Asif Ali Zardari has reportedly decided to shift his ‘camp office’ from Naudero to Lahore. Since he returned to Pakistan in the wake of Benazir’s assassination he has been operating from Bhutto family’s ancestral village to reaffirm his linkage with the dynasty, abandoning ‘Bilawal house’ in Karachi, which was known as the PPP’s unofficial headquarters, to be converted into a ‘Bhutto family museum’. It was understandable why Zardari had chosen to stay on in Naudero even after Benazir’s burial rituals ended, and he was no longer required to receive an unending stream of visitors arriving in Naudero to offer their condolence. To outgrow the controversy surrounding his succession as the de facto legatee of Bhutto dynasty was his top priority since critics, such as Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, had questioned the legitimacy of ‘Zardari’, including Bilawal, staking claim to Bhutto lineage. The two children of Murtaza Bhutto, daughter, Fatima (22) and son Zulfikar Ali Junior, (18), they said, were the rightful heirs of the Bhutto dynasty.
To identity himself as closely as possible with Bhutto dynasty was therefore an imperative of real politick for Zardari. But the odd move to shift to Lahore from Naudero has come as a surprise to political observers. In the wake of vocal anti-Punjabi sentiment expressed by PPP Sindhi cadres on the eve of Benazir’s burial which had prompted Zardari to debunk the accusation that Punjab could be blamed for Benazir’s killing, and reveal that most of the security guards killed along with Benazir were ‘Punjabis’ who he had himself recruited for the job, Zardari may have deemed it necessary to do more to rectify the damage which may have been done to the PPP’s image as the symbol of ‘federation’. The ‘anti-Punjabi’ mood had persisted in Naudero as Mian Nawaz Shairf leading his party contingent was reported to have encountered a hostile crowd which pushed around him and raised parochial slogans.
The fact that the QML has found it handy to counter the sympathy wave for the PPP by attributing a sinister design behind the massive rioting in Sindh and blaming it on Asif Zardari has made it all the more necessary for Zardari to reaffirm that the PPP did not derive its power from Sindh alone. To what degree the campaign to malign Zardari as a ‘Sindhi regionalist’ would hurt the PPP vote bank in Punjab is perhaps a little too early to say, but one cannot entirely rule out the chance that ‘Chaudhry's prescription’ for retrieving loss of popular support may backfire as a foul play. However the ‘litmus test’ of the popular mood in Punjab would come if and when Zardari chooses to run the PPP’s election campaign in Punjab, where the ‘Chaudhrys’ have already taken advantage of the lull in campaigning to run their own vote-catching exercise. If Zardari can pull as big crowds as Benazir would have, it would be a good enough indicator that the PPP was still in the run as a frontline vote-catcher.
Whatever gains or ‘averting losses’ Zardari may hope to secure by personally overseeing the election campaign in Punjab, it would be in terms of politics in the short run, or to be more exact from the point of view of improving the PPP’s election prospects. However, when Zardari says he wants to move to Lahore for political operations, it may mean that he intends to stay here for a much longer period than required for election activity. Shifting his political headquarters to Lahore, if he really means business, implies a number of things. Preference over Islamabad suggests that he plans to stay away from parliamentary politics and focus on party building. We are told that he is already in contact with Aitzaz Ahsan and some other party intellectuals who he wants to make his special advisers.
Zardari is not standing in election, even though he could, if he wished contest the by-election from Benazir’s Larkana constituency (for which the election has been put off). Handing over the PPP’s parliamentary wing to Makhdum Amin Fahim would be an unprecedented step in the party history, more so because there is a possibility that the PPP may emerge as the largest party in the National Assembly and asked to form the next government. And if Amin Fahim is installed as the new Prime Minister, it would the advent of a new era of ‘collective leadership’ in the PPP politics. Needless to say Benazir Bhutto would not have condescended to any such arrangement. What has induced Zardari to deviate from the well-established norm of PPP leadership style of functioning --- one party one leader and zero tolerance for parallel power centres in the party is not hard to tell. Zardari does not have the self-assurance to proclaim himself the ‘new don’ --- the undisputed party boss.
Nevertheless, one must accredit Zardari for a pragmatic approach to the question of Benazir’s succession. He has proved himself to be a realist and an astute politician who appears to be in no hurry to grab the Bhutto fiefdom, but is prepared to wait for his turn to establish his political authority. Politicians in the country are often victims of self-deception as they refuse to come to terms with ground realities, but the manner in which Zardari has moved to fill the vacuum created by Benazir’s assassination shows that he is acutely conscious of his limitations. He could have been misled into believing himself as a ‘man of destiny’ and tempted to go for an ‘overkill’. On the contrary he has had the sagacity to keep his cool, move with caution and focus on holding the party together, rather than projecting his own leadership. Although Zardari has so far been functioning as a party leader from a position of relative weakness, his willingness to let the PPP function without his stamp of authority on every activity suggests a measure of confidence in his ability to ‘set things right’ in due course of time.
Zardari’s move to shift his political headquarter to Lahore has another intriguing dimension. He does not want to get bogged down in Sindhi politics. Success of the PPP as a truly national party hinges on its support base in Punjab. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had swept the polls in Punjab in the 1970 elections, winning all the seats in Lahore. And Punjab has been a citadel of ‘Bhutto loyalists for many years, until Nawaz Sharif propped up by Zia regime appeared on the scene as the ‘lion of Punjab’. It goes without saying that PPP’s durable support-base in Punjab has considerably dwindled over the years. And it became evident from PPP poor showing in the elections held after 1988 that it was on the verge of being reduced to a non-factor in Punjab’s electoral politics. Asif Ali Zardari, it seems, has grasped the implications of this basic threat to the future of the PPP as a serious contender for power in Islamabad.
Rebuilding a support base for the PPP in Punjab appears to be primary task Asif Zardari has chosen for himself. And he appears to be paused for a long haul of party building in Punjab in an effort to rejuvenate the Bhutto loyalists and translate their loyalty and commitment into political action. Does Zardari have the ability to accomplish the job is premature to predict but he cannot exclusively rely on the ‘sympathy wave’ to turn a crowd into a viable political organisation. His first task would be to win the trust of the ‘Jiylas’ who are the conduits for transmitting the party mission to the masses and reviving a modicum of its once formidable power base in Punjab. Nevertheless it may turn out to be a futile exercise, no matter how long Zardari chooses to remain in Lahore, if his modus operandi is to operate through handpicked intermediaries. What he needs to do to begin his party building mission is to initiate a process of democratising PPP.