NEWSMAKER: Bilawal Bhutto Zardari

Training a young mind

As a teenager, all Bilawal Zardari wanted was to be a regular guy. He confided to Dawn when he was 16, while sitting by the seaside after visiting his father in jail, that he missed being able to play cricket.

He couldn't understand how his father could be in jail for eight years without really being accused of anything and said, with the unswerving faith of a child, that most of Pakistan's problems could be solved if there was justice and democracy.

Neither are exactly round the corner and reacting to Bhutto-Zardari's appointment as chairman of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) a blogger asked rather plaintively: "How can a party promote democracy but be run like a monarchy?"

There is little doubt that at 19, others, not Bilawal, are going to run the PPP. His father Asif Zardari indicated quite clearly who that was going to be: not Makhdoom Fahim who has been running the party for the last eight years that the Bhutto family has been abroad, nor even the fledgling Punjab wing of the party whose role Zardari senior was so quick to underline.

He told reporters not to question Bilawal too closely; remarked crisply to a Pakistani journalist (who are as pesky, if not more, as Indian journalists) that the will in which Benazir Bhutto had supposedly bequeathed the leadership of the PPP to her husband, who in turn had gifted it to the son, was a private document and could not be shared with anyone.

He also said that the PPP would contest elections. Legally, the PPP does not have a chairman because Bilawal is not yet old enough.

But there is absolutely no one in the PPP "" yet "" who will question the Bhutto family's claim to its leadership.

In Facebook, the social networking site, Marium Ghouri of Pakistan wrote about Bilawal: "He is soo cute... I have been dying to have a closer look at him...! I'm worried about him... he might not be safe in politics after what happened to his mother. Cute Guy".

To his friends at Oxford in the autumn, he was Bilawal Lawalib, many not realising his second name was just his first, spelt backwards. As a history fresher at Christ Church college, where he started out this year, he just wanted to be a normal teenager and wrote to a friend to change her plans. ""S***w birghton [sic] come to Dubai!!" he said. To another friend, he wrote: "I envy your freedom."

Obviously to his doting father, Bilawal can do no wrong. Asif Zardari said that when his son got news that his father had had a heart attack, he went to take his exams from the hospital and maxed them. And probably because he knows his father through fable much more than in reality, he hero worships him.

Dawn asked him if he discussed problems with his sisters. He said: "My middle sister doesn't talk about it a lot but my younger sister asks me and I tell her that we have to be strong and one day he (Asif) will be free and will be with us."

Of course, others in Pakistan, especially those who are old enough to recall the tenure of the Bhutto-Zardaris, have different views about his father, despite a gruff sympathy for the child. Those comments are too graphic to be reproduced here. At this point, with emotions running high, it is hard to say how Bilawal will adapt to his new summer job.

Of course he will change. But will Pakistan politics? The jury is still out.