Zardari urges nation to follow Bhuttoism philosophy

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In a message on the 80th birthday of the country’s first directly elected prime minister falling on January 5, the co-chairman said, “Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a colossus, who towered over national politics for more than four decades”.

“By undoing an iniquitous status quo and snatching power from the elite and giving it into the hands of the masses, Bhutto had become a legend in Pakistan around whose name the country’s politics still revolves,” he said.

At a time when dictatorship had brought disintegration and defeat to the nation in 1971, Bhutto picked up the pieces of a truncated Pakistan to build it anew, raised the morale of a defeated and demoralised people, recovered 5,000 square miles of territory and brought back tens of thousands of prisoners of war, he said.

“It is a measure of his greatness that today the politics of the country revolves around his name. A brave and dauntless leader that he was, he walked to the gallows rather than accept military dictatorship” he said adding, “He shall live forever in the pages of history.”

Zardari said former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto helped the people shape their own destiny. “The unanimous federal, democratic and representative Constitution of 1973, the nuclear programme, the OIC summit of 1974 in Lahore, Karakoram Highway, Port Qasim, Kamrah Aeronautical Complex and Heavy Mechanical Complex, fundamental rights through habeas corpus, passport to every Pakistani, and land reforms today stand as silent monuments to his memory.”

It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who established Azad Kashmir as an autonomous area with its own president, prime minister and judiciary, and gave Balochistan provincial status, he said.

The president recalled that tens of thousands of people were arrested, thousands killed, hundreds whipped and tortured, as they rallied around the Quaid-e-Awam in a bid to save his life and then carry on his struggle for a modern, democratic and developed Pakistan, free from exploitation and obscurantism.

He said Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a beacon for the peasants and workers, youth and women, and indeed to all those dispossessed and disadvantaged.

The PPP Co-Chairman said, “As the nation pays tribute to one of its greatest sons, let us join hands to defeat militancy and extremism, and move forward in the spirit of federalism, democracy, and egalitarianism, which he lit through his example of courage in the defence of principles and ideals.”