Asif Ali Zardari has presence, but not charisma. He understands well the power of populist politics, but often avoids it. To him it is volatile, and can end up consuming (and burning out) a politician. This lesson he seems to have learned from the fate of his father-in-law, late ZA Bhutto (ZAB) — the former PM of Pakistan and the founder of the party that Zardari leads today (with his son, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari). That party is the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).
The PPP emerged in 1967 as a populist, left-leaning party. During the ZAB regime (1971-77), the party retained its populist disposition, mainly due to the charisma of its chairman. But ZAB’s populism was fluid. It continuously moved from left to right and back again depending on (his reading of) the mood of the people. He also went back and forth between populism and pragmatism. But largely, ZAB retained his populist demeanour.
However, after ZAB was ousted in a military coup in 1977, the PPP returned to its ‘left-wing’ populist roots. It then started to settle squarely in the centre — but with populist overtones — during the time when it was led back to power by ZAB’s daughter, Benazir. Zardari’s father was a member of ZAB’s PPP. One is not sure how much contact the younger Zardari had with ZAB, but years later, Zardari’s politics became the anti-thesis of ZAB’s.
In interviews, Zardari has always admired ZAB. But the fact that he has consistently avoided populist politics suggests he is weary of it. It consumed his father-in-law. Populist politics can attract devoted supporters, but it can make ruthless enemies as well. It can also trigger a curious tendency within the populist: that of self-destruction. The now-jailed Imran Khan is a case in point.
In 1977, ZAB’s eldest daughter, Benazir, was thrown in at the deep-end when her father was toppled, and then (in 1979) executed by the General Zia dictatorship. She had studied abroad to either become an academic or find a role in foreign service. But after her father’s fall, she suddenly inherited a political party that had begun to be demonised as ‘enemy of the state’ by a reactionary dictatorship. Benazir’s mother, Nusrat, believed that the party could only survive if it pushed back. This saw the PPP return to its ‘left-wing’/populist roots. Benazir thus, had no other choice but to adopt this posture.
(Image Credits - Zahid Hussain)
Benazir’s populism was not natural. She had inherited her father’s robust intellectualism and charisma, but not his volatile and even mischievous nature. Outside his large study where he spent hours reading books, and when he was not in his fitted suits, he was an enthusiastic populist. It was not all an act, as such. He truly seemed to enjoy it. Shouting, singing, sometimes even dancing, in front of large crowds, and absorbing their energy. But this kind of energy can leave the ego dangerously inflated, and the perception of reality distorted.
For example, ZAB was so sure that opposition parties were scattered and had no following, that he called for an election almost a year ahead of schedule. He was shocked to learn that an alliance of right-wing, centrist and left-wing parties had been formed. The shock intensified when the alliance began to draw as many people to its rallies as ZAB was.
Zardari was watching developments in Pakistan from Dubai. Tensions were running high in Pakistan and he wanted to be there with Benazir but she wouldn’t allow it
In 2008, as chairman of the PPP, Asif Zardari chose a carefully crafted path because the party was in danger of crumbling after terrorists assassinated his wife Benazir in December 2007. He wasn’t a ‘visionary’ like his father-in-law, but he had a knack of predicting political outcomes in the near future purely due to his detached understanding of Pakistani politics. He doesn’t have the charisma that his late wife and father-in-law possessed, but he is known for his political acumen and charm.
Zardari was born in Karachi in 1955 into the Sindhi-speaking Zardari tribe that has Baloch roots. His father, Hakim Ali Zardari, was the chief of the tribe, and his mother Bilqees Khanum, was the granddaughter of the famous educationist and scholar Hasan Ali Effendi. Apart from agricultural lands in rural Sindh, Hakim Zardari also owned cinemas in Karachi and Hyderabad.
Zardari’s schooling years were spread across three institutions: Saint Patrick’s High School, the Karachi Grammar School, and Cadet College in Petaro. His profile on a website that was created when he became President in 2008, informs that after his schooling, he travelled to London to study for a degree in Business. But there is no mention of the name of the institution that he attended in England. One of Zardari’s old school friends (name withheld on request), once told me that Zardari had a "flamboyant lifestyle and personality" and that he was also very interested in becoming a film actor. In fact, in 1969, when Zardari was 14, he appeared in the Urdu film Salgirah. Zardari played the younger version of the film’s main protagonist played by Waheed Murad. The film was released on Valentine's Day and was a commercial success. However, there is no evidence that he pursued a career in films after Salgirah.
There is also no evidence of him being politically active as a young man. This, despite the fact that his father had won the 1970 and 1977 elections on a PPP ticket (from Nawabshah), and was a federal minister in the ZAB government. However, in 1983, Zardari, now 28, ran for a district council seat in Nawabshah, but lost. This eroded whatever little interest he had in politics. Two years later, he started his own real estate business. According to the aforementioned friend, Zardari was "a natural businessman." But before he started his business, "he often kept a baseball bat in the trunk of his car in case he was attacked by those opposed to his family."
In July 1987, when Benazir was in the midst of leading a movement to oust General Zia, newspapers reported that she had been engaged to one Asif Ali Zardari. No one in the political circles knew who he was. They did know his father, though. The engagement ceremony had taken place in the apartment of Benazir’s sister Sanam Bhutto in London. It was an arranged commitment agreed by Benazir’s mother and Asif’s father. This confused the Western media and liberals in Pakistan. Benazir had held liberal views on most social issues. In an interview to the Los Angeles Times she said, "I don’t really expect people in the West to understand."
This was important. Because had she chosen a marriage partner herself, she couldn’t have challenged a dictator who had managed to create a conservative constituency for himself (especially in the then PPP stronghold of Punjab). She didn’t question her mother’s choice. She was of the view that Zardari did not mind the fact that she will be in the limelight as a politician.
The marriage ceremony took place in December 1987, first at the Clifton Palace Garden and subsequently at Lyari’s Kakri Ground. Clifton is one of Karachi’s most ‘posh’ areas. Around 50,000 people attended the first ceremony, including common workers of the party. As agreed by the two families, there was no dowry given by the bride. The second ceremony in Lyari saw almost 200,000 people in attendance. Lyari was a PPP stronghold in Karachi. One of the oldest areas of the city, it was (and still is) a huge working-class area, mostly populated by Baloch and Kutchi people. It was also a hotbed of anti-Zia politics in the 1980s. The majority of attendees at the wedding ceremony here belonged to the area.
Zardari did not participate in the first post-Zia elections in late 1988. But his father did. He won from Nawabshah. The elections were won by the PPP. It formed a coalition government with the Mohajir nationalist party the MQM, and Benazir was sworn in as Prime Minister. She became the first ever woman head of government of a Muslim-majority country.
Zardari tried to keep himself away from politics. He concentrated more on his real estate business. But the opposition alliance led by Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi and Nawaz Sharif began to accuse Zardari of misusing his wife’s position as PM to gain business benefits. Jatoi was one of the founding members of the PPP and a former Chief Minister of Sindh in the ZAB regime. His electoral stronghold, like that of the Zardaris, was also Nawabshah, where he owned huge tracts of farmland. In the early 1980s, Jatoi had been tasked by Benazir to lead the movement against Zia in Sindh.
In 1984, Benazir was released from prison and sent into exile. But from 1985 onwards, she launched a purge in the party. First to go were the ‘uncles,’ or some senior members of the PPP. They had been severely criticised by leaders belonging to the party’s student and youth wings. The wings had accused them of having contacts with the Zia dictatorship while thousands of party workers were rotting in jails.
PPP stalwarts such as Jatoi, Jam Sadiq and Mumtaz Bhutto were pushed out by Benazir. They almost immediately became some of her most vehement critics. Jatoi lost the 1988 election from his stronghold in Nawabshah. He was defeated by a PPP candidate by over 50,000 votes! Even though Asif Zardari was not a member of the Parliament, Jatoi turned his guns on him, accusing him of ‘corruption.’
Benazir was just 35 when she became PM. Many fronts opened up against her regime. She had to tackle state institutions that were still crawling with Zia’s appointees. Many of these appointees were openly aiding the anti-PPP opposition alliance led by Jatoi and Nawaz. Ethnic violence that had become a norm in Karachi from the mid-1980s, intensified, leading to MQM’s departure from the ruling coalition. And then there were also consequences of Benazir’s inexperience at the helm and her inability to control some of the ‘electables’ that had jumped on the PPP bandwagon just before the 1988 elections.
There were rumours of widespread corruption, not that there wasn’t any before Benazir came to power. The most vicious campaign in this respect was launched by a large group of industrialists through a series of press ads in all major newspapers. Zardari was put in the centre of the campaign as the man who was "orchestrating the rot." President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a veteran bureaucrat who had been the Senate Chairman and became president after Zia’s demise in August 1988, used the 8th Amendment in the constitution to dismiss the Benazir regime in 1990.
The 8th Amendment had been added to the constitution during the Zia dictatorship. It gave the president the powers to dissolve the assemblies. Benazir and Zardari were barred from leaving the country and cases were registered against them by the caretaker government led by Jatoi. Zardari contested his first ever general election in October 1990 from jail. He won from a PPP safe seat in Lyari, garnering 54,308 votes. His main opponent from the Nawaz/Jatoi-led alliance could only manage 12,615 votes. However, the 1990 elections were won by the alliance and Nawaz was elected as PM. Jatoi had managed to win back his Nawabshah seat and was expecting to become PM. But Nawaz outmanoeuvred him, leaving Jatoi feeling bitter.
In 1993, Zardari was acquitted by a special court (for lack of evidence). He was released from jail. He was facing charges of corruption and even terrorism when he allegedly ‘tied a bomb around a businessman’s leg’ as a threat. The accusation was clearly absurd. Zardari’s lawyers succeeded in convincing the court that the charges against him were politically motivated.
Interestingly, in March 1991, when Zardari was still in jail, four men had hijacked a Singapore Airlines flight from the Kuala Lumpur Airport. The four hijackers were young Pakistanis who claimed they were members of the PPP. They demanded that Asif Zardari (and some other PPP leaders) be released from prison. Singaporean commandos stormed the plane and shot dead all four hijackers. According to Benazir, the hijackers had nothing to do with the PPP and that they had been sent by ‘the agencies’ serving the Nawaz regime to solidify terrorism charges against Zardari. The charges did not stick, and Zardari was released from jail in February 1993. A few months later, the Nawaz regime fell when the trigger-happy President Ishaq dismissed it on charges of corruption.
Ishaq was forced to resign by the military-establishment. This was a demand made by Nawaz after the Supreme Court restored his government. To break the deadlock between Nawaz and Ishaq, the military leadership eased out Ishaq. But Nawaz Sharif’s new PML-N could not win the 1993 elections. The PPP won a slight majority and formed a coalition government with anti-Nawaz PML factions. Benazir returned as PM. Zardari contested the election from Nawabshah. He received 40,372 votes and defeated the PML-N candidate who polled 29,026 votes. Zardari was inducted into the federal cabinet as Investments Minister.
Benazir seemed more in control compared to her first stint as PM. However, ethnic violence was still raging in Karachi, despite Nawaz ordering an ‘operation clean-up’ in Sindh in 1992, led by the military. Benazir’s brother Murtaza had also returned to the country from exile in Syria. Murtaza had been heading a ‘Marxist’ urban guerrilla outfit, the Al-Zulfikar, from Soviet-occupied Kabul in the 1980s in a bid to violently overthrow Zia who had sent his father to the gallows. Differences between sister and brother had come to the fore in 1981, when Benazir was leading an anti-Zia movement in Karachi and Al-Zulfikar hijacked a PIA plane and shot dead a passenger.
Benazir distanced herself from the hijacking and implored Murtaza to return to Pakistan and help her oust Zia in a more democratic manner. In fact, she was of the view that Murtaza was being misled by Zia’s intelligence agencies so that Zia could use the hijacking incident to intensify his crackdown against the opposition. This is exactly what he did. Benazir’s problematic relationship with her brother sharpened when in 1985, the youngest of the Bhutto children, Shahnawaz, suddenly collapsed and died in France. He was just 27. He was part of Murtaza’s Al-Zulfikar and was living with his Afghan wife in France.
Nusrat, Benazir and Murtaza suspected that Shahnawaz was poisoned by his wife who was working for Zia’s intelligence agencies. The French courts found no such connection and simply convicted the wife for ‘exhibiting negligence.’ She was given a 3-year-jail-sentence. Al-Zulfikar faded into oblivion after Zia’s demise. But Murtaza stayed in exile because of the many terrorism charges that he was facing in Pakistan. However, just before Benazir became PM for the second time, the Pakistani journalist Kamran Khan travelled to Damascus and interviewed Murtaza. Khan reported that Murtaza wanted to return and fight the cases lodged against him.
Populist politics can attract devoted supporters, but it can make ruthless enemies as well. It can also trigger a curious tendency within the populist: that of self-destruction
This raised alarm bells in the PPP leadership. Kamran Khan was suspected of being close to the country’s intelligence agencies. Benazir believed that Murtaza was being lured back so that he could be killed. But Murtaza saw his sister’s reluctance to facilitate his return as a way to secure her position as PPP’s chairperson — a position she shared with their mother. Before his arrival, Murtaza formed Shaheed Bhutto Council (SBC) to contest the October 1993 elections. He positioned the party as the ‘real PPP.’ He also stated that he was the true heir of his father’s party.
The other co-chairperson of the PPP, Nusrat, went all-out to campaign for her son. This shocked Benazir. SBC nominated candidates, including a still absent Murtaza, from various constituencies in Sindh and Punjab. But each one of them was routed by the PPP. Murtaza’s SBC could win just one provincial assembly seat. This was in Hyderabad where he was able to defeat a PPP candidate by a little over 2,000 votes. Murtaza did not realise that the PPP was an electoral machine that did constituency politics, and therefore, his ‘revolutionary’ slogans did not stand a chance to attract voters expecting jobs, roads, hospitals, schools, water and sewerage lines from their MNAs and MPAs.
In 1995, tabloids had often run stories about physical altercations between Murtaza and Zardari, even though there is no evidence that the two ever met face-to-face during this period
Secondly, Benazir’s image as the young woman who stood up to a dictator was still fresh in the minds of PPP supporters. Yet, Murtaza returned to Pakistan just months after his sister became PM again. Unwilling to influence the Karachi police, she did not interfere when Murtaza was taken into custody at the Karachi Airport. What’s more, as her mother began to echo Murtaza’s claim to the throne of the Bhutto dynasty, Benazir got the party to vote Nusrat out as co-chairperson. She told reporters, "It's a question of one being either with the PPP or against the PPP." From jail, Murtaza mocked his sister by calling her "Benazir Zardari." He said, "she should be ashamed to use the Bhutto name and should be known by her husband's name."
Well, technically, in a patriarchal society, he was right. But his statement was not about this. It was an attack on Zardari who, Murtaza now believed, was influencing her sister’s politics. Unlike during Benazir’s first term as PM when Zardari had tried to stay away from politics, now he was in the middle of it as a minister. One can understand why. If staying away had not stopped Benazir’s opponents from framing charges of corruption against him, maybe him being in the government could?
But whereas the old charges had failed to stick in the courts, new ones cropped up. The Nawaz-led opposition also began to echo Murtaza’s assumption that Zardari was the main brain behind the second Benazir government and was using his position as a minister to draw ‘illegal’ financial benefits. He became the media’s favourite punching bag.
In 1996, Murtaza who was now out on bail, and had transformed SBC into a PPP faction (PPP-SB), was killed in a ‘police encounter.’ His convoy was ambushed by cops just yards away from his father’s house in Clifton (that he had inherited).
Murtaza’s widow Ghinwa Bhutto, and mother Nusrat, accused Zardari of ordering Murtaza’s assassination. In 1995, tabloids had often run stories about physical altercations between Murtaza and Zardari, even though there is no evidence that the two ever met face-to-face during this period. In fact, there is also no evidence of a meeting between the two even before this period. Seven weeks after Murtaza’s violent demise, Benazir’s own hand-picked president, Farooq Laghari, an old party loyalist, flexed the 8th Amendment to dismiss the regime. He cited corruption and ethnic violence in Sindh as reasons. Laghari, too, suspected that Zardari had a role in Murtaza’s death. There was zero evidence of this, of course.
The PPP was routed in the 1997 elections that were swept by PML-N. Nawaz became PM. He promptly replaced Laghari as President with his own man, and then undid the 8th Amendment. On this he was supported by the Benazir-led opposition. A January 1998 report in the New York Times provided evidence of financial irregularities committed by the second Benazir regime. Once again, Zardari found himself at the centre of a controversy. He was alleged to have made millions. Zardari was arrested and thrown in jail. But while in jail, he was elected as a member of the Senate.
In 1999, Benazir went into exile with her children. Zardari was still in jail. He was facing multiple charges. In May 1999, Benazir was quoted as saying that the police had tried to murder Zardari in jail. The police authorities claimed he had attempted to commit suicide. Benazir rubbished the claim and insisted that it was an attempt on Zardari’s life ordered by the Nawaz regime.
In October 1999, Nawaz was toppled in a military coup by General Pervez Musharraf. The two had had a falling-out over the Kargil War (that Pakistan lost). Nawaz was livid, lamenting that his military chief had kept him in the dark. But when he tried to dismiss Musharraf, he was overthrown. Both Nawaz and Benazir remained in exile as Musharraf consolidated his position, first as ‘Chief Executive’ and then ‘President.’ He promised that he would keep PPP and PML-N out, and never allow the Bhuttos and the Sharifs to ever come to power again. In this respect, Musharraf was speaking the language of growing urban middle-class segments. Meanwhile, Zardari loitered in jail.
During the 2002 elections, the PPP and PML-N campaigned without their main leadership which was either in exile or in jail. Musharraf had helped form a PML faction (PML-Quaid) with the help of some former PML-N leaders who had dumped Nawaz. Some PPP leaders were also arm-twisted into quitting the PPP. These included Faisal Saleh Hayat and Aftab Sherpao. Both were once seen as staunch party loyalists but decided to support Musharraf. Both were dismissed from the PPP.
PML-N was routed in the election. It could win just 15 seats, most of them from Lahore. The PPP managed to bag 63 seats. PML-Q, which was overtly aided by the Musharraf regime, won 78 seats. It formed a coalition government with the MQM, Jatoi and Laghari’s National Alliance, Pir Pagaro’s PML-Functional, Sherpao’s PPP-Sherpao, and independents. During this period, Zardari became an avid reader. Benazir used to send him books on history and politics, and he had ample time in prison to devour them. In 2004, he was released on bail after spending almost seven years in jail. He was allowed by the Musharraf regime to go into exile. But within a year, he was back in a bid to revive the PPP. He was put under house arrest and then forced to return to Dubai.
Years in jail had taken a toll on his health. He remained aloof from politics. But Benazir was now ready to defy Musharraf and return to Pakistan. She and Nawaz had buried the hatchet in London and agreed to work together to neutralise the military’s involvement in politics. Alarmed by this development, and facing a series of crises, the Musharraf dictatorship tried to mend fences with Benazir. The Musharraf regime was a close ally of the US. The latter supported a rapprochement between the regime and Benazir.
By 2007, Musharraf was facing a crisis on multiple fronts. The economy was beginning to tank, incidents of Islamist terrorism were increasing, and a ‘lawyers movement’ had erupted when Musharraf dismissed a controversial Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry. Yet, Musharraf was unwilling to allow Benazir’s return, unless she cut a deal with him. This may have meant that she would not seek his ouster. Nawaz too was kept at bay in Saudi Arabia. Benazir finally decided that she would return and lead the party for the scheduled January 2008 elections. She feared that without the presence of Nawaz and herself in Pakistan, Musharraf would rig the election in favour of PML-Q.
Zardari was undergoing treatment in New York. He worried that Musharraf might try to get Benazir killed. He pleaded that she delay her return. He didn’t trust Musharraf. He used to call Musharraf ‘billa’ (tomcat). Benazir too didn’t trust Musharraf. But she argued that since the grip of the dictator was weakening, the time was ripe to strike. Yet, Zardari kept his actual opinions about Musharraf to himself lest they endangered Benazir’s return to Pakistan.
In October 2007, Benazir returned to Karachi and was welcomed by thousands of supporters. The same day the large rally that she was leading from the airport was attacked by suicide bombers. The attack killed 149 people, but Benazir survived. Immediately she accused the Musharraf regime of providing her insufficient security so she could become an easy target for extremist groups. Nawaz, too, had decided to return and was welcomed by a large number of supporters in Lahore.
However, as the regime intensified its crackdown against anti-Musharraf protests, Nawaz agreed with smaller parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami and Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf to boycott the planned 2008 elections. Benazir convinced Nawaz not to leave the field open for the pro-Musharraf PMLQ. Nawaz agreed. Benazir could have easily let Nawaz’s PML-N boycott the polls and win a large majority. But she understood the importance of PML-N’s participation in an election held by a dictatorship that had toppled Nawaz in 1999.
Zardari was watching all this from Dubai. Tensions were running high in Pakistan and he wanted to be there with Benazir but she wouldn’t allow it. Three of her children were still young and staying with their father. The eldest, Bilawal, was at Oxford University.
And then it happened. Zardari’s fear came true. On 27 December, 2007, Benazir was assassinated. The regime pointed the finger at militant Islamists, but Zardari accused Musharraf, lambasting him for ‘allowing’ the militants to easily infiltrate Benazir’s rally in Rawalpindi.
Zardari at once returned to Pakistan with the children. Violence had erupted across the country after Benazir’s killing. It was particularly intense in Punjab and Sindh, the PPP’s two electoral strongholds. The country saw three days of unprecedented rioting. Dozens were killed and millions of rupees worth of property destroyed. It was anarchy.
Day of the fox
After spending years in prison, Zardari had lost all interest in politics, even though, ironically, in jail he had been provided books on political theories and histories by Benazir that he read with great interest. He had all the time in the world. But after his release and self-exile, he yearned to become the businessman that he was and leave politics to Benazir. Her tragic demise in December 2007 changed all that.
On his return to Pakistan to bury his wife in the hometown of the Bhuttos, he looked disoriented. He had no clue as to what ought to be the party’s way forward. Benazir was at the core of the party’s mind and heart. But Zardari’s moment came when the violence in Sindh began to mutate and threatened to become a Sindhi nationalist uprising. Benazir was the second Sindhi PM to have been murdered. Her father was executed through a sham murder trial and her daughter, brutally assassinated. Slogans about Sindhis needing to avenge their deaths by separating Sindh from Pakistan began to ring ever-so-loudly across the angry province.
In an emotional speech that was televised live, Zardari angrily lamented the death of his wife and a former PM who had returned to put Pakistan back on track. He accused the regime of allowing men with nothing but hatred in their hearts to get close to her, enough for them to kill her, first with a bullet, which was immediately followed by a vicious suicide attack. Yet, he loudly announced that Benazir was first and foremost a Pakistani and that he would never allow the federation to break. He repeatedly said, "Pakistan khape, khape, khape!" In Sindhi it means Pakistan will survive/exist.
Zardari was hastily asked by the party seniors to take over the reigns of the party. He then led it to win a slight majority in the 2008 elections. With Musharraf still President (and a threat), Zardari managed to strike a coalition government with PML-N that wanted to impeach Musharraf. He got a party loyalist Yusaf Raza Gillani become PM and then manoeuvred his pieces on the board in such a manner that aided him to become president after succeeding to push Musharraf out with the help of PML-N.
Through legislation, Zardari neutralised the presidency’s power and empowered those of the prime minister. But, of course, he was to be the one to call the shots through his PM. That is why the regime at the time was called "the Zardari government." But once Musharraf was removed, the PPP-PML-N alliance began to crumble. However, Zardari had already got the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and Awami National Party (ANP) on board to sustain the PPP-led government. ANP decided to join the coalition after Zardari agreed that the colonial name of the Pakhtun-majority province NWFP would be changed to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP).
Musharraf had ousted a controversial Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), triggering a riotous backlash by the radicalised lawyers community, especially in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The PML-N heavily invested a lot of resources and effort in the so-called anti-Musharraf 'lawyers movement’ that followed the CJP’s ouster (on corruption charges). Now the CJP (Iftikhar Chowdhry) was ready to be reinstalled as the top judge of the country.
Zardari did not trust Chaudhry. He believed that the judge had been turned into a political figure by the lawyers' movement and even radicalised. He warned Nawaz that Chaudhry’s re-appointment would be a mistake and a catastrophe for politicians. On Zardari’s refusal to reinstate Chaudhary, Nawaz threatened to re-start the movement. Zardari finally relented and the CJP was back. But as feared by Zardari, the CJP brought with him a judicial populism which would last till 2024, polarise the highest court, dismiss two sitting prime ministers, and facilitate the military establishment to shape Imran Khan as an anti-thesis of Zardari and Nawaz.
Zardari’s regime couldn’t have come to power in a more turbulent period. The economy had slided, acts of Islamist terrorism had increased manifold, the populist media was enjoying uninterrupted influence because the government refused to ‘regulate’ it, and the judiciary led by an reinstated activist judge went out of its way to create hurdles in the path of the government’s economic policies. What’s more, the military-establishment under General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani refused to support Zardari’s diplomatic efforts to rekindle the country’s relations with India and the US.
Then, in 2011, the military-establishment ‘leaked’ a supposed scandal to a once fringe politician Imran Khan who it had started to groom as a future PM. In 2011, allegedly, Khan was aided by the intelligence agencies to successfully hold a huge rally in Lahore. The idea was to transfer the urban middle-class constituency that Musharraf had built for himself, to Khan. In the rally, Khan announced that the Zardari regime’s ambassador in the US, Husain Haqqani, had pleaded to the US government to intervene and push back the military's involvement in destabilising Zardari’s government.
Sharif’s PML-N and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), instead of wondering why the military-establishment had shared this ‘news’ only with a maverick politician and head of a small party, sprinted towards Chaudhry’s Supreme Court, asking it to investigate this ‘serious issue.’ In 2009, when Islamist militants had managed to occupy the scenic Swat valley, Zardari was pushed to sign an order to give power to the Islamists to impose ‘sharia laws’ there. The military wasn’t willing to intervene and the opposition refused to give the go-ahead to a military operation.
Zardari’s tenure as a master politician is coming to a close. His health is becoming an issue and he knows the time has come for Bilawal to take full control of the party
Zardari sat on the order for days, trying to convince the military and the opposition that the deal would not hold and the militants would continue to take over more territory. But eventually, he had to sign. Yet, within days, when images of women being flogged began to appear, the military agreed to launch an operation and the opposition followed suit. The area was soon cleared of militants.
Now, when the 2011 ‘controversy’ arose, Zardari could clearly see who really was behind it. In his TV show, the veteran journalist and political commentator Najam Sethi said that during a meeting with the chief of Jamiat-Ulema-Islam (JUIF), Fazalur Rehman, Zardari collapsed from exhaustion. After regaining consciousness, he told Fazal, "I’ve done whatever they’ve asked me to do. What else do they want?" By ‘they’ he meant the military-establishment.
The Haqqani scandal didn’t go anywhere, except in the dustbin of history. There was never any evidence of the ambassador ever asking the US government to intervene. Yet, Zardari was forced to remove his man in Washington DC. Then, the Chaudhry court dismissed the prime minister for committing contempt of court. PM Yousaf Raza Gillani refused to provide the court details of offshore properties held by President Zardari. Gillani accused the court of playing politics. But Zardari managed to hold on to power by appointing another PM.
It was becoming clear to Zardari that the PPP’s electoral influence in the country’s largest province Punjab was rapidly eroding. This was due to PML-N’s ever-growing popularity in Punjab, something that (from the 1990s onwards) was facilitated by the military-establishment. Yet, what PML-N could not realise was the fact that the now-eroded challenge to it by the PPP was smartly being replaced by the military-establishment with Imran Khan’s centre-right and populist PTI.
Consequently, Zardari began to put all his efforts into retaining Sindh. His idea of launching a social welfare scheme named after his late wife (Benazir Income Support Program [BISP]), went a long way in sustaining PPP’s electoral supremacy in the province. In 2013, whereas the party was routed by PML-N and came a distant second (followed by PTI), it managed to retain Sindh. From 2013 onwards, as PTI began to gain momentum and extraordinary media coverage, Zardari foresaw that Punjab was about to become a heated battleground but on which there was no room left for the PPP. So he began to move his pieces in Sindh as a way to keep the party in the federal parliament with enough seats to continue being treated as an important player.
He intensified the BISP in the province, adjusted loyalists in the Sindh government and bureaucracy, convinced influential Sindhi politicians to join the party, and then ‘launched’ Bilawal. This happened after the party supported military action against Islamists in 2015. The PML-N government wasn’t willing to send in the army. Not without PTI agreeing to support such an action. From 2008 till 2013, dozens of PPP, MQM and ANP workers had been slain by the Islamists. During the 2013 election campaign, just these three parties were demanding a widespread military operation against the militants. By then, they had slaughtered over 60,000 Pakistanis. PML-N and PTI didn’t utter a single word about this, focusing more on the ‘corruption’ of the PPP-led coalition government.
In 2015, just a month after militants attacked a school in Peshawar, killing students and teachers, the military, now led by General Raheel Sharif, put pressure on the Nawaz Sharif regime to order a military operation. Sharif hesitated. Khan and his PTI, were holding protest rallies in Islamabad, refused to support any military operation, thinking that they were on the verge of toppling Nawaz. Khan was arm-twisted by Raheel to suspend the protests and sign on an all-party agreement in favour of an operation.
But as the military scored a series of victories in areas occupied by the militants in KP, the operation bled into Sindh’s capital city Karachi as well, where - albeit secular - ‘militant wings’ of MQM and the PPP became targets. Zardari protested, claiming that the PPP had no militant wing. Seeing this as ‘yet another ploy to uproot PPP from Sindh,’ Zardari lashed out against Raheel Sharif. He also developed a grudge against PM Nawaz, accusing him of destabilising the PPP regime in Sindh.
Zardari’s outburst did not sit well with General Raheel. So, to avoid arrest, Zardari slipped away to Dubai, and waited for things to cool down. Cool down they did. Whereas the military operation was successful and incidents of terrorism dropped drastically and the economy began to improve, out came the ‘Panama Papers’ scandal. Whereas, according to these papers, hundreds of influential politicians from across the globe were maintaining illegal money on secret off-shore accounts, there was no mention of Zardari in them. This was ironic because thanks to years of efforts by the media and anti-PPP players, Zardari’s name had become synonymous with ‘corruption.’ And yet, here was a long list of ‘corrupt’ politicians from the Global North and the Global South, but no mention of Zardari.
There was no mention of Nawaz as well, even though names of some of his relatives did pop up. Khan ran to the courts to implicate Nawaz. Beginning with Justice Chaudhry, the judiciary had continued to be populist and activist. Meanwhile, in 2016, Bilawal convinced Zardari to change the CM of Sindh. The loyalist Qaim Ali Shah was already in his 80s. Bilawal wanted a younger CM to attract a new generation of Sindhi voters. He chose a 53-year-old engineer who had graduated from Stanford University and was a staunch PPP loyalist. He was Murad Ali Shah.
Zardari got Shah to help him set his pieces in Sindh once again, and further the reach of BISP that the party had launched in 2008. Through research, the party became aware that the scheme was increasingly popular among peasant and lower-middle-income Sindhi women. Not bothered by Sharif’s fate (due to the grudge that he had developed against Nawaz), Zardari kick-started an election campaign in Sindh much before any other party.
Sharif was removed as PM by a vengeful-sounding court on an absurd technicality, but the government managed to complete its full term. In 2018, Khan’s PTI managed to win a slight majority. Khan’s supporters in the military-establishment went into overdrive to get support from smaller parties so that Khan could form a coalition government. Sharif was sent to jail.
But Sindh (outside Karachi) was swept by the PPP, as the PTI dislodged a fractured MQM in Karachi. According to a FAFEN report, 51% of PPP’s voters in Sindh were women. The party had done its homework. Zardari continued to quietly tolerate the PTI regime which moved from committing one blunder after another. But PML-N was put under tremendous pressure as PM Khan seemed to put more effort in crushing the Sharifs than in governing.
Bilawal moved again. Seeing PTI’s influence erode in Karachi (because the party was least bit interested in doing constituency politics), and MQM struggling to keep a united front, Bilawal launched Murtaza Wahab. Wahab was a Urdu-speaking Karachiite and son of a staunch PPP loyalist late Fauzia Wahab and a father who was a progressive journalist before his untimely death in the late 1980s. Wahab, a workaholic like Murad, were teamed up with PPP’s Saeed Ghani (another Karachiite) and a few more Karachi-based PPP members in a bid to make electoral inroads in those areas of Karachi where PTI’s influence was quickly receding.
For the first time, a PPP-led government in Sindh began to invest effort and resources in Karachi, while Zardari and Murad continued to set and reset the party’s pieces in the rest of Sindh. Sindh remains to be vital for Zardari. It continues to provide the party a powerful provincial government and keep dozens of PPP MNAs in the parliament.
In 2021, Zardari sensed that the bond between the military-establishment and Khan’s government had begun to weaken. He immediately formed an alliance of opposition parties which included PML-N and JUIF along with ANP and a string of smaller parties. But much to the delight of PM Khan, cracks began to appear in the alliance. Nawaz and Fazal wanted to march towards Islamabad and ask their MNAs in the parliament to resign.
Zardari was appalled. He thought this to be an impulsive and emotional idea which will only strengthen Khan. When Nawaz and Fazal refused to change their plan, Zardari pulled his party out of the alliance. But Shehbaz Sharif, Nawaz’s younger brother and former CM Punjab, quietly sided with Zardari’s argument. He convinced Nawaz and Fazal. To Zardari, the opposition needed to remain in the parliament so that when the time comes it could remove Khan constitutionally through a no confidence vote.
As relations between Khan and his erstwhile supporters in the military continued to deteriorate, Zardari found enough space to begin cultivating support from within parties that were part of the coalition government. Finally, he informed Shehbaz that he had gathered enough MNAs to launch a no confidence vote. The military-establishment under General Bajwa had by then become so repulsed by Khan’s government, that it decided to step aside. Khan went ballistic.
But in April 2022, Khan could not stop the no confidence vote from passing and out he went, replaced by a coalition government headed by Shehbaz Sharif.
Shehbaz was elected PM. The PPP’s major player in the new set-up was Bilawal who was appointed Foreign Minister. The new government took this opportunity to not renew Bajwa’s tenure as military chief. It fell on Nawaz to appoint a new chief. He asked his brother to appoint General Asim Munir, knowing well that he had been admonished by PM Khan for bringing to his notice corruption charges against Khan’s handpicked CM in Punjab, Khan’s third wife and a friend of hers. Munir was livid. But here he was now, elevated to head one of the most powerful positions in the country, and ready to facilitate the government to turn around an economy which Khan had left on the verge of bankruptcy.
This made Nawaz nervous, though. This would mean signing a tough IMF deal, austerity measures and rampant inflation. He advised Shehbaz to announce fresh elections. But Zardari disagreed. He didn’t want to dissolve the Sindh government. There were unfinished projects there which would further strengthen the PPP’s electoral hold in the province. He also advised Shehbaz to make the best of the support that the military establishment was willing to provide — to the two parties that it had once tried to wipe out through Khan.
As Khan ran across the roads with his supporters, claiming that the military-establishment, PML-N and PPP had been used by the US to remove a potential leader of the ummah, the Shehbaz faction in the PML-N prevailed and decided to continue. As inflation rose beyond 30% and the rupee dropped, PML-N began to lose support. Khan, who had become increasingly unpopular as PM, began to pose as an ‘anti-establishment’ figure, baiting General Munir so that he is forced to revive the military-establishment’s relations with him. Instead, he was thrown in jail on various corruption charges.
PML-N struggled to win in 2024, as PTI swept KP and large parts of central Punjab. With the aid of PPP and MQM, PML-N managed to form the government. PPP once again swept Sindh and bagged a slight majority in Balochistan. In Sindh, the party’s vote bank rose from 38.7% in 2018 to 45.5% in 2024. Once again, over 51% of its total votes came from Sindhi women. What’s more, the party also managed to bag seven seats in Karachi.
In 2021, Murtaza Wahab was appointed as Administrator of Karachi by Bilawal. His workaholic personality, captured by a consistent social media campaign and accessibility, went a long way in making him popular in various areas of the city — especially where Pashtuns, Baloch and Sindhis were in majority.
This aided the party to weave an effective campaign for the 2022-23 local elections in Sindh. The local elections were swept by the party in the rest of Sindh, and for the first time, the PPP won a majority in Karachi. JI came a close second and PTI third. Wahab was eventually elected mayor.
This encouraged Bilawal. He looked to repeat the Karachi strategy in Punjab, as a way to revive the party in its former stronghold.
But Zardari asked him to delay his plan. Just before the 2024 elections, Zardari saw Punjab set to be torn in two between a struggling PML-N, and an emotional PTI. He still saw no place for PPP in this fight. He wanted to wait till one of the two were knocked out. But Bilawal refused to back down. Off he went, investing a lot of resources and energy in Punjab, as Zardari once again began setting his field in Sindh.
This time, the PPP was being challenged by a much larger alliance. It included JUIF that has a strong vote-bank in northern Sindh; PML-N, PTI and Sindhi nationalists. Heading them all was Pagara’s conservative Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) packed with powerful feudal personalities. Yet, the massive alliance was decisively routed by the PPP. But, as predicted by Zardari, Bilawal’s Punjab plan crashed. The party could win just a handful of seats in Punjab.
The PPP is supporting the Shehbaz regime from outside, even though Zardari has smartly acquired his pound of flesh: the presidency; the senate chairmanship; two governorships; and two provincial regimes. But Sindh remains to be his primary possession. It keeps the PPP alive in federal politics. Tutored by his father, Bilawal did well in appointing Murad Ali Shah as CM Sindh, and through Wahab and Saeed Ghani, made the party relevant in Karachi. Bilawal has deep respect for his father. But when it comes to inspiration, he is spoiled for choice: his grandfather’s charismatic populism, his mother’s diplomatic and tolerant politics, and his father’s hardcore pragmatism and mastery of realpolitik. Bilawal seems to be fusing all three.
Zardari’s tenure as a master politician is coming to a close. His health is becoming an issue and he knows the time has come for Bilawal to take full control of the party. Zardari's confidence in his son has grown, but he still sees the existence of some rough edges in him. Fact is: Zardari is clearly living to see his son become PM. Bilawal has his work cut out.