The Rise of the Pakistani Middle Class
By Riaz Haq
CA
www.pakalumni.com
There is a quiet revolution taking place in Pakistani politics: the middle class clout is rising. This is something that has not received a lot of attention by the media. Here are some of key nuggets gleaned from the fine print of media reports that support this contention.
1. In Jhang, ten out of eleven of those elected are from the middle class rather than the families of the usual feudal zamindars, reported British author/journalist William Dalrymple traveling in Pakistan during recent elections. He says this trend would have been unthinkable ten years ago.
2. Some of the most benign feudal lords suffered astonishing electoral reverses. Mian Najibuddin Owaisi was not just the popular feudal lord of the village of Khanqah Sharif in the southern Punjab, he was also the sajjada nasheen, the descendant of the local Sufi saint. Because of Najibuddin's personal popularity, his vote stood up better than many other pro-Musharraf feudal lords — and he polled 46,000 votes. But he still lost, to an independent candidate from a non-feudal middle-class background named Amir Varan, who received 57,000 votes and ousted the Owaisi family from control of the constituency for the first time since they entered politics in the elections of 1975.
3. PML-N led by Nawaz Sharif and MQM swept the urban vote in Punjab and Sindh respectively. Both parties have their power bases in the urban middle class.
4. The PPP's voter lives in a different world, a world that was dominant up to a decade ago. It is a world that is much more rural, more deferential, more rooted in tradition. Its nationalism is less marked and its Islam less influenced by the international trends of the last 30 years and thus much less politicized and much more based in centuries-old Sufi traditions. Describing this situation, Jason Burke of the Guardian argues that "this is a Pakistan that is disappearing". Burke goes on to say that a PPP candidate in rural Punjab recognized it telling him that his party needed to "re-invent itself".
While many rural residents in Sindh and Southern Punjab who voted for the PPP have remained relatively isolated from the major developments in Pakistan in the last decade, the urban middle class has grown dramatically in numbers and influence during the military rule of President Musharraf. The New York Times reported on this expansion of Pakistani middle class last November in these words: "As he fights to hold on to power, General Musharraf finds himself opposed by the expanded middle class that is among his greatest achievements, and using his emergency powers to rein in another major advance he set in motion, a vibrant, independent news media". Acknowledging this fact, Dalrymple recently wrote as follows: "It was this newly enriched and empowered urban middle class that showed its political muscle for the first time with the organization of a lawyers' movement, whose protests against the dismissal of the chief justice soon swelled into a full-scale pro-democracy campaign, despite Musharraf's harassment and arrest of many lawyers. The movement represented a huge shift in Pakistani civil society's participation in politics. The middle class was at last moving from their living rooms onto the streets, from dinner parties into political parties."
By enlarging and enriching the middle class in Pakistan, President Musharraf has unleashed the forces that he cannot control. In some ways, this situation is similar to the Soviet leader Mr. Gorbachev's perestroika that eventually led to the rise of democracy and capitalism in Russia and many of the former Soviet republics.
The fact that this enlarged, enriched and energized middle class is beginning to assert itself in Pakistani politics is a welcome change. Democracies depend on the existence of large, powerful middle class for their sustenance. If the size, influence and participation of the middle class in Pakistani politics continue to grow under the new government, it will only strengthen democratic institutions and the rule of law in the country.
