The PPP's recent victory in Gilgit-Baltistan has reinforced a familiar Pakistani narrative: electoral success as proof of effective governance. Supporters cite ballot box victories as public confidence; critics argue elections reveal less about performance than about entrenched elites mobilising patronage, securing establishment blessings, and preserving their grip on power.
That debate matters acutely in Sindh, where the PPP has governed uninterrupted for eighteen years and routinely cites its mandates as vindication. Yet when those mandates are examined alongside the province's social and economic outcomes, a more troubling question emerges: what if repeated electoral success is not evidence of good governance, but a symptom of a system designed to keep powerful interests in power and perpetuate the status quo regardless of results?
Any comparison across different political ecosystems comes with caveats. Singapore is a compact city-state (population: around 6 million) that never had to contend with a feudal rural hinterland, inter-provincial resource battles, a restive ethnic opposition in its largest metropolis, or federal meddling. Lee Kuan Yew governed a small island with a unitary structure and a ruthless developmental state; the PPP has ruled Sindh within a fractured federation, under IMF programmes, through waves of terrorist violence and climate disasters. These contexts are not identical. Yet the gap in outcomes is so vast, and the leadership philosophies so diametrically opposed, that the comparison remains instructive—not as a mechanical template, but as a mirror held up to the choices within a provincial government's control.
In June 1959, Lee Kuan Yew inherited a swampy, resource-starved trading post: 13.5 per cent unemployment, 52 per cent literacy, per capita GNP of roughly $1,240, and 70 per cent of the population living in slums. Ethnic riots tore through the streets. Separation from Malaysia in 1965 was a political amputation—Lee wept on television—and the impending British military withdrawal threatened 20 per cent of GDP overnight. The island had no army, no hinterland, no oil. By any rational measure, Singapore should have failed.
It did not fail because Lee made a decision that seems obvious in retrospect and is rarely made in practice: the government existed to transform the lives of its people, and every institution would be built around that purpose. He gave the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau prosecutorial teeth and political insulation—it could investigate ministers, and did. He recruited civil servants by examination and paid them enough that corruption was a bad trade. He built the Housing Development Board as a delivery machine, not a patronage mechanism. When a policy failed, he scrapped it. When an official stole, he was prosecuted regardless of whose nephew he was.
By 1990, unemployment had fallen to 1.7 per cent, literacy crossed 90 per cent, and per capita GNP rose to around US$13,000. Lee built systems that kept working after he left the room. A teacher was evaluated on the results and held accountable if students could not read. A civil servant who accepted a bribe faced prison, not a lateral transfer.
Now consider Sindh under the PPP—eighteen uninterrupted years from 2008 to 2026, over a province that is no barren rock. Karachi alone generates roughly 25 per cent of Pakistan's GDP. The province commands the fertile Indus delta, cotton, rice, natural gas, coal, and 300 kilometres of coastline. Development budgets exploded from under Rs 90 billion in 2008–09 to Rs 1.018 trillion in 2025–26. Cumulative provincial spending exceeds Rs 7.5 trillion. The PPP can point to thirty public universities (up from ten), expanded cardiac facilities in Karachi, and its most trumpeted achievement—the Thar coal project, now delivering over 2,600 megawatts to the national grid, a genuine contribution to Pakistan's energy security.
Key postings in land revenue offices, government departments, and police stations are made at the behest of the favoured zamindar
But then look at Tharparkar itself, the district sitting on top of that celebrated coal. Its poverty rate is 76.9 per cent, the highest of any district in Pakistan outside Balochistan. Maternal mortality stands at 298 deaths per 100,000 live births, the worst in Sindh. Literacy in parts of the district falls as low as 24 per cent. When the plants were built, villagers were displaced while skilled roles went to outsiders and Chinese contractors. The electricity travels hundreds of kilometres to light up Karachi and Lahore. The people living above the coal still fetch water from brackish hand pumps in the dark. Thar is no rebuttal to the critique of PPP governance. It is its sharpest illustration: resources extracted and exported upward, while the human beings above them remain among the most deprived in Pakistan.
To be fair, the party navigated a genuine catastrophe. The 2010 floods wrecked the province. The 2022 super-floods killed nearly 800 people, affected over twelve million, and damaged or destroyed over 1.9 million homes in Sindh alone. Karachi terrorism, runaway inflation, and COVID hammered every province. These were body blows, not invented excuses.
Yet the data is unforgiving. When the PPP took power in 2008, Sindh's literacy rate stood at roughly 58 per cent. The Pakistan Economic Survey 2024–25 reports it at 57.54 per cent—fractionally lower after eighteen years and trillions in education budgets. Punjab, starting from a comparable baseline, has climbed to 66 per cent. Nearly half of Sindh's children remain out of school. By 2024, only 39 per cent of Grade 3 students could read a simple story. Two-thirds leave primary school unable to read a paragraph.
How is this possible after an education budget that grew from Rs 111 billion in 2012–13 to Rs 405 billion in 2024–25? Because the money never reached classrooms. In 2023, it emerged that 56,000 teachers in Sindh attended school only once or twice a month. The province has an estimated 7,000 ghost schools—buildings on the government's books, empty in practice, their headmasters existing as line items in a patronage ledger.
In 2024–25, the school session was reduced to a semester because the Education Department ran out of textbooks, and matriculation students sat exams on a truncated syllabus because the session started four months late. This is not a system failing under pressure. It is a system that was never designed to educate anyone.
Water and sanitation compound the indictment. In Qambar-Shahdadkot and Tharparkar, women walk kilometres to fetch brackish water from hand pumps or tankers that arrive irregularly, if at all. In Dadu, canals meant to be desilted annually had not been touched for years before the 2022 floods turned controlled flow into a catastrophic breach. A barrages officer in Sukkur once put the governing philosophy plainly: "We manage elections, not flows."
Sindh's multidimensional poverty headcount rose from 43.1 per cent in 2014–15 to 45.2 per cent in 2019–20—the only province in Pakistan where poverty increased over that period. Punjab fell. Trillions spent. Poverty rising.
To understand why, go to a cotton field in Sanghar rather than a budget speech in Karachi. A hari—a sharecropper—does not own the land he farms. Nearly 60 per cent of Sindh's peasants are sharecroppers; a survey across eight districts found that 84 per cent of rural households own no cultivable land. The landlord controls the hari's credit, irrigation water, children's school placement, and very often the local police station. On election day, no weapon is needed. The landlord simply reminds the hari of everything that can be withheld. The vote is delivered. The PPP wins. The landlord collects his reward—a party ticket, a ministry, immunity—and the cycle locks shut for another term.
But electoral dominance is not the same as popular enthusiasm. The PPP's longevity owes as much to opposition failure as to its own machinery. The PML-N has never treated Sindh as a serious political battlefield. The PTI, for all its urban energy in Karachi, never built the district-level infrastructure to challenge feudal networks. Electables in Sanghar or Larkana have had little choice but to align with the PPP—not because the party has earned their loyalty, but because no other major party has given them a reason to leave. The PPP's grip is therefore as much a product of opposition neglect as of its own design.
This is not a metaphor. It is the mechanism. According to human rights activists, all 23 districts have been distributed by the PPP leadership among landlords who are sitting or former MPAs and MNAs. Key postings in land revenue offices, government departments, and police stations are made at the behest of the favoured zamindar. Officers who refuse are transferred. In Sanghar alone, 15 assistant commissioners were transferred in two years.
The PPP's dominance is not simply votes from below—it is protection from above
What makes this arrangement politically ingenious—and morally grotesque—is that the PPP simultaneously positions itself as the heir of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, champion of the dispossessed. The party that sings roti, kapra aur makaan spent eighteen years in government and, in 2013, amended the Sindh Tenancy Act to remove the clause protecting haris from forced labour. When the Sindh High Court struck down those amendments in 2019, the PPP-led government appealed to the Supreme Court—fighting to preserve the legal scaffolding of bonded servitude. The party of Bhutto went to court to protect a landlord's right to extract unpaid work from Pakistan's poorest people.
Thirty-odd families—the Bhuttos, Zardaris, Talpurs, Jatois, Chandios, Makhdooms and others—have treated Sindh's districts as personal fortresses. Party tickets go to feudal lords who deliver votes; they receive control over local appointments and immunity; the poor receive, every five years, another promise of roti, kapra aur makaan that eighteen years and Rs 7.5 trillion have not fulfilled.
The PPP's standard reply is electoral. Four consecutive provincial mandates, it argues, prove that Sindh trusts it. The data demolishes this. An analysis of the 2018 general elections found that 37 out of 39 rural National Assembly seats in Sindh—excluding Karachi—were won by feudal families or their political allies. That is 95 per cent of rural Sindh's national representation controlled by the same landed class that controls irrigation water, harvest loans, and police stations. These are not election results. They are a census of capture.
Agricultural income taxation is constitutionally a provincial subject. Sindh has had full legal authority for eighteen years to tax the vast landholdings of the families who dominate its legislature. It has not done so. The Federal Board of Revenue's Parliamentarians' Tax Directory for 2019 showed 312 parliamentarians collectively declaring Rs 9.52 billion in income while paying Rs 408 million in tax—an effective rate of 4.28 per cent, at a time when dozens of legislators paid between Rs 1,000 and Rs 10,000 in income tax for the entire year.
Asif Ali Zardari declared Rs 136 million and paid Rs 2.2 million. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari declared Rs 29.66 million—including agricultural income—and paid Rs 535,000. A schoolteacher in Sukkur or Dadu, whose salary is deducted at source, pays a higher effective rate than the families who govern the province in the name of the poor.
The arrangement is self-sealing: electables deliver votes; the PPP rewards them with power and tax exemptions that keep their economic dominance intact. The provincial treasury is built instead on the backs of Karachi's salaried middle class, while vast agricultural estates contribute almost nothing.
An election is only as free as the choices available to the voter. When a man casting a ballot depends on his landlord for the harvest loan, the school place, police indifference, and irrigation water, he is not exercising free choice. He is performing a transaction whose terms were set long before polling day. Calling that a mandate is like calling a confession extracted under duress a voluntary statement.
Feudal influence is only half the story. The PPP's electoral longevity has also been underwritten by a quiet arrangement with the establishment in Islamabad. The party delivers what the establishment needs most: a stable, pliant Sindh, and a cooperative national posture—holding the presidency, anchoring coalition arithmetic, providing Senate numbers on demand. In return, Islamabad looks away. Accountability cases stall. Rivals find the institutional wind against them. The PPP's dominance is not simply votes from below—it is protection from above. Voters in Sanghar did not choose this. They inherited it.
A party genuinely winning on performance would have no reason to appeal to the Supreme Court to preserve forced labour, no reason to transfer every honest officer who declines to serve the local zamindar, no reason to leave vast agricultural estates untaxed, and no reason to keep local government deliberately weak. The PPP suppresses every mechanism that could produce accountability because accountability—not conspiracy—is the real threat to its power. Electoral victories built on dependency, exemption, and arrangement are not a vindication of governance. They are its most damning indictment.
Lee built institutions insulated from personal interference; the PPP built a system where every institution—police, bureaucracy, schools, courts—is subordinate to the same feudal calculation. Lee recruited the civil service on merit; the PPP staffs it on loyalty, producing a bureaucracy docile enough to serve the system and dysfunctional enough to serve no one else.
In January 2026, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari alleged that "some forces" were conspiring to strip Sindh of its resources. The alibi has genuine soil—Pakistan's federal-provincial balance has always been contested. But the 18th Amendment gave the provinces more fiscal autonomy than ever before. The Sindh Revenue Board grows at 20 per cent annually. The resources are already provincial. The only question after eighteen years is what has been done with them.
The answer is in Sanghar, where a Hari votes as his landlord instructs and his children attend a school that opens twice a week. It is in the 2013 Assembly session where PPP legislators quietly deleted the words protecting a landless peasant from forced labour. It is in the untaxed acres of feudal estates, Dadu's undesilted canals, Tharparkar's dry taps, and 56,000 teachers drawing salaries for work they perform once a month.
Lee Kuan Yew looked at a swampy island with nothing and built a state that served its people. The PPP looked at a province with everything—the Indus, Karachi's economy, coal, gas, coastline, and Rs 7.5 trillion in public money—and built a state that serves itself. That choice, made and remade every five years across eighteen years, is not a failure of capacity. It is a success of design.
Sindh's potential has not been stolen by fate. It has been governed, with great precision and at enormous public expense, for the benefit of the people doing the governing. The ledger is clear, and it is unforgiving.