Bhutto scion campaigns to be PM
thatta — His mother was assassinated on the campaign trail and his grandfather was executed by a military dictator, but that has not prevented Bilawal Bhutto Zardari from seeking the job they both held: prime minister of Pakistan.
Oxford-educated and single, 29-year-old Bilawal is campaigning himself for the first time, traversing the sprawling plains of his native Sindh province to try to revive the fortunes of his struggling, left-of-centre Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) ahead of a July 25 general election.
He was still in university when his mother, two-time prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in 2007 as she campaigned to restore democracy after military rule. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, also a prime minister, was hanged after being deposed in a military coup.
“I didn’t choose this life, I didn’t actively go out and pursue it. My mother always used to say that she didn’t choose this life, it chose her. In the same way I feel like it applies to me,” Bilawal told Reuters, as he stood on the roof of his open-top, 20-foot-high bullet-proof bus.
Asked if he is ever afraid while campaigning, he answered briefly: “No”. He then pivoted to discussing a “climate of fear” in the leadup to the elections that some activists blame on Pakistan’s powerful military.
In one of the first interviews since being named the PPP’s prime ministerial candidate, he also criticised fellow Oxford graduate and opposition leader Imran Khan — a potential coalition partner.
Flanked by supporters on either side of the single-lane highway, Bilawal was showered with rose petals as he waved to thousands of people who waited to catch a glimpse of the youngest of the political dynasty that many call the Pakistani equivalent of the Kennedys.
Despite the feel-good feeling in the crowds, election time is always tense in Pakistan, which has been ruled by the military for almost half of the 70 years since independence.
The outgoing Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government has accused the military and courts of playing a role in the ouster of prime minister Nawaz Sharif last year and helping Imran’s PTI political party. Imran, a former cricket captain of Pakistan, denies the ac-
cusation and calls the PML-N a graft-ridden “mafia”.
And overshadowing all this is the fear that the election is being engineered by the “establishment”, a euphemism for Pakistan’s much feared military and intelligence top brass, along with some senior civil servants and judges.
The military has repeatedly denied that it interferes in modernday politics. “I think that there is absolutely a history in Pakistan of an over-active role for our establishment and the Pakistan Peoples Party firmly believes that should not be the case,” Bilawal said, when asked about the military’s
involvement in politics. “There is absolutely a feeling that certain candidates are feeling pressurised, are feeling certain political parties are being supported in ways that they shouldn’t be,” he said. “I believe everyone should believe in the people of Pakistan, trust the people of Pakistan to make their own choices.”
His convoy started in the town of Thatta, the medieval capital of Sindh, and was later headed north to the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, hoping to revive the vote base it lost in the 2013 polls, when it finished second. —