KARACHI/ISLAMABAD: PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari informed his father and Co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari on Saturday about his recent meetings with several top leaders of the Punjab chapter and hinted that he would soon visit the province to reorganise the party.

According to a PPP spokesman, Mr Bhutto Zardari informed the former president, who is in London, that the leaders from Punjab had complained that the authorities in the province were pushing the party cadres to the wall. He said the

Punjab PPP leaders had sought the party leadership’s guidance to force the provincial authorities to shun tactics of victimisation.

The co-chairman advised Mr Bhutto Zardari to go to Punjab and reorganise the party there immediately after Eidul Fitr.

The PPP chief also chaired a meeting of the party’s Karachi division at Bilawal House to discuss the law and order situation and devise a strategy for the coming local government elections in the city.

JULY 5 ANNIVERSARY: In his message on the eve of the 38th anniversary of July 5, 1977 when Gen Zia overthrew his grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government, the PPP chairman said the eggs laid by the dictator “have grown into full monsters”.

“The dictator’s eggs have grown into full monsters of terrorism, extremism, dictatorial mindset, intolerance and poverty. This is what tin-pot dictator Zia had inflicted on the country and Pakistan is continuously reeling under miseries.”

He said the late Z.A. Bhutto had collected pieces of a shattered Pakistan in 1971, given it a constitution, laid foundations of the country’s biggest industrial units and founded the nuclear programme to make its defence invincible. He introduced land reforms and several projects to put the country on sound tracks. However, his government was overthrown “in the darkness of night by a dictator to put Pakistan on a regressive path and uprooted democracy to deprive the people of their right to rule themselves”.

The co-chairman in a separate message said that ‘privatised jihad’ introduced in the country after the 1977 military coup continued to haunt the nation, posing the existential threat to the country. He said the need to clearly understand the disastrous consequences of exploiting religion for political ends had never been as great as it was today.

“July 5 is a black day in our national calendar as on this day a dictator overthrew an elected prime minister and later executed him, decimated the Constitution and began privatising jihad, exploiting religion and fanning sectarianism for his own personal political agenda,” he said.

He said democratic forces had largely restored the Constitution, but “the mindset of religious extremism, privatised jihad and sectarianism that the dictator’s polices spawned continues to haunt the nation”.

The PPP leader said people had consistently refused to be suppressed by brute force and always bounced back to seize their democratic rights from the jaws of dictators. “We must collectively fight to the finish the pernicious mindset of religious fanaticism and extremism.”

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2015

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