IT is the most unpopular man versus the most popular institution. Asif Ali Zardari has exploded and his party has set about ‘getting its act right’.

Advice has been pouring in for the PPP from all shades of ‘well-wishers’. The most dominating, by most accounts the most sensible, piece of advice in recent times has been whereby the PPP has been asked to get rid of or sideline Mr Zardari at the top.

Whereas that may have quite a lot of appeal for those who must see a resurrection of the PPP, for whatever noble reasons of diversity and choice, the party’s problems, that have to be seen together, and in separation from its bad government in Sindh, are not Zardari-specific. The PPP’s core has been neglected for far longer than Mr Zardari has been at its wheel.

The decline has been aided by the slippery methods adopted by the PPP co-chairman over the last seven and a half years. However, the issues behind the slide date back to the days when Benazir Bhutto was around and when she took the decisions she thought were necessary to keep her and her party relevant.

The decline has been aided by the slippery methods adopted by the PPP co-chairman over the last seven and a half years.

The 1997 election shook PPP badly. Of the two provinces that mattered the most, the party was routed in Punjab and was contained in Sindh. The election was allegedly rigged, but Ms Bhutto accepted the results in order to help promote democracy. It was felt that whatever issues the PPP had with the election process, it needed to reinvent its policies for relevance to Pakistanis.

Just as sometime after the 1997 polls court cases were opened against her and her spouse, a rethink was on within the PPP. Increasingly, it was gathered from the statement coming from the top leadership, that the PPP had (further) softened its stance on sharing power with the establishment.

Mr Asif Zardari was more commonly associated with elaborating this position, even when he got a few minutes with the reporters during his visits to the court for hearing of cases from the jail where he spent so many years and where he is thought to have fashioned his future reconciliation strategy. But surely, the ‘change’ couldn’t have come about without Ms Bhutto’s blessings.

Meanwhile, the party did precious little to reorganise and readjust itself to changing realities most starkly marked by the mass-scheme development model of the PML-N. Taking part in the 2002 general election when the PML-N was reduced to playing a survivor, PPP secured only 60-odd seats in the National Assembly, trailing behind the PML-Q hotchpotch by more than 30. Yet, this was followed by no visible effort by PPP stalwarts to recreate the party at a popular level.

Instead, the party and its leadership struggled between its avowed, long-standing public stance against military dictatorship and an urge to find a comfortable place for itself next to a supportive establishment. From this uncertainty emerged the patriots, a group of PPP members who supported Gen Musharraf. A decisive moment in its transformation came when Ms Bhutto agreed to work closely with the general, in her avowed effort to bring back democracy to the country.

It is debatable whether the PPP could have done better in the 2008 election had Ms Bhutto been around to lead it. According to one strong theory, the PPP’s showing in Punjab and to a great extent in the then NWFP owed in large part to the PML-N’s belated entry into the electoral race. Yet while the danger was there, no extraordinary effort followed the 2008 polls to find the right direction for the party.

Mr Zardari chose to reconcile with all and made no secret of his desire to co-exist with the establishment; he ditched Gen Musharraf in favour of seeking stronger alliance with politicians, most notably Mian Nawaz Sharif. It is on the basis of those old ties that Mr Zardari is now asking Mian Sahib to support him in his battles today.

The PPP leader would do well to understand that Mian Sahib’s links with the establishment are much longer and much more natural than the ties he has assiduously built since the days the faujis would send Ms Bhutto home midway through her terms in the prime minister’s house.

Mr Asif Ali Zardari, his son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and all others who are seeking a revival of the PPP must acknowledge that a mere change at the top will not rescue a party that is gasping for breath. There is a people’s charge sheet that has to be faced, and which has not been responded to since the days Ms Benazir Bhutto was there calling the shots. The party had to reorganise, finding a modern alternative to the shopkeeper’s logic that says a good road can conceal the systematic dismantling of social and cultural institutions that must be there promoting, or at least pretending to promote, diversity.

That challenge remains. After the chants against the establishment have died down, after the PPP stalwarts have spoken against the PTI and Imran Khan, the real revival task will require them to try and find an alternative to the PML-N steamroller, which, to derive from an expression from Mr Asif Zardari, has a more permanent presence than the one at an army general’s command. Imran Khan found his feet in Pakistani politics after he understood this basic fact: that he needed to oppose PML-N.

The jiyalas may celebrate the hoarse cry emanating from their leadership and long deprived of sustenance and depleted in numbers, they may be inclined to read it as a sign of life. But their leadership’s insistence on meekly defending their weak governance instead of finding ways to improve as yet inspire little hope of a turnaround anytime soon.

The line needs to be repeated and then again: the effort needs to go much deeper than replacing a Zardari with one Bhutto-Zardari. The people of Sindh may complain that they have suffered at the hands of the PPP over the last seven and a half years that it has been in power. The party has been neglected for much longer.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2015

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