Project Bilawal launch Dr Taimur Rahman Project Bilawal launch/PPP revival is now fully underway. The PPP has held an impressive rally demonstrating its continuing support in Sindh. Detractors will criticise that this is only in Sindh where the provincial government belongs to the PPP, or that the audience did not seem as charged as previous PPP rallies or as charged as in the PTI’s dharnas (sit-ins), or that Bilawal’s Urdu language skills leave much to be desired, so on and so forth. Nonetheless, detractors cannot take away the simple fact that the rally has shown that the PPP continues to remain a key player in the political landscape of Pakistan. As a political scientist, I tend not to put too much currency into how people dress, their degree of manliness, their command over a language and so on. Such things certainly have an impact on whether a political leader is able to communicate their message clearly (in this regard Bilawal is improving but nonetheless struggling with Urdu). In my view, people are much more flexible in these matters than our commentators are ready to accept. After all, we are living in a country that was founded by a man who used to speak to the public in English and that too at a time when English was even less understood than today. I want to turn my attention, instead, to the political programme that the young new driving force of the PPP has put to the Pakistani public. This is far more relevant in so far as it tells us about the future direction of the PPP under Bilawal’s leadership. First off, I have noticed two polar opposite reactions on social media. On the one hand, we have those who are deriding Bilawal with the choicest abuses. They are mostly supporters of right wing parties. The universal characteristic amongst them seems to be that they have no desire to even engage in any way, shape or form with Bilawal’s arguments or the content of his speech. They dismiss it as window dressing, hence unworthy of any attention. On the other hand are those who are generally of a secular and democratic persuasion and find the dominance of the right wing narrative in Pakistan distasteful. Although not necessarily supporters of the PPP, they are buoyed and encouraged by a feeling that there are many others like them as evidenced by the PPP rally and hence seem more emboldened to speak out strongly against the right wing. Whether this sentiment lasts remains to be seen. With respect to the content of Bilawal’s speech, the staunch defence of secularism and parliamentary democracy was not surprising. From what I had heard from his precious speeches I was quite sure he would come out with guns blazing on those principles. He highlighted as many of the central issues and the shortcomings of other political parties in relation to these principles that is possible in one speech. In fact, as far as democratic federalism is concerned, the young Bhutto had taken a better position than his grandfather, who, despite his ostensible ideological commitment to federalism was actually quite a national chauvinist towards the movements of oppressed nationalities. By doing so, in my opinion, he has successfully placed himself in a present vacuum in the mainstream for the constituency of Pakistanis who adhere to these values. This is where the left should have positioned itself but failed for several reasons mentioning which would take us too far from the subject of this essay. The most interesting point for me personally was Bilawal’s staunch defence of property. In response to the PTI’s agitation to take down the security wall outside Bilawal House, he said that he too could call on the workers to take over factories, he could call on the peasants to take over the estates, he could call on the minorities to protect themselves with arms, he could call on Mukhtaran Mai to become a phulan devi; in other words, he could retaliate with open and unabashed class war against the rich and that this was “his pitch” (i.e. that the PPP had done so in the past). But he ended that entire section of his speech by categorically stating that he would never do so. In other words, his argument in a nutshell was: leave my private property alone and I will leave your private property alone. This defence of the sanctity of private property implies that Bilawal wants to return to the PPP of the 1990s but not the PPP of the 1970s. In this regard, his grandfather may be considered more left of centre than the stated intention of Bilawal. An argument is often made that this kind of radical class politics may be completely out of phase with the current national debate and that it would risk alienating the PPP from the mainstream. The alternative argument is equally tenable that, thus far, it is the aspirations of the poor for a serious redistribution of resources that has sustained the mass base of the PPP. And one can also point out that given the changes in Latin America and the rise of anti-globalisation and anti-austeritiy movements in Europe itself, class is once more on the agenda of world politics. To conclude therefore, I think Bilawal has certainly presented a trenchant defence of secular democratic values within the framework of parliamentary democracy. But it only raises the same question that has been raised time and time again by the aspirations that the PPP itself sets in motion: can any meaningful democracy be established without a change in the class structure of the country or an affront to property itself? The writer is an assistant professor of Political Science at LUMS, spokesperson for Laal (the band), and general secretary of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP) dailytimes.pk/opinion/27-Oct-2014/project-bilawal-launch
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 09:57:23 +0000
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