LARKANA: Pakistan Peoples Party-Workers (PPP-W) president Dr Safdar Abbasi has said that Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari is now “a story of the past”, and advised his son Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari to start reconstruction of his party being its chief, cautioning him that “he has got very limited time”.

Speaking to Dawn at his residence the other day, he observed that Mr [Asif Ali] Zardari had severely damaged and traumatised the PPP.

In reply to a question, he said he and other PPP old guards who preferred to quit the party over accepting Mr Zardari’s leadership never maligned him to the extent his close aide Dr Zulfikar Mirza did. “What is happening with the party today had been predicted by us seven years back,” he added.

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Dr Abbasi insisted that Mr Zardari alone was responsible for the situation and said members of the party’s central executive committee should also be blamed for keeping silent under his pressure. “Now the pendulum of politics has swung towards the army,” he said.

The PPP-W chief said he supported the PPP-PML-N ‘charter of democracy’ but saw Mr Zardari’s policy of reconciliation as ‘hypocrisy’. Commenting on Mr Zardari’s recent outburst against the army, he observed that he had since backed down from his stand considering the fact that the party’s CEC had endorsed a year’s extension in Rangers’ stay in Sindh.

Published in Dawn, July 25th, 2015

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