PPP and the Sindh card

For all its worth, President Asif Ali Zardari has outdone what any other democrat has been able to do in the past: keep his government and his party largely away from harm that the machinations of the civil and military establishment could incur. As Cyril Almeida pointed out in Dawn, now is when President Zardari is planning for the next elections; pawns have been readied for an attack, the knight too ready to swoop in when needed, and the sweet sound of “reconciliation” wearing off any steam that the opposition might have collected.

And yet, for all his adversaries’ moves that he has anticipated and countered, there remains one factor critical in establishing whether the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) will manage as widespread a mandate in a Sindh emotionally charged and torn by the death of Shaheed Rani: floods.

Sindh of course is the PPP’s traditional bastion of power. After Benazir Bhutto, the PPP has chosen to overplay its ethnic card – be it in the Centre for a beleaguered leader, or in the province to pummel coalition partners into the guilt of being “non-Sindhi”. In the absence, or perhaps an end, to ideological politics, the hegemony over bonafide Sindhi is a contested terrain and its political expression is many times violent.

For many Sindhi-speaking Sindhis, the attachment with the PPP dates back not to when the party was founded but the time when Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, Zulfikar Bhutto’s father, secured the accession of Junagadh to Pakistan – only to be thwarted by the Indians later on. It was, at the very least, an attempt to keep as much of Sindh together as possible. The glorification of both Shahnawaz and Murtaza Bhutto in the Sindhi-speaking Sindhis is due in part to the impression that they were both murdered through a conspiracy designed by Punjabi actors – regardless of who carried out the executions.

The PPP’s adherence to a discourse of pure-bred Sindhis, prevalent among most parts of Sindh barring perhaps Karachi and Hyderabad, is understandable. Sindhi nationalists would perhaps even love if history remembered Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as a disciple, or at the very least, a follower of GM Syed. But the fact is that while PPP and the nationalists share divergent views on whether to remain part of Pakistan, the nationalists vote bank tends to support the PPP on grounds of ethnic affiliation.

The PPP has been playing on the nationalists’ terrain without much challenge thus far, primarily because nationalists who engage in the democratic process of the Pakistani state had been on the fringes of the mainstream and not participating in elections. This situation has changed and these smaller nationalist parties now stand to gain in their limited areas of influence (it is worth noting, however, that many accuse established stalwarts to have sold out in one form or another to the establishment). Nawaz Sharif has also been banking on these forces to dent the hold of the PPP in Sindh, visiting the leaders of two such parties during his last visit to Sindh.

President Zardari must also be weighing up the extent of damage caused to the MQM in the wake of Mirza’s utterings. The last time around, while the government and the PPP were desperately searching for funds and relief, the MQM with its network of ambulances and other vehicles was among the forefront of relief and rehabilitation efforts. And given the manner in which the MQM’s media coverage is structured, images of MQM leaders giving away supplies and tents to the homeless were well-covered by Sindhi channels along with that of the larger nationalist parties.

The MQM’s success left many Sindhi intellectuals debating the merits of a social welfare organisation in the mould of MQM’s Khidmat-e-Khalq; the general consensus was that all “Sindhi” parties – including the PPP – lacked on this front. In terms of voter appeal, that is a huge plus.

While PPP MNAs from Sindh, mostly women, are carrying out the thankless task of organising relief missions, the party as a whole – and especially the Sindh leadership – has been found almost clueless about how to deal with a disaster it braved a year ago. The nationalists, the non-voting kind, have been active this time too – as parties, not individuals.

The nonchalance of the provincial cabinet over all matters pertaining to floods last year ensured that a number of crises re-emerged this year as well. This is despite the fact that President Zardari himself had ordered that all measures to guard against any destruction caused by floods be completed by March-end.

The problem for President Zardari is that while the floods may not dent the PPP’s vote in the next elections, but the monopoly over the Sindhi card will weaken. The nationalists’ increasing popularity and the MQM’s extended outreach in the interior parts of Sindh threaten the PPP; the slow and gradual amalgamation of Muslim League factions only serves to weaken the PPP more. For the PPP’s monopoly over “Sindhi” to persist, the government needs to make its move fast.

The writer is Deputy City Editor, Pakistan Today, Karachi. In Twitterverse, he goes by @ASYusuf.