which in 1980 was folded when the ANP was formed.

The party stumbled along in the 1980s and 1990s, both in the government and the opposition, mostly as an ally of Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz. But with an aging Wali Khan, who could never come to terms with his defeat in 1988 in his home constituency, the party leadership was transferred to his wife Nasim Wali Khan and those who were loyal to her. The biggest shock to hit the party during those years came when Ajmal Khattak, one of the most respected Pakhtun nationalist leaders after Wali Khan, left the party in late 1990s.

By then the split in Wali Khan’s family had also become obvious, eventually resulting in his son Asfandyar Wali Khan’s elevation as the head of the party. He soon sidelined all those loyal to his stepmother, alienating in the process some of the most senior leaders and office-bearers of the party. Under the shadows of this struggle for supremacy, the ANP went into the 2001 elections and experienced its worst ever electoral defeat. Not only had the party been mauled in the elections for the provincial assembly, it also did extremely badly in the National Assembly elections: not even a single member of the ANP represented the party there.

After the elections, Asfandyar Wali continued revamping the party structure and fine-tuning the party policy. The socialist party that once opposed the American-funded ‘jihad’ against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan now stands for a foreign policy that does not oppose American intervention in other countries, especially Afghanistan. Despite pressure from its allies in the All Pakistan Democratic Movement, the ANP has not boycotted the polls, deriving succour from the fact that an earlier decision by its predecessor party not to stay away from polls was eventually vindicated by the subsequent events.— Mohammad Riaz
 

Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam – Fazl

It is difficult to pigeonhole Pakistani political parties into narrow ideological compartments. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam – Fazl is a case in point. It makes sense to ask why it is so because the party has Islam as part of its name and there can be no bigger ideology than the religion itself. But the fact that some of the party’s leaders have recently formed a new faction called Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam – Nazriati means that dissidents no longer feel that the JUIF led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman no longer espouses their ideology.

As the party’s 2002 election campaign reveals, this ideology stood on three major planks: anti-Americanism, support for the Taliban fighting Western forces in Afghanistan and a promise to enforce Sharia law after coming into power. Six years later, however, the party’s leadership – namely Rehman – is bending over backwards to tell the rest of the world that the JUIF members are not religious hardliners, they don’t hate the West as many Islamic radical fundamentalists do, let alone fight wars with the US and Europe, and that they believe in electoral democracy.

Dubbing himself a moderate, Rehman is insisting that he is a mainstream politician who has nothing to do with the Islamic extremists fighting wars of attrition in Pakistan’s border areas. His party is no longer calling for American blood as it did in 2002 and his colleagues and he no longer call the Taliban “our boys”. Instead, the JUIF is drumming up support by invoking the development works it has undertaken or the jobs it has provided during its five years in power in the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan. The party perhaps knows that the tasks of opposing the West, waging ‘jihad’ and implementing Sharia law has been taken up by people it has no control over. And people will be unwilling to suspend disbelief if it still claims to champion these causes.

This, however, is a realisation that the party came to terms with after quite some time. Back in 1995, for instance, when a Kashmiri militant group kidnapped some Westerners, Rehman offered his services to have the hostages released only to find out that the captors paid him no heed. A few years later, he tried – and failed – to persuade the Afghan Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden to the Americans or send him over to another country. In fact, as late as last summer he was still suffering from the illusion that he could convince the people running the Lal Masjid in Islamabad to surrender to the government. The way they spurned his ‘help’ must have made him realise things have changed: he no longer enjoys the unconditional support of Deobandi clerics and commoners. They do not see him as the only political/religious authority to pay obeisance to.

Historically speaking, however, this is not the first time that he is being challenged by what he considers as the rank and file of his political base. The emergence of militant anti-Shia outfits, such as the Sipah-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, was the first sign that his hold was weakening. New centres of power were clearly emerging in his fiefdom i.e. Deobandi Islam in Pakistan.

That was, however, not the only time that his leadership was challenged. The death of his father, Maulana Mufti Mahmood, in 1980 and Rehman’s elevation to the chairmanship of his father’s party had in fact led to the emergence of what we now call the JUIF. The other, and smaller, faction was called the JUIS after Maulana Samiul Haq who, being much senior in age and political experience to the then 27-year-old Rehman, did not submit to the latter’s leadership.

In later years – mainly in the 1990s – Rehman’s politics was so tinged by pragmatism that he was seen as an exception among the political mullahs of Pakistan. Hence, in a way, the American invasion of Afghanistan came in quite handy for him to reclaim his lost religious moorings. The resulting alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami and other religious parties – the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) – proved this beyond doubt when it polled almost 10 per cent of the total votes in 2002, more than any religious party has ever polled in the country.

For many observers, however, the MMA was an exception in the JUIF’s history. The party is generally seen to be more inclined towards liberal, left-of-the-centre parties as allies. But the record shows it has a rather chequered history in alliance-making. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, JUIF’s mother party, was formed in 1919 with an anti-British mandate and was a close ally of the Indian National Congress. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam was originally formed as a splinter group in 1940 by those Deobandi groups that were supporting the demand for Pakistan. When the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam was revived by Mufti Mahmood it stood against General Ayub Khan with all the other mainstream parties in the 1960s. In 1971, it formed provincial governments in the Frontier and Balochistan in coalition with the nationalist National Awami Party though in 1977 it sided with right wing and religious parties to launch an agitation against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. And then for much of the 1990s, the party allied with Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party contrary to the general sentiment among religious leaders.

Indeed, the party is certain to keep swinging from ideology to pragmatism and back. Its corresponding success or failure, however, will be determined by how much these swings are in tune with the changing times in the country. — Muhammad Badar Alam
 

Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz

Nawaz Sharif’s political career took off from under General Ziaul Haq’s crashed plane. About a decade later, another plane – carrying a different chief of army staff – came quite close to putting an end to it. But before General (retd) Pervez Musharraf took over and threw Sharif into the purgatory of exile, persecution and political decimation, the latter had successfully planted himself at the head of a political juggernaut – oiled by his personal wealth and pushed by the powers-that-be – which steamrolled over friends and foes with equal ferocity.

The Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PMLN) first bared its claws days after Zia’s death in August 1988 when Sharif hoisted Fida Mohammad Khan, at the expense of Mohammad Khan Junejo, to head the then Pakistan Muslim League (PML). The party’s genesis and its subsequent split is one reminder of military dictators’ ability to make and break political processes and organisations. “The Pakistan Muslim League, born of the National Assembly of 1985 and headed by Mohammad Khan Junejo, was the civilian face of the Zia regime. When Zia, miffed by Junejo’s growing independence, axed the National Assembly and sent the Junejo premiership packing, the Muslim League split into two factions, the one in the wilderness still headed by Junejo and the one which closed ranks behind General Zia under the command of his most loyal protégé, Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif,” is how Ayaz Amir sees the development in a November 2000 column in the daily Dawn. “The meeting in which this split was sealed was held at the Islamabad Hotel. No speeches were made, no discussions held. Instead, the opposing factions hurled abuses and spoons at each other,” Amir adds.

After Junejo, Fida Mohammad Khan was the next casualty of Sharif’s relentless march to the top. By the time general elections were held in late 1988, Sharif was the undisputed leader of the League.

Until 1992, when the first challengers to his undiluted hold on the party started appearing, the League was a party, known and recognised by its most prominent face on the national political scene. And after these challengers started creating splinter groups, the bulk of what remained gathered behind the face that had come to symbolise it the most. The PMLN took over in 1993, when its generic predecessor had started yielding raucous progeny in the shape of the Junejo League, the Chattha League, the Wattoo League and so on. The first major jolt that the PMLN ever suffered, however, came in the form of electoral defeat in 1993, made possible by these dissidents.

Nevertheless, when the party made its comeback in 1997, it more than made up for its loss. Bolstered by its so-called heavy mandate, it reigned so supreme that it deigned to brook not even the semblance of resistance. Riding roughshod over the opposition (through its accountability bureau) and the superior judiciary (with a physical assault), the PMLN cared little about people’s economic independence when it froze ordinary citizens’ foreign currency accounts. Until it met its nemesis — the rest, of course, is history.

PMLN was at its weakest in the 2002 polls when it managed to win only a handful of National Assembly seats. Its top leadership was sent into exile after the 1999 military coup and its leaders and members within the country, for the first time, faced the wrath of the state as the parties of perpetual opposition generally do. Many of its staunchest supporters and greatest beneficiaries took little time to wilt under official pressure and switch sides.

However, eight years later, with both Sharif and his younger brother Shahbaz back in the country and firmly placed on the party saddle, many in the chattering classes are willing to suspend their suspicions. Reading more into the defiance that the PMLN has so far shown to Musharraf, observers and analysts are willing to treat it like an anti-establishment party à la the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

“When (Zulfikar Ali) Bhutto went to the gallows, the PPP’s cause looked hopeless. But it was not many years later when his daughter gathered the rewards of his courage. When this military chapter comes to a close, as in the nature of things sooner or later it must, it requires no clairvoyant to see as to who will still be riding the tide of public approval,” writes Amir. By deciding to fight the 2008 elections on a PMLN ticket he perhaps gives a clear signal that the ride has already started. However, with the tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the tide in favour of the PMLN has been overtaken by the wave of sympathy towards the PPP.

These tides and waves, however, seldom end up cleansing the body-politic or the players within. Amir, despite following Sharif’s political lead, has already pronounced a profound warning against taking his leader’s comeback as an act of extreme heroic proportions culminating in the final victory of the people against their oppressors. “That it should be Pakistan’s destiny to remain in thrall to flawed and limited heroes is of course a different matter.”

Some of Sharif’s flaws have, indeed, been glaringly obvious of late. He oscillated frequently between boycotting or not boycotting the coming elections, sending confusing signals to his voters and sowing discomfort, if not estrangement, in the hearts of his political allies of past, present and future. He also seems unclear about what he should demand before the elections and what he can get. From seeking a neutral caretaker setup and an independent election commission, he has now moved to call for a national government before the elections. Surely, the situation demands greater clarity. — M.B.A.
 

Pakistan Muslim League – Functional

The Pakistan Muslim League – Functional (PMLF) is one of the several factions of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML). Formed in 1992, after the disintegration of the PML – Junejo, the party is centred around Pir Mardan Shah II, popularly known as Pir Pagaro, who is the spiritual leader of the Hur community in Pakistan. Pagaro studied at Oxford and only returned from England in the early 1950s at the request of Pakistan’s first premier, Liaquat Ali Khan. Pagaro was soon introduced to the rough and tumble of national politics after joining the PML rank and file.

Over the years, Pagaro has built a special relationship with the military, a handy asset for a political leader in Pakistan. As the leader of the Hurs, he once supplied thousands of volunteers to the military in the 1965 and 1971 wars against India. Unfortunately, like many other political entities, Pagaro’s party has not been able to expand much: its presence is restricted to rural Sindh and southern Punjab.

In 2004, the PMLF became part of one unified PML under a merger plan. However, Pagaro soon quit the unified PML over the appointment of its office-bearers and revived his own party faction. In 2006, Pagaro’s son Sadruddin Shah Rashdi alias Younus Sain was elected the party’s president in Sindh during a PMLF convention, while Syed Ahmed Mahmood Shah was elected the party’s president in the Punjab. Since its creation the party has rarely won a ministerial portfolio without political manoeuvring. In the 2002 election, though the PMLF bagged five National Assembly seats and 16 Sindh Assembly seats, which is still insufficient for a decent ministerial portfolio, it still managed to secure a place in the federal cabinet, while two of its legislators were made members of the Sindh cabinet.
 

Jamaat-e-Islami

The party of pan-Islamism, preferably through an Islamic revolution, has fared quite poorly after it decided to dabble in electoral politics of Pakistan in 1950s. It is a sad comment on the 60-year history of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) that it is finding itself almost where it had started from. The question facing the JI is whether or not electoral polictics can change anything and what could be the alternative. This question faced the JI when it first decided to contest elections and the battle between the ballot and the bullet – between election and revolution – was won by a very thin majority in favour of the former.

Once this decision was made, the JI has seen itself trying contradictory ways to win over people to its cause: in 1960s it supported a woman – Fatima Jinnah – as a democratic alternative to General Ayub Khan’s military regime only to reverse that policy in 1990s, opposing Benazir Bhutto for being a woman, among other things. Even more fundamentally, the JI opposed Ayub’s dictatorship but supported General Ziaul Haq when he overthrew Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s elected government. Then again it was initially ambivalent towards General (retd) Pervez Musharraf for overthrowing Nawaz Sharif before openly opposing and somewhere in the middle endorsing his coup by giving him much-needed parliamentary votes to get constitutional indemnity.

Besides these conflicting policy stances, the JI has used a number of tactics to have its way: from being a part of a right-centre-left alliance against Ayub to a centre-right alliance against both Zulfikar and Benazir Bhutto to a right-wing alliance against everybody outside it and now a left-centre-right alliance against Musharraf. Apart from these alliances, it has fought elections from an umbrella group of Islamic-minded candidates – called the Pakistan Islamic Front – in 1993 and made a solo attempt in 1997 and joined hands with all the major religious parties in the country in 2002.

In terms of electoral success their last foray into elections was the most successful. Many JI leaders – including its chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed and his daughter – made it to the National Assembly, some others became senators and about a dozen ended up being ministers in the Frontier’s provincial government.

But trying to judge the JI political power through its electoral achievement or lack thereof can be misleading. It spearheaded the anti-Ahmadi movement in 1953, it was instrumental in the Islamisation policies during Zia’s regime and two of its parliamentarians tabled a Shariat Bill which still remains unapproved by the Senate. JI was also a major influence on Sharif’s policies when the two were together in the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad in 1988 and 1990 polls.

Even in 2008, the JI was all set to achieve much more than it actually should, had Sharif stayed out of the polls — something he initially endorsed and campaigned for under the banner of the All Pakistan Democratic Movement (APDM). Shorn of Sharif’s presence, APDM and its election boycott appears hardly a big deal. But the JI can never be counted out. Who knows what new policy or tactic they may adopt or what secret backing they may secure to come back — yet again. — M.B.A.
 

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf

There is no doubt that cricket in Pakistan has always had politics of its own, involving the authorities that run the game and the players that play it and sometimes even dragging in the government, the media and the fans at large. One man who mastered this politics earned for himself the undisputed title of the ‘King’ of Pakistani cricket can be forgiven for taking his victories – on as well as off the field – seriously. By pulling off another extremely uphill task quite successfully – the building and running of Pakistan’s first private sector, state-of-the-art cancer hospital – he added another feather to his already much-adorned cap. By the middle of the 1990s, Imran Khan’s name had become a byword for unqualified success.

That was, of course, before he had decided to enter the next domain of public life — politics. In a country lacking role models, especially in politics, his entry into the field should have been a logical next step in his highly successful career as a sportsperson and social activist. But, somehow, that was not to be.

A year after founding Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf in 1996, he led it into general election in 1997 as the ‘third force’ in the country’s politics. The result was a disaster, though. The party could not win even a single seat in any of the four provincial assemblies as well as the National Assembly. Khan later put down the defeat to inexperience. Some others blame it on his marriage with Jemima — a rich British woman with Jewish ancestry.

After the 1999 military takeover, both the largest parties – Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League – came under scathing official criticism for creating and developing a culture of revenge, corruption and individual aggrandisement of their leaders. Tehreek-e-Insaf’s agenda of justice for all and across-the-board accountability found an echo in the corridors of power and Khan was next seen canvassing for General (retd) Pervez Musharraf for the presidential referendum in 2002.

The tide turned against Khan after that and quite quickly. In the 2002 general election, he accused secret agencies of pulling the strings against his party and its candidates — leaving him with only one seat in the National Assembly and another in the Frontier’s provincial assembly. Since then he has been opposing the Musharraf regime with as much political backing as he could muster and, of course, with a lot of attention from the local and international media.

The next phase in Khan’s politics came with the crisis that erupted after the sacking of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry in March 2007. Since then Khan has been running from pillar to post to create political waves as the main slogan of the lawyers’ movement – independence of judiciary – resonates with the thrust of his party’s agenda. In the process, he also took on Altaf Hussain’s Muttahida Qaumi Movement with an attempt to launch criminal proceedings against them in the UK.

After the imposition of emergency on November 3, 2007, Khan created yet another controversy when images showing him being manhandled by the student supporters of Jamaat-e-Islami, a party he seemed to have found a kindred soul in of late, were aired on television.

Since the announcement of the 2008 election, Khan has added another slogan to his party’s agenda – independence and neutrality of the Election Commission – and has decided to sit out the polling. He says that if voter turnout remains below 25 per cent, he will deem his campaign for poll boycott successful. For someone who always went for the biggest prize in sport, this is certainly a huge descent. — M.B.A.
 

Muttahida Qaumi Movement

For the past 16 years, Altaf Hussain has effectively steered his Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) while living in self-imposed exile in Britain. Hussain’s navigational success has remained constant all these years — unlike Benazir Bhutto’s and Nawaz Sharif’s, whose absence led to factionalism within their parties. In fact, Hussain has not only kept his party intact but has also strengthened its position, quite a feat for a political leader residing outside the country.

The grouping that emerged in the MQM in the form of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement – Haqiqi in 1992 did not particularly unsettle the party, lower its popularity ratings or even hurt its vote bank. As the MQM prepares to test the electoral waters again, it is confident in the knowledge that it is one of those rare parties, in the present circumstances, which hopes to consolidate and not just retain its position. The party is likely to win three or four more National Assembly seats from the province of Sindh than it had secured in 2002. This is a sign that it is broadening its base in interior Sindh. At the same time, the MQM is making its presence felt in some constituencies in the Punjab by fielding its candidates there as well.

Since the year 2000, the MQM has adopted a more friendly posture towards the establishment and has reaped rewards galore, according to political analysts. The party seems to have graduated from its previous confrontationist role as a thorn in the flesh of successive governments from 1988 to 1999. In November 2007, the MQM completed a full five-year stint in power as a key ally of the ruling party. The party relished the position of provincial governorship, which its nominee Dr Ishratul Ebad held with rare interest.

Apart from Hussain, the party has not encouraged the building of a personality cult around any other leader. Only a few faces have been retained in the parliament since the party’s first contested legislative elections in 1988. The MQM, as a rule, always has a pool of available candidates for the elections — a reminder to the old guard that they need the party more for their own political survival. Despite all these organisational wonders, it appears that the MQM has not successfully shed its past image of confrontationist politics. Like volcanic fury, they can erupt if the carnage of May 12 is anything to go by. But the party now seems willing to accept that these tendencies are perhaps impeding its proposed spread into other parts of the country. M.A.
 

Pakistan Muslim League – Quaid-e-Azam

Since long, the people of this country have known no such thing as a Pakistan Muslim League (PML) without any suffix attached. The League’s seemingly ever-multiplying factions have used up most letters of the alphabet by way of these suffixes. This is, in fact, the only way of distinguishing one faction from the other.

After the 2002 general elections, the leaders of these factions found it too confusing to keep using all those denominators of their distinctiveness. So they merged and fused and brought some outsiders in to create what for the first time after 1988 is registered in the official annals as the PML. Most people will still doubt if a party with such an unmixed name exists. They are fond of referring to it with various other sobriquets: the King’s Party, the Quisling League, the Queue League or the Musharraf League, just to name a few of the relatively decent titles the party has acquired during its five years in power.

The party can rightfully take the credit for running the only government which has completed its constitutional term in office during the last three decades. But two factors have been responsible for this feat: one, the party’s backers in the establishment have placed their faith in its ability to deliver, and two, they have helped it through various crises it faced during its stint in power.

The first ever indication of this power being at work emerged when immediately after the 1999 coup some individuals annoyed with Nawaz Sharif were allowed to coalesce and form a loose grouping called the PML – Like-Minded. This included luminaries such as Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, Syed Fakhar Imam and his illustrious wife Syeda Abida Hussain, and was headed by Mian Azhar, who enjoyed the dubious distinction of being one of the first Lahoris to ditch the most politically eminent son of their hometown. They were soon swarmed by many more deserters from the Sharif camp: the most well-known among them being Tariq Aziz, Akhtar Rasool and Mian Munir, who had earned notoriety for being in the lead of goons in the Supreme Court attack in 1998. As the elections approached in 2002, they had solidified into PML – Quaid-e-Azam, with the Chaudhrys of Gujrat joining their top ranks, touting their long history of sulking under the Sharifs’ dominance.

Until after the elections, some older whiners – such as General Ziaul Haq’s son Ijazul Haq, Hamid Nasir Chattha and Manzoor Wattoo – were still left out of this coming together of men with thwarted ambitions and indefinite appetite for perks and power. Some others, in the meanwhile, had taken the same route of desertion, though they came from another source. These were legislators belonging to the National Alliance consisting mainly of Farooq Leghari’s Millat Party and the so-called Patriots. After their coalition government got going with Pervez Musharaf’s blessings and his security advisor Tariq Aziz’s active involvement, it was but natural for everyone around to feel the need for ‘unity’, hence leading to the birth of the ‘Pakistan Muslim League’. Nursed by the military, this rather strange looking child of the establishment is now pitching for another attempt at winning the February 2008 elections and forming the next government.

The question of whether it will be able to hold itself together under the debilitating leadership of the Chaudhrys of Gujrat after it comes into power again or made to sit in the opposition largely depends on whether it keeps getting support from the establishment. So far it has done well with the official patronage to see it through various political challenges. With the blessings of its powerful benefactors, it has changed many a political course, ditching two prime ministers and one president of the party in the process. If the recent past is anything to go by, whoever blinks first is bound to be thrown out of the power kilter. Odds seem to be arraigned ominously against the current wielders of highest levers of power within this undiluted source of support for all things closer to the heart of the military powers-that-be. — M.B.A.
 

Pakistan Peoples Party

If the strongest democracy in the world believes in government of the people, by the people and for the people, Pakistan’s biggest political party swears by a creed slightly different: the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) is a party of the people and for the people but it is run by the Bhuttos. The tragic assassination of the party’s chairperson, Benazir Bhutto, and the subsequent succession of her husband and son to the top party job have only highlighted this fact even more prominently.

For the PPP, contesting the seventh parliamentary election in its forty-first year of existence, Benazir Bhutto’s murder was certainly as severe a blow as the hanging of her father and founding chairperson of the party, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1979. But unlike the turmoil the party experienced in the aftermath of his death, it has handled its second succession without any outward signs of trouble. This was made possible by Benzair Bhutto’s will that she prepared two days before flying back to Pakistan in October 2007. It names her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as her political successor. In a much-needed show of unity, the party’s executive committee endorsed the decision as well as Zardari’s move to pass on the mantle to his 19-year-old son, rechristened Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, in a bid to lay claim to the political legacy of his grandfather and mother. Though this provoked some to say the party was treated like a family heirloom, the PPP seems to have no problem with it, at least until the elections are held. Some real challenges will emerge after the elections, however, especially of factionalism and splintering which have haunted the party since its early days. A close confidant of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Maulana Kausar Niazi, was the first to quit the PPP and form his own faction called Progressive People’s Party. After Nusrat Bhutto became the PPP’s chairperson – in the wake of her husband Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging — and her daughter Benazir Bhutto the co-chairperson, another senior party leader Hanif Ramay made his Musawat Party. In 1986, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi quit the PPP and formed the National Peoples Party (NPP) which attracted political giants such as Ghulam Mustafa Khar, Ramay, S.M. Zafar, Hamid Raza Gilani, Malik Hamid Sarfraz, Ghous Bux Raisani. Khar and Ramay returned to the PPP after 1988.

But the most significant challenger to the party’s unity came from within the Bhutto family. In mid-1990s, Murtaza Bhutto, the estranged brother of Benazir Bhutto, returned from exile and formed his own faction of the PPP, adding Shaheed Bhutto as a suffix. He was killed in a police encounter in Karachi in 1996 during his sister’s second tenure as prime minister. Ghinwa Bhutto, his wife, now heads that faction.

Just before the 2002 general election, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, the party’s president in the Frontier province, formed the PPP – Sherpao group. In another shocking development, senior party leaders Faisal Saleh Hayat and Rao Sikandar Iqbal along with a host of legislators from the party split and founded the PPP – Patriots to join the government.

Yet the party survived. The cornerstone of Benazir Bhutto’s success as the PPP chairperson was to see the party through all this without losing its significance in the national polity. In the process, she transformed the party both ideologically and structurally. When she died late last year, the PPP she left behind was completely different from the party her father had bequeathed to her. Her critics within the party and outside say she struck too many compromises vis-à-vis the party’s ideology and the principles her father espoused, which is why the PPP she headed could no longer claim the overwhelming popular support it enjoyed under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In the 1997 general election, the last in Benazir Bhutto’s presence in the country, the party’s share of votes fell to an all-time low of 21.8 per cent. Though it bounced back to the status of being the biggest party in terms of the total number of votes it polled in 2002, the PPP could not win even a single National Assembly seat from the Frontier province and Balochistan — a major jolt to its claim of being popular in all the federating units.

This was, however, rectified when she returned from almost a decade-long stay abroad on October 18, 2007 to a historic welcome. The fact that those who died in bomb attacks on her welcome caravan that day came from all over the country meant that her party was reclaiming the lost political space.

But her move to enter into negotiations with the regime headed by the then General Pervez Musharraf was not popular even among her diehard supporters. It was pressure from the rank and file as well as the change in political situation that she had hardened her stance towards the Musharraf government by the time she took to campaigning for the elections. More than anything else, her death redeemed her style of politics — nothing would deter her from being where the action is.

Her demise is sure to win her party as many votes as the tears shed across the country in mourning her assassination. The number must be big enough to lead the PPP to winning polls for the fifth time, a record by any standards in Pakistan.
— M. A.