Fissures in the Middle

Pakistan is at war. It is a conflict of ideas across the country and Pakistan’s bourgeoning middle-class is at the centre of it.

A class that first clearly emerged on the country’s economic and social radar in the 1980s, thanks mainly to the trickle-down effect of the massive financial aid that the US dished out to keep the Zia dictatorship afloat during the first Afghan civil war, and the money that poured in from the sweat of Pakistanis working abroad, especially in the Gulf states.

Its economic expansion also meant a growing sense in this class about the importance of holding a stake in the country’s political landscape. The emergence of political parties like the Mutahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in urban Sindh and the revamped Pakistan Muslim League (PML) in urban Punjab was a clear indication in this respect. The close association of both these parties with the new Pakistani middle-class economic and political aspirations was overseen by the ‘military-industrialist-establishment’ in their formative years.

That’s why, even if the feudal instruments of the overall establishmentarian equation was missing in its support of the two parties, both MQM and the PML were seen as being conservative, pro-military and mostly working as the urban bulwark forces safeguarding bourgeois/industrial and military interests in the cities. Not only against encroaching feudal aspirations, but also against working-class sentiments that traditionally leaned towards populist forces like the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

This role was the traditional domain of petit-bourgeois politico-religious parties like the Jamat-i-Islami Islami (JI), that was ultimately rewarded with ministries and influence by the Zia-ul-Haq Martial Law.

However, as the social make-up of the middle-classes started to change owing to its economic expansion under Zia, the Jamat-i-Islami started to seem an outdated and complacent instrument, lacking in imagination to address new-found middle-class standing and problems.

With the Jamat’s dwindling status , mainly due to the exhaustion it faced after assisting the establishment in toppling slippery populists like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and then helping the military construct the controversial anti-Soviet ‘jihad’ effort in Afghanistan, new middle-class parties like the MQM and the PML automatically fell into place to represent the new urban Pakistan.

The evolution of these two parties can be studied to gauge the evolution of the urban middle classes from 1985 onwards.

Even though the PML broke into various factions after Zia, all of these factions remained conservative fronts of the military-industrialist aspect of the establishment.

Eventually, and as the results of the many elections that took place in the province in the 1990s would suggest, an ideological link too developed between the military-industrialist nexus and the new middle-classes.

The voting trends suggest that the urban Punjab bourgeois in the 1990s further embedded itself in an ideology that was politically conservative, pro-capitalism, largely pro-Army but anti-feudal. It was also anti-populist and saw large populist parties like the PPP with suspicion, fearing it would manhandle the economic initiative the urban Punjab’s middle-classes had gained during the Zia regime.

Though replacing the Jamat-i-Islami as the military-industrialist establishment’s civilian political front, all PML factions retained the ‘natural ideological link’ that they had with the Jamat. The only difference was that the conservatism of the PML factions echoed more the Machiavellian strains of political Islam flouted by Zia rather than the Maududi model so dear to the Jamat.

This level of Punjab’s middle class politics tied closely to the PML and the military-industrialist nexus reached a peak when the PML (N) swept clean the (albeit controversial) 1997 general elections.

However, by the middle of PML (N)’s second stint at the centre (1997-2000), an interesting realisation started to creep its way into the political psyche of the PML (N) and (thus) in Punjab’s middle-classes.

The PML (N)’s crashing win in the 1997 elections made them believe that it was only through elections that Pakistan’s middle-classes will be able to ward off the feudal hold over the country’s politics, and that the PML (N) and the middle class’ attachment to the military had reached a dead-end and was actually hampering the further development of bourgeois political and economic interests.

Is this why the October 1999 military coup undertaken against Nawaz Sharif’s PML(N) government? Perhaps.

However, the tragic 9/11 episode meant that Musharraf, to survive, had to tinker with the ideological orientation of Zia’s military-industrialist-feudal set-up, trying to change its Machiavellian politico-religious moorings with an equally Machiavellian strain of ‘moderation’. A stress on urban capitalism remained to be a constant, though.

But even when the urban middle-classes benefited from the bubble of economic prosperity that emerged during Musharraf’s regime, reaction to it was rather different in urban Punjab than what it was in urban Sindh.

The bubbly prosperity saw the middle-classes in urban Sindh feeling what the middle-classes in the Punjab had felt during the Zia dictatorship. But the prosperity experienced under the Zia dictatorship had made Punjab’s middle-classes conservative, the economic high experienced by the middle-classes in urban Sindh during Musharraf’s regime saw MQM rapidly fall in line with Musharraf and in the process become overwhelmingly secular. To Musharraf the MQM became in Sindh what the PML became to Zia in the Punjab and what the PML (N) was to the establishment in the province in the 1990s.

The economic and political rejuvenation experienced in urban Sindh seems not to have bode well with Punjab’s middle classes who were closest to Zia’s ideological and economic set-up of the establishment. They now saw this establishment’s changing character under Musharraf with great suspicion, feeling that perhaps for the first time in decades, Pakistan’s economic and political weight was being shifted back to urban Sindh from the Punjab?

Maybe this is why a clear fissure is apparent between urban Punjab and urban Sindh in the ways and moods of present-day politics. If today Karachi’s middle classes are not largely pro-Musharraf, they are neither so vehemently against him. MQM too remains to be at its strongest mainstream self and there is little sympathy for the lawyers’ movement. These anti-Musharraf manoeuvres, in the context of the recent political economy of urban Sindh, are seen as ‘Punjabcentric’ and an attack on whatever that was achieved in the realms of economics and politics in urban Sindh during the Musharraf dictatorship.

On the other hand, Punjab’s middle-class suspicious of Musharraf’s economic and political moves, have overwhelmingly supported conservative anti-Musharraf motives by parties such as the PML (N), the Jamat-i-Islami Islami, the protesting lawyers and even small interest parties like Imran Khan’s Tehreek-i-Insaaf. What this may also mean is that whenever large mainstream parties like the PML (N), and ‘nuisance groups’ like the Jamat, Tehreek-i-Insaaf and the lawyers talk of ‘revolution’, democracy and ‘self-sufficiency’, they are actually asking for a revival of Zia’s local and international manoeuvres using political Islam and free market enterprise but minus the US.

There is nothing progressive and revolutionary about this. Its roots basically lie in the fear that Musharraf (and now the PPP) might draw away urban Punjab’s ‘economic and political domination’. This anti-Musharraf drive also tends to be driven by the belief that a strong member of Punjab’s bourgeois elite at the centre is the best answer to Pakistan’s political and economic ills.

To achieve this, it seems, Punjab’s urban bourgeois are, for the first time, willing to cut their link with the military, and if need be, also minus populist parties like the PPP and representatives of urban Sindh, the MQM from the equation, even if this meant re-linking their political aspirations with Islamic parties like the Jamat and sympathising with anti-Musharraf forces amongst the reactionary Islamist groups in Punjab and the North.