OSCILLATING BETWEEN POPULISM AND DEMOCRACY: POLITICS OF ZULFIQAR ALI BHUTTO AND THE RIGHT WING RELIGIOUS PARTIES

Abstract

The anti-Ayub movement marked a pivotal stage in Pakistan’s history that could have potentially turned the polity into a genuine democracy. It was the reactionary political field during the 1970s that sabotaged the democratic project. The political parties turned reactionary, especially the socialist Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) morphed into a rightest and authoritarian political force, significantly damaging Pakistan's democratic process and created an environment that helped in the rise of more reactionary politics. Religious parties heavily relied on religious populism to counter Z.A Bhutto making the political landscape fertile for anti-people polity. By using primary and secondary sources and exploring some of untapped vernacular sources the study explores why both Bhutto and religious parties turned more reactionary and missed an historic opportunity to make democracy the politics of common sense, in Gramscian terms. The study employs populism as a major theoretical grid underpinning the analysis of political landscape. It is significant to explore the politics of the 70s because it was the tumultuous decade that largely influenced the democratic trajectory of the coming decades by derailing the fledgling democracy in the country.