A new kid on the block: Bilawal Bhutto
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Saeed Minhas
There has hardly been an election since 1970s when a real Bhutto was
not seen running through rallies, addressing gatherings and waving to
the crowds across the country to harvest support for the party
candidates but all this has changed in this election.
To understand this phenomenon, The Spokesman ventured into the party
ranks and interviewed multiple layers of leadership. Given below are
some of the thoughts transpired from these discussions held with Benazir
loyalists, Zardari lovers and political pundits.
Threats from Taliban, Zardari-centric party politics, new rules of the
election game and a half-hearted and half matured legal chairman of the
party are all being cited as the reasons for Peoples Party’s absence
from political campaigning. There are others who believe that it is but
usual to see the ruling party’s popularity going for a dip in Pakistan’s
chequered political history. Yet there are those who are blaming the
courts for throwing the party in the arena with their hands chained to
contest those who seem to have received special treatment throughout
PPP’s five-year rule from My Lords.
The fact remains that master Bilawal, despite hiring a surname, is yet
to transform into a Bhutto, whom people remember as challenging the
threats and posing questions to opponents while standing right in the
middle of the masses. The transformation from Zardari to Bhutto is
considered not a small one by many of the seasoned party stalwarts. A
new kid on the block is how many political opponents have started
calling Bilawal even before the upcoming elections. Party loyalists
refer to him as young master with all due reverence for his adopted
family name of Bhutto.
Many are drawing parallels with the defiance of his late mother Benazir
Bhutto, without understanding that Benazir launched herself in
Pakistani politics at a time when state funded fanatics had not started
hitting inwards. Ziaul Haq and Company’s strategic assets were busy in
foreign lands and Pakistanis had never heard of suicide bombers or IED
attacks. She learned the art of leadership on the job and defiance came
with the passage of time. There was a time when she agreed to all the
dictates of the Khakis before the 1988 swearing in and then came the
2007 parleys where she pulled uniformed junta into NRO negotiations to
ensure her own and Mian Nawaz Sharif’s return to the country. She defied
the same Khakis only after gaining a hard-earned maturity.
Bilawal, on the other hand, did not have to go through house arrests,
did not see a tyrant holding his grandfather and neither could he find
the time to mix and mingle with the Pakistanis. The result is that he
hardly knows anyone but those who were considered loyalists by his
mother during their self-exile days in Dubai or London. Shifting schools
from Islamabad to Karachi then on to Dubai and ending up in London was
how he completed his studies since his birth in 1988. He was only three
months when his mother weathered the heavy hands of Khakis and earned an
election victory.
Bilawal, for all practical purposes, revealed in many interviews with
all those who saw him raised in all those places, has grown up under the
shadows of his mother and, at the most, with his two sisters. His
chemistry with the father’s Zardari clan has never been in place till
his crowning as party chairman in December 2007 or even as Tuman (Chief)
of Zardari tribes in 2010. All those whom he had seen surrounding his
mother were systematically kept out of the gates by Zardari and
resultantly he could find himself doing nothing but posing for the
photo-ops where his father would be running the show. Proverbial uncles
and aunties looked at him with apathy and cared for him like a political
infant, revealed those insiders who have seen him for months in Garhi
Khuda Bukhsh or Karachi.
The result is that Bilawal is seen at a distance from the real party
and more close to the huge legacy he has been asked to carry on, without
much time and liberty to choose between his likes and dislikes. Having
his mother’s looks is not the only resemblance he brings to the
political table of Pakistan; he is already subjected to many rumours
ranging from his personal relations to his liking or otherwise for many
aunties and uncles surrounding him. He is already facing many of the
questions being raised in the current elections about the conduct and
politics of his father and much more reverence from the same critics for
his mother that it might take him another—depending on many
factors—election cycle to fathom the difference between his acquired
status and his bloodline. As one of the old family servants once
revealed about one of the last meetings of Benazir Bhutto with all her
three kids, she distributed the majority of her properties and
belongings amongst her two daughters and quite a little to Bilawal. But
as the servant quotes, she told Bilawal that “you will get much more
from your father than you and I can both imagine.” Bilawal has already
got so much more from father’s side that he might need lot more time to
understand what his mother had advised him before leaving for Pakistan
after signing the NRO in Dubai. For the time being social media might
remain the only domain for this little master of the political field, as
he does not even know what to do and who to trust.
He needs to come out of nappies and nannies to deliver
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