Though the PPP’s top leadership is at pains to explain that there is no rift between the party’s two chairpersons — Asif Ali Zardari and his son, Bilawal Bhutto — certain statements from Zardari at the PPP’s Foundation Day last November more than alluded that Bilawal was to be pulled back a bit after he was pushed in to regenerate the dwindling status of what still remains to be one of the country’s largest political parties.

After being rather ubiquitous on social media sites and headlining the PPP’s most recent rallies, Bilawal went missing on the party’s all-important Foundation Day in Lahore.

The media was informed that he wasn’t able to make it to the event due to illness. But when faced by questions in this regard from some diehard PPP supporters (jiyalas), Zardari is reported to have told party members that he has advised Bilawal to ‘tread cautiously and have a temporary break from active politics’.

Bilawal has remained largely silent on the matter. In fact, in a Tweet he actually asked party cohorts to support Zardari. But the question is what made Zardari suddenly pull back Bilawal, who was launched with his blessing and approval to revive the party’s fortunes in a rapidly changing political scenario in Pakistan?

One PPP member and someone close to Bilawal suggested (through an email to me) that differences between father and son arose when Bilawal increasingly began to disagree with Zardari’s comprehension of the current political scene.

Those advising Bilawal believe that Zardari’s style of doing politics and running the party — i.e. through unabashed pragmatism — made more sense when the PPP was heading a volatile coalition government a year and a half ago, but not anymore.

The thinking in this context is that since the PPP-led coalition government was made up of unpredictable coalition partners (ANP and especially the MQM), and the fact that the regime was constantly being besieged by a hostile (and almost reactionary) electronic media (that was allegedly being instigated in this regard by some leading members of the ‘military-establishment’), Zardari’s pragmatic, stoic and Machiavellian style of politics actually helped his government to survive such antagonisms.

Couple these with his regime’s own glaring ineptitudes and incompetence in the fields of economics and overall governance, Zardari did rather well to cleverly and pragmatically manoeuvre the PPP-led government in completing its full five-year term.

But this did not stop the PPP from receiving a bashing in the 2013 election in which it could only manage to win big in Sindh. It was decimated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan and especially in the county’s largest province, the Punjab. What’s more, it also lost its electoral strongholds in southern Punjab.

Before Bilawal was launched into mainstream politics, there was widespread consensus within the party that he, being young, fresh and closer to the Bhutto legacy, was the PPP’s best bet to revive its electoral fortunes.

These had begun to erode after the tragic assassination of the popular Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and especially due to the way the party had fumbled across the coalition regime that it had managed to enact after the 2008 election (under Zardari).

But in immediate hindsight, one can now suggest that not much thinking went into devising the regenerative narrative that Bilawal was supposed to bring to the table as the saviour son of late Benazir Bhutto and the co-chairperson of the PPP.

Some party insiders, however, insist that Zardari always maintained that Bilawal, who lacked any prior experience in the rugged and impulsive ways of populist politics in Pakistan, required at least four to five years to get the hang of things.

Unlike his grandfather, PPP founder and former prime minister, Z.A. Bhutto, and his mother, Benazir Bhutto (twice PM of Pakistan in the 1990s), Bilawal did not come to the party on the back of vigorous political activism and jail sentences dished out by military dictators. Even his father, the pragmatic Asif Ali Zardari, has a history of being dragged into courts and lockups.

But the recent political rise of men like PTI’s Imran Khan — whose struggle to the top is not quite punctuated by long jail-terms, midnight arrests or episodes of torture — suggests that such ‘badges of courage’ do not resonate anymore with the new generation of voters and political activists.

Another problem that Bilawal faced was his almost complete lack of fluency in what one can call the populist, rhetorical Urdu that is usually used to stir up crowds during political rallies in Pakistan.

But the PPP member in his email to me shared an interesting bit of info. He wrote that to the surprise of his father and party elders, Bilawal learned the many nuances of such a language rather quickly.

Though one is not sure whether Bilawal too is as much of an avid reader of books and a student of history as his grandfather and mother were, (according to the PPP insider) Bilawal closely studied recordings of the many speeches made by Z.A. Bhutto and Benazir and became quite apt in convincingly mimicking the style of both the leaders.

This might have pleased his father, but it was the evolving content of Bilawal’s speeches and statements that left Zardari finally pulling the plug.

The truth is, Bilawal, now conscious of his role as the saviour of the once mighty PPP and of the party’s legacy of being a left-leaning populist-nationalist outfit in a political realm rapidly being encroached upon by right-wing politics of all shapes and sizes, began to bite off more than he could chew.

Beginning well by anticipating the changing narrative and sentiments of the Pakistani polity and of the military-establishment (regarding extremism), he unabashedly lashed out against extremist outfits. But he coupled this by also wagging a finger at India, and then attempted to embarrass moderate centre-right parties such as PTI and the ruling PMLN for being apologists of the extremists.

Gaining instant media coverage and confidence, Bilawal then seems to have broken away from the orbit outlined for him by his father when, in his newly-honed swagger and swing, he went after PPP’s former coalition partner, the MQM. Not only that, but he is also said to have been extremely critical of the PPP’s current government in Sindh and alluded to getting a ‘human audit’ done of those at the helm of the provincial government.

Zardari’s pragmatism cannot allow this. To him having an understanding (no matter how awkward) with urban Sindh’s strongest political party (the MQM) is vital if (1) the PPP is to hold its numbers in Sindh; (2) ward-off the perceived electoral threat now being posed here by PTI; and (3) continue to neutralise the Sindhi nationalist parties.

There is a possibility that PPP elders directly related to the party’s government in Sindh too might have had a lot of say in asking Zardari to zip Bilawal up.

Nevertheless, contrary to the wishes of those who are looking at Bilawal to fight back, the truth is, despite his animated arrival, he is also conscious of the fact that on his own (or without the party’s machinery controlled by his father), he is just a loud vessel; a busy Twitter handle, at best.

Thus, all indications in this regard suggest that (albeit grudgingly) Bilawal has decided to heed his father’s advice. He will now be concentrating more in making his entry into the mainstream leadership of the party by contesting as a PPP candidate in the next general election and not out-rightly dismiss the element of political pragmatism.

According to the Zardari doctrine, governance requires pragmatism, whereas populism should only matter in times of an election.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, December 14th, 2014