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 The Pakistan People's Party: Rise to Power
Product Details:
Author: Philip E. Jones | ISBN: 0-19-579966-6 | Format: Hardcover | Pages: 543 | Weight: 2.06 lbs | Pub. Date: 2003 | Publisher: Oxford University Press
DESCRIPTION
The best chance for a political leader to permanently curb the power of Pakistan's military bureaucratic oligarchy occured in December 1971, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was named President and Chief Martial Law Administrator. Two unprecedented developments of enormous consequence had occured in Pakistan. First in 1970 elections, Bhutto had led his Pakistan People's Party to victory in the country's key province, Punjab, by galvanizing the common man behind his programme of Islamic socialism and promises of roti, kapra, makan ('bread, clothing, housing'). Never before had the rural peasant or urban worker so broken with his customary leadership, the rural landlord and the urban union godfather, to assert his independent political rights as he did in 1970. Second, in having lost East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and a war with India, the military was completely discredited.
The book's argument subscribes to the belief that the People's Party was a transitional political organization, in that it reflected both the passing age of elite politics and the new age of mass politics. The election victory of the PPP in the Punjab represented the breakthrough of the mass public into the political sphere, and signaled a fundamental and irreversible alteration in the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. The book includes a social and political analysis of the 1970 elections using polling station level data for Punjab.
The book includes several appendices covering the election results of 1970 and two hitherto unpublished interviews with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, one of which was conducted by the author just before Zia's coup.
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