Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari on Wednesday staked claimed to Pakistani metropolis Karachi.
Delivering a speech in connection with the party’s founding anniversary, Bilawal said the PPP was a party representative of the Federation. As such, Karachi he said, was also very much the party’s. Felicitating party activists for flooding Nishtar Park — the venue of the address, the PPP chairman said a PPP jiyala (activist) among those present at the venue will very soon be named the mayor of the city. This, he said, was the party’s right.
Bilawal then proceeded to invoke the combined legacies of former prime ministers Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir Bhutto over the course of his address. The PPP, he said, has successful chased away three dictators over its history.
Zulfikar, Bilawal said, had rehabilitated a dismembered Pakistan. He sticked to his stance, Bilawal said and never took a “U-turn” in a thinly-veiled jibe at former prime minister Imran Khan. He simply did not budge even at the cost of his own life, the PPP chairman said.
This very legacy, Bilawal said, had been carried forward by Benazir. Benazir, he said, had not chosen to closet herself in a residence after the 2007 Karsaz bombing and address party workers via video conferencing in a not so subtle dig at Khan. Conspiracies, he said, were hatched against her time and again in actuality unlike the false narrative being proliferated these days. Never once, Bilawal said, she had resorted to politics of hate even then.
Benazir was assassinated in broad daylight in Rawalpindi, he said. Even then, Bilawal said, the party displayed exemplary patience and refrained from indulging in politics of vengeance. “I too could have very well instructed PPP jiyalas (activists) to ransack the Presedential Palace and demanded former president Pervez Musharraf’s head be delivered to me. But of course I did not. We have not been reared on politics of hate,” he said
