Bilawal Bhutto Zardari breaking the rules of how Pakistani politics is done

Jon Boone

Benazir Bhutto's heir behind two-week cultural festival that he says celebrates heritage and marks start of cultural fightback

With tongue-in-cheek videos mocking military rulers, acerbic tweets criticising opponents and musical extravaganzas on ancient ruins, Pakistan has never seen anything like the political debut of Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

The 25-year-old is gradually taking up the mantle of his mother, the assassinated former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and seems set on breaking all the rules on how politics is traditionally done in the country. Rather than rushing to find a seat in parliament after meeting the age qualification for election last September, Bhutto Zardari spent recent months putting together a festival to showcase the traditional culture of his home province of Sindh. He has marketed the jamboree with a quirky and mischievous campaign. Karachi has been plastered with posters depicting him as Superman – a play on the festival's logo, which has commandeered the famous S from the superhero's uniform – and a series of humorous videos was made.

The first shows him sitting behind a desk in a darkened office in the staid manner military coup leaders have long used to address the nation, declaring an emergency to save the nation's culture. Some have declared it all a breath of fresh air Others are puzzled. The festival began on Saturday night with a glitzy opening ceremony at Mohenjo-Daro, the ancient ruins of one of the world's first cities. Guests were treated to a show that included Bollywood-style dance routines with music from a big-haired songstress known as Pakistan's Britney Spears, tableaux of models attempting to represent the site's history and a fireworks display. It was as much political as cultural. The Sindh festival's slogan, "Preserve, promote, protect", just happens to have the same initials as the Bhutto family enterprise the Pakistan People's Party, the now much-diminished political movement co-founded by his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto Zardari hopes events that might otherwise be entertainment will help win back some of the "societal space" ceded over the years to religious hardliners that he says are undermining Pakistan's indigenous culture and helping the Taliban to flourish. Included on the roster of events is a traditional kite-flying festival long banned in Punjab province, where suspicious clerics regard it as a Hindu remnant from pre-partition days. Bhutto Zardari said: "This is the beginning of the counter-narrative, the beginning of a cultural fightback." Analysts say a long process of reviving the PPP is just beginning. More important than concerts, Bhutto Zardari will gradually have to assert direct control of a party still dominated by an exhausted old-guard popularly thought to be corrupt. On Saturday night some said the ceremony resembled a pop variety show with little that was distinctively Sindhi. Conservationists criticised Bhutto Zardari for holding such a spectacle at vulnerable ruins he claims he is trying to protect.