I love dreaming. I have been doing this since my childhood. Even now when I am old, I day dream before going to bed and usually go to sleep in that state. Result is that probably I dream all night. Science says that we dream when our system faces lack of Oxygen. But who cares as long as one lives in a blissful dream stage.
But dreams are not always pleasant. Last night, I dreamt that my mamu Dr Mubeshir Hassan managed to get Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto out of prison to our place for a few hours. A few dozen people gathered to have a glimpse of Bhutto and many were raising slogans. I was sticking to him like glue but he was not giving me any importance. He talked with Fatima Bhutto about exchange of few emails. I asked for his email address repeatedly but he simply ignored the request as if he did not hear me. And then suddenly high police officials entered the house and announced that his time was up and they had to take Bhutto back to the prison. Bhutto was crying like a baby saying that he did not want to go back. I was holding on to his hands. The police used the machine that is used to make sugar cane juice to crush my hands but I kept holding his hands but he was whisked away.
I obviously had woken up and really felt depressed. I grew up listening to Bhutto’s speeches on the TV and tried not to miss any. There is nobody nowadays who could speak like him both in terms of style and content. Nawaz Sharif and Bilawal Bhutto cannot utter even a few sentences without looking at the script. No one has accused Bhutto or his family ever of corruption; it was not that corruption was not an issue then. Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s son, Gohar Ayub, was accused by the whole nation of corruption; many of Ayub’s ministers were known to be corrupt.
Bhutto could be guilty of many flaws but not accumulation of wealth. And his party is now led without exception by one rich person after another. It has an elite culture. Zardari desires to have a palace, not a house, in every major city of Pakistan; and only God knows who funds the construction. This is not all. The family has palaces all over the world, starting from Dubai to London to France. You cannot even think of waging an ideological battle with such a leadership.
The awam of Pakistan may be poor and illiterate but they see all these things. When they have an alternative which shows them even a ray of hope, they opt for it. This explains the musical chair between the PPP and the PML that we experienced in the nineties.
PPP is now finished in the Punjab. And a political force without a foothold in the Punjab becomes a regional one. The PPP leadership may make all kinds of claims about the results of 2018 elections and may allege rigging after the elections but it hardly now has a presence in three of Pakistan’s provinces which will be shown in the elections. It is not even getting candidates willing to contest. What a comedown from the eighties when people were doling out hundreds of thousands to get a PPP ticket despite General Zia remaining the president of Pakistan.
Something has really gone wrong with the PPP. And the irony is that many of the intelligent and particularly the old folks discern the malaise but cannot place their finger on the exact problem. The coterie surrounding Bilawal is elitist and English medium and advises him to operate the party as if it is an NGO working in the field of human rights. Nice speeches, good press releases and appropriate visits to shrines, temples and party workers’ houses. If this method of working had been so successful, the NGO would have been ruling Pakistan by now. The less said the better about the group surrounding Asif Zardari. When you have folks like Dr Asim and Sharjeel Memon sitting with him then you cannot expect a revolution.
Asif Zardari is described by many as intelligent but he is intellectually not bright. This is again a major come down from the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto. Believe it or not, Benazir many a times discussed articles written by me that she had highlighted. She once praised me for writing in PPP’s favor during General Zia’s times when nobody had asked me to. Who reads nowadays? They don’t even tweet themselves: just 140 or 280 characters. Zardari also has a knack for selecting the wrong individuals for the wrong jobs. One critical example in this respect is the selection of Qaim Ali Shah as Sindh’s CM. He has been the longest serving CM in the province’s history but has nothing to show for his performance.
There is frankly little that can be done now till election times. The PPP will get a beating. It will win in rural Sindh not on the basis of its performance but due to lack of alternatives and its hold on the waderas. The party should then do an appraisal and roll heads from top to bottom. Otherwise, it might as well bury it in Naudero and start celebrating its birth and death anniversaries. After all, it is good at cutting cakes and thrusting it into each others’ mouths in front of cameras
The Last Stop 