IT has been said before and the remark will likely haunt the PPP in future — its activities in Lahore and Punjab on the whole are far higher on ceremony than the occasion demands.

As the party begins the 50th year of its life, there are calls that it must reorganise itself at the basic level. It could spend the year reorganising and reforming its cadres at the district level and maybe there will be some kind of a party to celebrate by the half-century mark in November 2017.

Lahore is Z.A. Bhutto’s city. It is the birthplace of the PPP. It is the land of the original jiyala such as Jahangir Badar to whom was dedicated the meeting held to mark the party’s 50th foundation day. The more these lines are repeated the more the party appears to be an outfit that has run out of ideas.

The trends are far too obvious to be turned around with mere a change of tone. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari spoke to a gathering of his workers on the PPP’s foundation day in the safe confines provided by Malik Riaz. That in itself is quite a halter that the current leadership has voluntarily placed around their necks. It is a big enough sign of the party’s limitations in the eyes of its workers should anyone want to talk to them.

As the party begins the 50th year of its life, there are calls that it must reorganise itself at the basic level.

The privileged Bahria Town territory is where the PPP has held — ‘has been forced to have’ — most of its big events in the last few years. Every now and then there are assurances that, in what would signify a real turn for the better, the venue will change soon and the PPP leadership will be able and willing to mingle with the people at large. That has not happened and it is routine for the party to call off its public functions and return to work from its ‘underground’ base.

The cancelled meetings far outnumber the small gatherings that the PPP has managed to organise here, that too, at long intervals. It has absolutely no presence in Lahore bar one or two small areas where the jiyalas are not yet quite prepared to fold their banner and disperse. They are more likely to be the subject of the news that must report rampant hunger and indiscipline at the dining table following a party convention than be a source of inspiration, a role model for future political workers — as was the case sometime ago.

The image of the jiyala that PPP vows to rediscover in all its past glory and all its past relevance is that of a simpleton if not an outright nincompoop who allowed himself to be exploited emotionally. There was a time when the jiyala enjoyed sympathy even when it was increasingly tough for the more aware to respect this particular version of a political worker.

There is no concept at all today of an activist offering support selflessly and unconditionally in a world that has since realised that the leaders are actually there to govern well beyond the ceremony thrust upon them by the times, courtesy the sacrifices of their elders. There must be some self-interest or it is all a myth.

The choice of venue itself, however forced it might have been, was particularly jarring this time given the recent changes in the party’s Punjab chapter. The expectation amongst those who still have some hope about the return of the PPP option was that, at the start of the 50th year of the party, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari will give a road map or at least provide broad hints about what his programme will be based on.

At his presidential speech at the party’s foundation day all he said was that his will be a progressive manifesto. That is not quite the moon the diehard fans had been waiting for him to deliver out of the blue. That is a lot of hot air, again and a probable excuse would be that the party has just had a change of leadership in the Punjab chapter and it will take the new office-bearers some time to get going at the desired speed.

That is precisely the point: Why did it take the PPP ages to understand that Qamaruzzaman Kaira and Nadeem Afzal Chan were the best combination it could come up with at the provincial level? The delay indicated that the party for so long could still be in two minds about which option to use: committing itself totally to the ‘popular’ as represented by Messrs Kaira and Chan as against persisting ‘carefully’ in pursuance of the old system of building local alliances with so-called electables.

It would be in the PPP’s interest to go over the list of its candidates in various elections, with a focus on Punjab. The party has been forced more frequently than any other group to replace its old nominees with new ones. This point will be sufficient to prove what harm the PPP was causing itself by depending so heavily on past winners of polls to pull itself out of its current predicament.

The fact that the PTI was by far the preferred choice of all those who couldn’t be accommodated in the PML-N for one reason or another should have pushed the PPP faster towards trying the popular route, as opposed to indulging in the politics of locally influential figures. It is most certainly easier said than done but then so dire is the state of the PPP in Punjab that it ought to be thinking in revolutionary terms.

Maybe the adjustment has been made in earnest and, win or lose, the PPP will be found doing something worth its name in the coming 12 months before people decide whether it has the stamina or justification to continue beyond the half-century point away from its home ground of Sindh. The party must gain speed. At the present rate it will take the procession many decades to escape the rich man’s mysterious mansion.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2016