The builders are still working on a multi-million pound home for Benazir Bhutto's son and heir, but it has already provoked an angry wave of accusations that the young leader is out of touch with his country's impoverished population.
The builders are still working on a multi-million pound home for Benazir Bhutto's son and heir, but it has already provoked an angry wave of accusations that the young leader is out of touch with his country's impoverished population.
Set in 14 acres on the edge of Lahore, the bungalow will have everything an aspiring Pakistani leader needs: a helipad, bombproof walls and vast lawns that can accommodate 10,000 people for election rallies.
Opponents have seized on its cost, rumoured to be five billion rupees, saying that it represents the worst excesses of the political elite.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari - who at 24 is still too young to stand in parliamentary elections expected in May - was named co-chairman of the Pakistan People's Party with his father, President Asif Ali Zardari, when Bhutto was assassinated in a suicide attack in 2007. The men are due to visit the building site on Saturday for an inauguration ceremony.
The house has been lampooned variously as a retirement home for the president or the ultimate bachelor pad for his son, equipped with swimming pools and fitted out by international designers.
Imran Khan, the former cricketer who has put tackling corruption at the heart of his campaign to become prime minister, said the lavish mansion typified the old-style politics that he was trying to end.
"It shows they have complete contempt for the people of Pakistan," he said. "They don't care what anyone thinks - even with elections soon."
Bilawal House is expected to be completed next month and has been built with reinforced, bombproof concrete. It will include offices for party workers as well as at least six bedrooms, acting as what one political insider described as a "hub" for the elections.
Bilawal has moved into the spotlight in the past year and is considered by many to be a more reliable vote-winner than his father, who was only able to return from exile with his wife when corruption investigations were dropped as part of a general amnesty.
Others within the party believe that the lack of time Oxford-educated Bilawal has spent in Pakistan and his hesitant Urdu underscore the way the Bhutto dynasty has lost touch with ordinary people. The new house - in a country considered so poor that it is in line for more than a billion pounds of British aid, yet where two thirds of MPs pay no income tax - will only add to the criticism of a political elite that is growing richer while the rest of the country struggles with power cuts, rampant inflation and unemployment.
Naveed Chaudhry, a senior PPP leader in Lahore, said that details of the house had been exaggerated by political opponents and that construction costs were no more than 3.5 million pounds.
"The land is not as expensive as people think and it really is no different from what the president has in Islamabad or Karachi," he said, adding that all the costs were borne by Zardari.
The president's spokesperson would not comment, except to say that the house has been built by the president's construction company.
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