The Search for a New Constituency

Abstract

On 22 October 1958, responding to a call from General Mohammad Ayub Khan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto joined Pakistan’s first military government as Minister in charge of the portfolios of fuel, power and natural resources. He was then thirty-one years old. The only son of Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, a wealthy and well-known landlord from Sind who himself had been active in politics, Zulfikar Ali had been carefully prepared for a career in politics. He was the heir to a powerful political empire that had been built by his father in central Sind. In this capacity, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was expected to look after the interests of his family and those of other large landed aristocrats of Sind and to help the relatively backward province of Sind catch up with the more advanced parts of Pakistan. These objectives were clearly in conflict with those political goals to which he began to subscribe as a member of that small but rapidly growing class of people who can perhaps be described as Pakistan’s urban intelligentsia. These objectives included a system of government based on institutions that offered political participation to a broad segment of the population, achievement of political balance between those who wielded power because of their access to sources of wealth and those who were potentially powerful because of their very large number, the right of the government to intervene when the markets failed to deliver equitably to all classes of people the additions to the wealth of a nation, and the need for the developing countries to come together and construct a new international economic order that would allow equality of opportunity to all nations and to all people.KeywordsArmed ForceInternational Economic OrderUrban Middle ClassisPolitical BaseSenior Civil ServantThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.