Bilawal: Scion of Bhutto dynasty makes political pitch as defender of Pakistani traditions

Jon Boone

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari steps out of mother Benazir's shadow by launching festival in Pakistan People's party's Sindh heartland

The heir to Pakistan's grandest political dynasty has seized on kite-flying, livestock races and Valentine's Day concerts in a bid to stake out an identity for himself as a defender of traditional culture against the rising tide of religious extremism in the country.

The activities are among more than a dozen events that will form part of a two-week cultural festival in February organised by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the 25-year-old son of the assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

The Sindh festival is being seen as the first major initiative undertaken by a young politician who until recently was little more than a symbolic figurehead for a party that reveres the Bhutto name.

Plans for the festival were announced at a glitzy event in Karachi on Monday night that owed more to a Silicon Valley gadget launch than the traditional rallies and campaign speeches that have made the Bhutto family's Pakistan People's party (PPP) a power in the land since his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, set it up in 1967.

To a backdrop of computer graphics put together with the help of friends from his university days at Oxford, Zardari paced across an outdoor stage at Karachi's Mohatta Palace gleefully taunting the religious right, which has campaigned against Valentine's Day and regards the ancient kite-flying festival of Punjab as inflected with Hindu tradition.

He warned that the growing influence of hardline Islamic sects originating in the Middle East was leading to people "passively accepting the Talibanisation of Pakistan".

"They are surrendering our culture, our history, our identity and our religion based on a lie cloaked in an imported, fictionalised version of Islam," he told the crowd.

Other plans include horse and cattle racing, which the government ended in 2006, and celebrations of Sufi music, which many hardline Muslims regard as counter to Islam with some extremists even attacking the shrines of Sufi saints.

The opening ceremony will take place at Mohenjo-Daro, the ancient ruins of one of the world's first cities.

Hosting a large kite-flying event in Karachi, the southern port and capital of Sindh, the PPP heartland, will also be seen as an affront to Lahore, the Punjabi metropolis that is the seat of the Bhuttos' great political rival, the faction of the Pakistan Muslim League controlled by the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif.

Despite long being renowned as the home of Basant, a springtime celebration marked by thousands of kites flown from the city's roofs, Lahore banned the popular event in 2005 following deaths and injuries caused by kite strings that some over-competitive enthusiasts coat with glass powder to cut their rivals' lines. Zardari vowed to strictly control kite-flying in Karachi, which will only be allowed with officially sanctioned kites on the city's long beachfront. The festival is being seen as a statement of independence and intent of a young politician who has yet to fully stamp his authority on a party that fell into the hands of his father, the former president Asif Ali Zardari, after his mother was killed by assassins while campaigning in 2007. Father and son have reportedly had disagreements in the past over party strategy and the former president stayed away from Monday's event. One senior PPP member close to Zardari said there was nearly a state of "civil war" within the family and that some of the party's old guard were uneasy about the young man's occasionally brash style. It's hard to imagine any other politician ripping open their shirt, as Bhutto did on Monday night to reveal the Sindh festival's logo – a Superman-style "S". Others might have shied away from his plan to finance some of the cost of the events by selling "heritage cards" for the chance of wining cash prizes – a lottery in all but name and therefore open to legal challenge.

In recent months Zardari has become increasingly vocal, speaking out against soaring inflation and against the government's far-reaching plans to privatise state-owned companies.

He has also become a pugnacious presence on Twitter, and could be seen Tweeting from his phone during his presentation on Monday, which he co-hosted with his sister Bakhtawar.

Although he qualified to stand for election on his 25th birthday in September he told the Guardian that he would remain outside parliament until 2018 – the likely year of the next general election.

The Oxford University graduate has been criticised before for his weak command of Urdu and his habit of spending much time outside Pakistan, where he is obliged to live under suffocating security in his family's fortress-like home in Karachi's Clifton district. One senior diplomat recently wondered whether Zardari was "too westernised" to become an effective leader of the party, which shot to power on its platform of socialist populism for the first time in the 1970s. On Monday he spoke to the invitation-only crowd in English, something organisers said was a deliberate decision to give himself more freedom and deny political opponents video clips that could be used against him in the campaigns to come.

Later this month he will revert to a more traditional style of politics when he addresses thousands of the party faithful who are expected to flock to the Bhutto family shrine in their hometown of Larkana to mark the sixth anniversary of his mother's death.