Religious Seminaries in Pakistan: New Age Islam's Selection, 07 April 2017
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
07 April 2017
• Religious Seminaries In Pakistan
By Ethsam Waheed
• Pulverising the Roots Of Terrorism
By M Ziauddin
• Politics of Military Courts
By Dr Ejaz Hussain
• Dowry Anyone?
By Asha'ar Rehman
• Ideas Are Dangerous
By Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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Religious Seminaries in Pakistan
By Ethsam Waheed
April 6, 2017
Pakistan will regain its lost freedom only when the terrorism ordeal is over. Over the years it has become abundantly clear that this is not just a conventional war but also an ideological one which can be traced to a pointed lack of religious awareness. There is also something amiss about how our great faith is being taught mainly in the religious seminaries of the rural areas. This enables the terrorist outfits to recruit youth conveniently and transform them into their minions. My aim is to highlight this gap.
According to official statistics, 940 civilians were killed in 2015 in terrorist attacks. In 2016 the toll mounted to 612 lives. The attacks may have decreased but the casualities per attack have risen. An example of this is the attack carried out on February 16, 2017 in which at least 88 civilians were killed. The suicide bomber blew himself up inside a historic Sufi shrine in the town of Sehwan in Jamshoro district of Sindh. This is the worst attack, in terms of civilian fatalities, recorded in Pakistan since the December 2014 Army Public School attack in Peshawar.
The statistics of the attacks are as horrific as the mindset of these terrorist organisations. The origin of extremism is the ideology and animosity for Pakistan being induced in upcoming generations through religious education. Extremism can only be defeated in principle when these generations are preached the teachings of the Holy Quran with accuracy, rather than misinterpretations. This strictly means that one does not get to cherry pick verses of the Holy Quran and start preaching them out of context to spread animosity and achieve personal gains.
This leads us to a bitter truth; we as a nation have done disservice to Islam till date. There is a major lack of even basic understanding of the Holy Quran even amongst the most literate in the society.
The responsibility of coaching the ‘Deen’ as a code of life is handed over to the religious seminaries or madrasas. The seminaries teach Islamic subjects such as Tafseer (Interpretation of the Holy Quran) without any scholarly monitoring. This has made them a hot topic of discussion in the national and international media. They are reminiscent of the ancient education system of Islam.
The number of madrasas in Pakistan recently crossed 35,000 from fewer than 300 since the country came into being. This stark comparison was made in a report issued in Karachi titled ‘The Madrasa Conundrum — The state of religious education in Pakistan’. The report was authored by lead researcher of the non-governmental research organisation, HIVE.
The heavy influx of students in the religious seminaries of the rural area is dependent on certain factors. The main factor remains the economic situation of a household. A majority of the population is living below the poverty line. Every household on average has one bread earner to feed four or five children. Due to economic pressure, the head of a household is bound to send one or two of his children off to the closest seminary. Basic needs of the children are covered in these seminaries that are funded by various sources. But I believe children are preached the teachings of the Holy Book out of context. Impressionable young minds are played around with so much that they actually think they could earn the ultimate prize by killing a handful of innocent citizens.
To sum up, my real concern is the growing number of seminaries in the country. These institutions need to be scrutinised for transparency and authenticity of their syllabi. It is imperative to understand that the war on terrorism cannot be won until the religious seminaries are monitored effectively. The agendas preached in seminaries remain grounded such as Islamic insurgence which is often misunderstood as ‘Jihad’ waged in various parts of the world. It is a tragedy that concepts such as affection and mercy abundantly present in the Holy Quran are often overlooked and not preached enough. The authorities need to look closely into this matter and take effective action. It is also the duty of every Muslim to read the Holy Quran with understanding and spread its teaching of love, affection and mercy.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1376599/religious-seminaries-pakistan/
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Pulverising the Roots of Terrorism
By M Ziauddin
07-Apr-17
The Lahore terror attack on Wednesday last in which four soldiers of the Pakistan Army lost their lives once again reinforces the general belief that the social and physical terror infrastructure in the country has by and large remained unscathed notwithstanding the notable successes of the Zarb-i-Azb or of the recently launched Raddul Fassad.
As a result of the successes of these military missions the frequency of terror attacks and the extent of their carnage have certainly come down greatly. But the ensuing successes of terror attacks in taking a terrible toll of security forces and the sectarian and minority targets seem to have increased in proportion.
The official rhetoric that follows such tragedies goes something like this: It was a suicide bombing planned in Afghanistan. The TTP trained perpetrator had travelled all the way from our war-torn neighbour to Lahore in Punjab or Sehwan in Sindh or wherever deep inside Pakistan (without having been apprehended on the way despite having been identified as a threat) with the relevant security agencies having been alerted to the possible terror threat being on the way and his general whereabouts well in time.
This is too laughable, to say the least. The purpose of this elaborate make-believe is clearly to cover up the failure of those responsible for the eradication and elimination of the social and physical terror infrastructure that still exists intact inside Pakistan and which provides the wherewithal for carrying out such seemingly lone-wolf attacks.
Indeed, it defies logic to think that a young man of 18-22 having just arrived from Afghanistan in one of Pakistan’s cities or towns could carry out such a deadly targeted attack successfully without local assistance and that too without a pre-planned plot hatched and perfected after several days and weeks of trial runs.
It is this infrastructure that needs to be pulverized if Pakistan wants to get rid of the menace of terrorism for good. But then it is next to impossible to even make a dent in this infrastructure without first eliminating the mind-set that has over-taken a critical mass of our population.
And this mind-set is not cultivated in the madrasas alone. Even our so-called public and private schools construct such a mind-set through not only the syllabus that is taught in these institutions but even most of the members of the faculty of these schools seem to have drunk from the same poisonous fountain.
So, the centre and the provinces urgently need to review key principles of shaping curriculum, and for developing it, there is a need to establish dedicated permanent research and educational centres. To question and to be able to think critically should be among the purposes of education.
The subjects of ‘citizenship’ and ‘civic education’ should be compulsorily added in primary-level institutions, especially public and private schools and madrasa; and the nurturing of a good citizen in the light of concepts drawn from Quaid-i-Azam’s August 11, 1947 speech. In fact this speech should be made part of the Constitution replacing the Objective Resolution.
Higher educational institutions, such as colleges, universities, and higher-tier madrasas, should uphold the modern requirements of research and critique, which in touch, should be accorded central status in the education system.
But abhorrence to research and critique is perhaps rooted in this obscurantism filled mind-set as our culturally influential elite continue to suffer from illiberal dogma, intolerance, bigotry and parochialism. This perhaps is the main reason why Pakistan is lacking in research activity.
Not only this. Since our cultural elite have developed an entirely puerile standard based on religious obscurantism against which they measure success in career and life, our research workers do not get the national recognition that they deserve.
Joel Mokyr, an eminent economic historian defines “culture” in his book (A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy) as “a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behaviour, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society.”
Although Enlightenment thinking was always a minority viewpoint, in early modern Europe, it was one held by culturally influential elite who became convinced that general progress through increased knowledge was both possible and desirable and that their new knowledge should be spread in order to enlighten the people.
The most important observation of Mokyr which needs to be studied in some depth in Pakistan concerns what he calls ‘culturally influential elite.’ And he mentions Thomas Becon and Isaac Newton as part of these culturally influential elite.
But then since Pakistan has been in a state of war now for nearly 40 years, most of our culturally influential elite tend to be military-related rather than art, literature, academia and other knowledge based intellectual subjects-related which has compoundedfurther the problems of militancy that we are facing today.
However, even on the military subject as well we seem to be missing the trees because of the forest as we have so far shown no inclination to probe the new concept of national security called the Comprehensive National Power (CNP), notable for being an original Chinese political concept.
The CNP is calculated numerically by combining various quantitative indices to create a single number held to measure the power of a nation-state. These indices take into account both military factors (known as hard power) and economic and cultural factors (known as soft power).
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/07-Apr-17/pulverising-the-roots-of-terrorism
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Politics of Military Courts
By Dr Ejaz Hussain
07-Apr-17
Whenever I would read a text that suggested Pakistani politicians were incompetent, corrupt and short-sighted, I tended to disregard it considering such a perspective to be part of a conspiracy of extra-parliamentary forces against our noble and visionary politicians and democratic political parties. However, my doctoral research has dawned on me the lingering dilemma of Pakistan’s democracy where all four of the martial laws imposed by military chiefs were supported by a section of politicians, along with civil bureaucracy and judiciary. This grim fact should suffice to hold political forces partly responsible for the chequered record of democratization in Pakistan.
The role of Pakistani politicians, especially from the party in power, in the recent (re)establishment of military courts speaks volumes about their parliamentary commitment, democratic vision and governing capability. The military courts are now a constitutional reality for the second time in a row. Thus, one may oppose such an entity on academic grounds but it’s hard to dispute its constitutionality given the fact that the parliament has legislated it. Additionally, the Supreme Court’s judgment in the petition challenging the 21st constitutional amendment that had led to the establishment of military courts in 2015 seems to have waned prospects for further legal brainstorming on the matter.
Nonetheless, for a political scientist, the way political parties approached one another and engaged in lengthy out-of-parliament deliberations ahead of the recent re-establishment of military courts was simply astounding. It was no small event when political parties finally took the matter to the parliament to amend the 1973 Constitution, after more than five rounds of multi-party sessions.
It was puzzling and fascinating at the same time, to see Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI), the worst opponent of the ruling PML-N, to have not only joined these parliamentary sessions but also supported the government over the passage of what now is termed as the 23rd constitutional amendment. It was bewildering to observe the politics of the Pakistan People’s Party. It showed its presence and consent in the National Assembly with relative ease, after fruitful bargaining with the PML-N and the powers that be, and approved the bill in the Senate after the lapse of a few days.
Ironically, the MQM also voted in support of the bill, along with the ANP that has lost some of its key leaders in terrorist attacks in the past. Though, the latter has not been in political limelight since its defeat in the 2013 general elections, it has had a consistent stance against terrorism. Importantly, however, the political attitude of PkMAP led by Mehmood Khan Achakzai was that of indifference to the appeals by its ally, the PML-N. Mr Achakzai not only registered his party’s disagreement with the purpose and process of legislation for extension of military courts, but also led his party to vote against the bill. On the one hand, such an approach reflects political and legal differences within Pakistan’s party system, and, on the other hand, it highlights that there is space in it for bargaining and belligerence, depending on the issue at hand. By voting against the bill, the PkMAP might have been successful in assuaging its core nationalist constituency in Balochistan. It remains to be seen to what extent the party may be able to walk with the PML-N in the weeks to come.
In view of the above, one may ask who got what in this affair. Indubitably, the PML-N government was successful in getting the 23rd constitutional amendment approved by the parliament. From the PML-N’s perspective, this course of action would help remove any lateral irritants and facilitate a smooth journey towards the next general elections. However, will the N-League get what it has in mind is yet to be seen in context of the Panama Leaks case. The party that has accumulated maximum benefits is the PPP. It can now cherish the fact that its associates such as Dr Aasim Hussain, Sharjeel Memon and model Ayyan Ali no longer have any constraints on their mobility. Moreover, PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari seems to have re-taken control of the party. He’s busy re-organising the party, especially in the Punjab. However, in order to stage a comeback, at least as a partner in a future ruling coalition in the centre, the PPP still has work cut out for itself.
Quite to the contrary, the PTI could not gain much from this affair. The party avoided popular criticism by becoming a part of the process. The religious political parties such as the JI and the JUI abstained from voting, clarifying their ideological position on the subject as well as avoiding unnecessary media rebuke.
Finally, the biggest winner in this affair was the military as its preference prevailed in the end. Overall, the political leadership of Pakistan came out of this as a loser for being unable to genuinely reform governance and justice regime.
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/07-Apr-17/politics-of-military-courts
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Dowry Anyone?
By Asha'ar Rehman
April 7th, 2017
YET another effort has been made, by an honourable judge of the Lahore High Court, to somehow address the scourge of dowry in Pakistani society. Hearing the case of a divorced woman who asked for a fair evaluation of the dowry she had brought to her then husband’s home the justice observed that the Nikahnama should have a column listing all that is given as dowry at the time a couple tie the knot.
The judge “directed the Punjab government to introduce a new legislation to incorporate dowry items in Nikahnama (marriage certificate) so the miseries of women litigants seeking recovery of their dowry after marital break-up can be reduced...”.
The judge said “the brides should also be educated and well informed about negative impacts of dowry and should be taught that they can lead a better life with more independence and happiness”. He advised “women to make bold moves towards exposing families demanding dowry using the help of the legal system”. He said the “legal system should be made more accommodative to make the brides and their family members comfortable”.
The court asked the law secretary to take the required course to have this legislation in place “at the earliest” which would shift the focus to the Punjab Assembly. The assembly must now deliberate long and hard, but a judge speaking with so much urgency on the topic of dowry is so much like old times when jahez was considered to be a pressing problem requiring immediate attention. The direction given speaks of the difficulties anyone asked to come up with a solution related to matters of dowry is immediately confronted with.
Society has accepted dowry as a necessary tradition that cannot be discontinued.
The dowry issue brings out so many contrasting sides to people and their preferences in life. Dowry is something to be ashamed of even as it is a source of pride, the kind that is flaunted at the most triumphant moment. The same set of people would be hiding it one moment in front of one particular group and not too long afterwards they might be found showing it off in front of another audience.
Given that the utmost secrecy is often maintained in the shifting of dower items to the home of the blessed ‘shurfas’ at the time of marriage it is difficult to see that there would be any volunteers filling in the new Jahez column in the Nikahnama. There will have to be some law forcing them to do so, which brings us back to the sad discussion about how existing laws aimed at curbing the practice are routinely flouted. The media was only allowed to flash images of the most expensive and ostentatious wedding in Punjab recently since the organisers of the event were sure they would get away with it.
Most shockingly, in so many instances the exercise to estimate the worth of dowry is undertaken only after signs of estrangement between the couple come to the surface. The Lahore High Court case mentioned here took up the plea of a woman who refused to accept a lower court’s evaluation of the riches she had brought for her husband’s pleasure over and above her own transfer to his house. She pleaded that the price tag put on the jahez items by the lower court was much smaller than the amount she claimed at the dissolution of her marriage.
I know this must have left a bad taste in the mouth of many sensitive souls but this was not at all an unusual occurrence. Money affairs feature as prominently at the end of a marriage as they do at its start. Quiet, uncomplicated settlements elude many and resorting to the courts for a resolution is routine.
There are laws that discourage the practice of giving and receiving dowry, but it is a problem that has long since been placed in a category which defies all attempts at reform. The entries in this category are best left unattended, at a comfortable distance from debate lest they turn into a source of collective pain and shame. There’s a sense of resignation with which society has accepted dowry as a necessary tradition that cannot be discontinued.
The moments when Pakistanis are shaken out of their apathy by a report on the ‘curse’ of Jahez are becoming less frequent. There are, of course, bits of news about a ‘bride’ being burnt over her inability to bring a dowry befitting the status and imagination of her in-laws. There are so many incidents of husbands and in-laws losing their cool at some point and satisfying their anger by snuffing out a fragile, defenceless life.
The newspapers are full of stories of torture and killing on account of an insufficient dowry. Quite often, the emphasis of those who highlight these ugly situations is on the violence it all culminates in. There are calls for protecting women against domestic violence. There are demands for — and some practical work has been done on this — ensuring proper treatment for victims of violence carried out because of the size of the dowry. There are not too many words spoken in anger against the scourge of dowry itself. It is certainly not like the past when the subject would be spoken about with so much passion and conviction.
There are no ready solutions to this question short of a miraculous overnight transformation where all people, without exception, suddenly discover the true meaning of dignity. The belief — there has to be such a belief to sustain civilisation — however, is that answers will come once the right amount of pressure has been created by a vibrant forward-looking debate by those who care. The Lahore High Court judge asking for the introduction of a new column in the Nikahnama has done his bit by reigniting a dead debate. It is now for others to join in and take up a challenge that all of us have been too afraid to face.
Source: dawn.com/news/1325334/dowry-anyone
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Ideas Are Dangerous
By Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
April 7th, 2017
IN 1928, the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini had established a vice-like grip on Italy, a country which only a few years earlier had seemed ripe for a working class revolution. Amongst the most prominent leaders of the Italian left, Antonio Gramsci was convicted of crimes against the state and sent to jail for the rest of his life. At his sentencing, the public prosecutor uttered the words: “For 20 years we must stop this brain from working.”
In the event, the fascists could not stop Gramsci’s brain from working, one that Mussolini had himself remarked was “unquestionably powerful”. Via his sister-in-law, Gramsci smuggled his writings out of jail for years, and the collection of his thoughts compiled as the Prison Notebooks has since become one of the most celebrated political treatises of modern times.
What was it about Gramsci that constituted such a threat to Mussolini and his thugs? Why was it necessary to “stop his brain from working”? Why, indeed, do ruling establishments everywhere go out of their way to not only physically target dissident thinkers but also discredit them?
The answer, quite simply, is that ideas are dangerous.
Progressives face a new wave of state repression.
In this country, like in Mussolini’s Italy, those on the left of the political spectrum have always been subject to political victimisation, whether through direct coercion or through propaganda that depicts them as traitors (and this includes being called enemies of the faith).
The Pakistani state had what was virtually a no-tolerance policy towards the left during the Cold War years, which was regularly justified by the fact that left-wing parties enjoyed the patronage of foreign states. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China’s embracing of globalisation, any pretence of Pakistani leftists being supported by external powers was done away with.
The events of 9/11 created new problems for Pakistani officialdom. The erstwhile jihadi darlings of the ‘free world’ had to be reined in, at least enough so as to appease Washington and other Western capitals. Elements of the progressive community, still trying to come to terms with the end of 20th century communism and the structural changes in the global capitalist order, were actually supportive of the Pakistani state’s military-centric ‘solutions’ to what was now the world’s biggest problem, ‘terrorism’.
Indeed, the religious right had branded itself as the principled revolutionary force of the twenty-first era, opposed to imperialism and even, at times, suggesting that it wanted to challenge class domination (although it steered well clear of challenging patriarchy or ethnic-national oppression).
Amidst the confusion, there were still individuals, movements and organisations on the left that tried to make sense of it all; to clarify that the binary of Western imperialism vs Islamism was a false one; to establish that the state had not been democratised in favour of working people, women, ethnic and religious minorities; and to call attention to the manner in which ‘development’ and ‘counterterrorism’ were become catchwords for the new hegemonic ideology of the 21st century.
These ideas do not have great traction across the length and breadth of Pakistani society, largely because those who propagate them are weak, and often spend as much time fighting amongst themselves as with the perpetrators of the hegemonic ideology. Yet the handful of genuine people’s mobilisations to have emerged in Pakistan over the past couple of decades, on issues as diverse as housing for the urban poor, the rights of populations displaced by ‘development’ and war, privatisation of basic services and claims to land, water and other such livelihood sources — all of these have been fuelled by the ideas of this country’s long-suffering left.
Old habits die hard especially for state bureaucracies that are trained to be wary of even basic democratic impulses. So it is that an emaciated community of progressives who are critical of state and corporate power, not because they are enemies of the country, but because they are committed to the cause of its people, face a new wave of state repression.
Dr Riaz Ahmed’s jailing on a ridiculous charge of possessing a weapon was laced with a veiled invocation of much more serious charges that would make it impossible for him to walk the streets without being lynched by mobs. One would like to believe that his release on bail represents a shift in thinking within official circles. Yet the fact that others like Ghulam Dastagir and Baba Jan continue to languish in jails on trumped-up charges, while many others have disappeared without trace, suggests that change is not so easily forthcoming.
The left cannot pose any kind of existential threat to the state of Pakistan, and it is debatable if it ever did. Despite the fact that it is right-wing supremacist movements that are spreading hate and violence everywhere, the left’s ideas continue to be considered dangerous. To whom and why is not hard to understand.
Source: dawn.com/news/1325322/ideas-are-dangerous
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Bhutto’s Fading Legacy
By Imtiaz Alam
April 6, 2017
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto lives on in history, 38 years after his hanging at the hands of a most ruthless military dictator in what is now universally considered a ‘judicial murder’.
History has absolved Bhutto. But it is yet to erase the blot of an immense moral burden on the conscience of the judiciary. Times have changed and the undying Bhutto’s legacy gradually fades without being rejuvenated by a dynastic third-generation Bhutto Bilawal Zardari.
You can revisit Bhutto’s memory by commemorating his martyrdom and ritually visiting his mausoleum, but you can’t meet the challenges of your times by just parroting praises for the great man. It is no longer a Bhutto and anti-Bhutto divide, even though social stratification widens between the deprived and the privileged. But the PPP under a mimicking Bilawal or Machiavellian patriarch, Asif Zardari, is just struggling to keep its head above the political waters. No doubt, Zardari played a crucial role in the transition-to-democracy period and helped transfer power from the presidency to parliament by showing the door to Gen Musharraf, and with the passage of 18th Amendment. Zardari succeeded in surviving in power, but at the cost of the PPP’s popular image; this brought a once most popular party to its knees in the last general elections.
It was the dynamic and heroic Benazir Bhutto who held high the social-democratic flag in post-cold war times, somewhat in the footsteps of the New Labour of Great Britain. She bravely picked up the fight against the reactionary dictatorship of Gen Ziaul Haq. Where Bhutto gave us the 1973 constitution, Benazir Bhutto (BB) wrote yet another glorious chapter in the long struggle for democracy and constitutional rule against successive military dictatorships. Unlike Asif Zardari and her son, BB earned the mantle of leadership in her own right while standing up to unimaginable hardships. Whatever you say about her political manoeuvres or the NRO, she again paved the way for democracy and gave the PPP a new ideological cause by firmly standing up to the threat of violent religious extremism.
On his 38th death anniversary, Z A Bhutto was less enthusiastically remembered by his depleting worshipers as they now have less hope in the current leadership, which is struggling with its bad image over almost nine years of bad governance in Sindh. The PPP was once famous for its critical popular political culture. That, it seems, has now been buried under the arrogant denial of malpractices of some of its leaders. Rather, the party shows no sign of repentance over the alleged corruption of some of its blatantly corrupt leaders.
Instead of sidelining those who brought a bad name to the unblemished record of the founders, the party firmly stands behind them. It looks ridiculous when Bilawal – a decent and thoughtful young man – attacks the Sharifs on corruption charges while standing with his party’s former prime ministers known for their poor record and some kleptomaniacs.
Bhutto – himself a clean, distinguished intellectual, visionary and strong administrator – gave us the most talented and clean cabinet in Pakistan’s history. He was a populist and a patriotic and strong leader who, in fact put together a broken and dismembered Pakistan and gave the downtrodden of this land the consciousness and strength to stand up to tyranny and exploitation. He believed in the people and undertook reforms to alleviate the plight of the poor and also made Pakistan’s defence impregnable. Ironically, his national security paradigm holds the ground till today, even though it helped build a national security state that flourishes on the marginalisation of civil society.
Though Bhutto’s land reforms failed to make the peasantry owners of the piece of land they cultivate, he did raise consciousness among the rural poor on their rights. He built a huge public sector under his state-socialist model, but at the cost of not only big business but also small businesses. Bhutto’s greatest mistake was the compromise that he expeditiously made with the religious right. That, however, could not save him from the wrath of what is known as the mullah-military-bazaar alliance. Bhutto’s achievements and endeavours far outweigh his weaknesses and mistakes – of which there were many.
Bhutto’s popular politics and struggle were too short and less troubling compared to that of his worthy successor. BB had to fight against two dictatorships and the strong political and ideological legacies of Gen Ziaul Haq. She learned from the authoritarian mistakes of her father and reinvented the PPP in her own humanist image to suit her own times, without forgetting to address the PPP’s strong constituency among the poor and the social-liberal intelligentsia.
Like her brave father, BB took on the forces of religious extremism and terrorism and provided an alternative narrative to make Pakistan a truly democratic and enlightened country which is at peace with its neighbours. It was too tragic to see her die at the hands of forces of extremism and authoritarianism. BB was far more democratic, humanistic and visionary than any other politician in Pakistan. She was the last leader of a generation that remained committed to social idealism and liberal-democratic values in a country where violent extremist and conservative paradigms prevail.
Though the PPP remains committed to human, civil and political rights, it has lost touch with its pro-people ethos and popular aspirations of the masses. Under Zardari, the PPP is now a party of the feudal elite – entirely dedicated to power politics, regardless of peoples’ expectations. The emergence of young Bilawal on the political scene is clouded by the over-arching shadows of his father. Bilawal doesn’t know how to chart his own path different from that of his father’s. No doubt, he needs his father as much as BB needed her mother to make her way forward. And Bilawal’s on-and-off ‘launches’ have damaged his prospects to rebuild the PPP from the ashes of past glory.
As a student of politics, Bilawal should be able to discern the difference between the times and pursuits of his grandfather and mother and find his own grounds. BB gave the PPP a lot that was different from her father. That is what Bilawal needs to do as well if he is really serious about his political career and the future of a PPP that is receding from the national scene. You can’t be a vanguard of a popular social-liberal party on the ‘strength’ of feudal landlords in the backyard of Sindh.
In its special supplement on Bhutto, the PPP did not bother to say a word about what it intends to do. The party’s intellectual bankruptcy is quite obvious as is the alarming loss of touch with the masses and their needs. There is a large space for a popular social-democratic centre-left party in the present circumstances. And Bilawal, despite his progressive inclination, is not finding enough room in his party to come forward and fill the void that the PPP has itself created.
Under the burden of bad governance, the young PPP chairperson cannot move forward with his muddle-headedness. The PPP has to decide which side of the social and ideological divide it stands on if it has to survive as a party of the people.
Source: thenews.com.pk/print/196715-Bhuttos-fading-legacy
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URL: https://www.newageislam.com/pakistan-press/religious-seminaries-pakistan-new-age/d/110674