Bilawal shows talent to lead major political force

ISLAMABAD: Young Chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has displayed during his back-to-back impromptu pressers in the federal capital that he has the talent and dexterity to lead and lift up a major political force from a dismal state of affairs.

But unlike his bombastic campaign speeches in the Azad Kashmir elections, he was urbane, restrained and refined even while taking on his rivals including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. He employed no indecent, coarse or obnoxious language against any adversary, which has unfortunately become the hallmark of a newly emerged political entity, having a large following.

The high point in his rejoinder to Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan’s prescription for minus-one formula in the PPP, meaning ostracizing Asif Ali Zardari – has a great emotional touch based on bitter memories of the Bhutto family.

In a charged tone, he stated that the minus-formula was repeatedly imposed on the PPP - first by executing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and then physically removing from the scene his maternal uncles, Shahnawaz and Murtaza, and his mother Benazir Bhutto and today’s talk is minus-Zardari and tomorrow’s will be minus-Bilawal.

Bilawal gave a clear message that his elders were made to face the minus-one formula by the powers that be, and that now Imran Khan has awfully talked about the same. Despite being too angry over the PTI chairman’s recipe for the PPP to come out of its hard days, the young politician did not use profane lingo against him, but only said such suggestion doesn’t befit him.

A welcome U-turn that Bilawal took related to his previous repeated slogan, dubbing Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as a traitor for being a friend of his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi. “I can’t even think of describing a democratically elected prime minister as a traitor. I had never ever even called uncle Altaf Hussain a traitor because he is a political reality of Karachi which still exists.”

His rhetoric on the first day of the joint parliamentary session that the PPP was fully with the government on the Kashmir cause but in 2018, the prime minister will be from the PPP while Nawaz Sharif will be in jail for the Panama Papers disclosures pertaining to offshore companies was a combination of soft and harsh remarks.

Bilawal’s meeting with Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman, for whatever reason, was a good initiative to have fine working relations with senior politicians especially those who have closely worked with his mother and father and had been their allies. He paid his respects to the JUI-F chief and publicly articulated his admiration for him for having been met repeatedly as a small kid.

It is a fact that during his stay in Islamabad when the joint session was in progress, Bilawal firmed up the PPP policy aired in the parliamentary sitting. As he himself disclosed, he acted decisively by dismissing a call from some of his party leaders to boycott this session.

Even during the parliamentary leaders’ deliberations with the prime minister on Monday in which the PTI leaders specifically Shah Mehmood Qureshi heaped lavish praise on Nawaz Sharif for his UN speech and his overall stand on the Indian atrocities in the occupied Kashmir, Bilawal politely picked holes in the official policy on Kashmir and also raised the issue of an early investigation into the offshore companies. He thus acted like a shrewd politician, who firmly but civilly vented out his views in a decent and controlled manner without being lousy and a rabble-rouser. He made his point but still did not make the prime minister feel uneasy in his chair.

What made Imran Khan to go all out against Zardari demanding minus-one formula were the calculated remarks of Bilawal, when he said: “. . . you have to put the national interest first and if you do not place this on priority, you cannot do it as you have given space to Nawaz Sharif to hide behind the Kashmir issue and democracy to avoid the Panama issue and accountability. It [PTI’s boycott of joint sitting] “is a very immature decision and it’s not cricket that you hit the ball, hit the ball, hit the ball and on hitting a sixer you think that you will become the prime minister. It would not happen. . .”

Certainly, his attacking comment, first-ever against the PTI chairman after an extended honeymoon between the two parties, thoroughly disappointed some PPP leaders, who have been inching close to Imran Khan and having been dragging their party to strengthen their cooperative relations with the PTI. This rocked their longstanding desire.

All these assertions and activities of Bilawal amply demonstrated that the young man is learning the art of possible fast and will be further polished in the days to come. But he needs to work very, very hard to pull his party out of the cul-de-sac.

—Originally published in The News