A tale of two classes

(DAWN)

By Mohammad Waseem
Tuesday, 15 Dec, 2009

Among politicians, only Z.A. Bhutto was a strong ruler, preceded by Liaquat Ali by a generation. The
middle-class public officials have been generally more powerful than those from the political class,
ranging from Ghulam Mohammad and Iskandar Mirza to Ayub, Yahya, Zia, Ghulam Ishaq and
Musharraf.

In Pakistan, two dominant classes compete with each other for influence and
privilege. One is the middle class, which provides the catchment area for the civil
bureaucracy, technocrats, the military’s officer cadre and the business community.

The other can be called, for lack of a better term, the political class that includes political
entrepreneurs of various kinds at various levels, led by the landed and tribal elite.

These two classes represent the two power centres in the country. The middle class
operates as the most stable, influential and status quo-oriented segment of society. The
institutional expression of this class is realised through the state apparatus. The process of
post-recruitment socialisation in the form of the training of the bureaucracy and army
officers aims at merging their individual ambitions with an all-pervasive institutional ethos.
The middle class has a near-monopoly over higher education, professional expertise and the
cultural universe of the nation. Very few on top and at the bottom level of society make it to
these fields. The three metropolitan centres of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, followed by
Faisalabad, Multan, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Hyderabad, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Sukkur, Quetta,
Sargodha and a host of other cities represent a sprinkling of the middle class in varying
degrees.

More than any other section of society, the middle class is ideologically oriented in the two
domains of religion and nationalism. It adheres to scriptural Islam as opposed to syncretic
Islam. It supports the madressah-oriented written tradition as opposed to the shrine-based
oral tradition of Islam. It is pan-Islamic in its vision. It seeks the unity of the Muslim world
and upholds a dichotomous worldview based on conflict between Islam and the West.
Secondly, the middle class supersedes all other classes in its nationalist framework of
thought, which operates essentially in negative terms. In six decades, it has projected
nationalism in the context of the perceived enemies of the nation. It has been all along anti-
Indian, anti-Soviet Union in the first four decades and anti-American in the last two
decades. It is also anti-communist and anti-secular.

The composition of the middle class has changed in two generations. Previously, it came
from the impoverished aristocracy, politicians, the intelligentsia, lawyers, judges and public
careerists of various kinds.

In recent decades, the professional middle classes — doctors, engineers, architects,

accountants, corporate managers and information technologists among others — have been
the descendants of military officers and bureaucrats in increasingly larger numbers. Their
political outlook reflects their social background.

The middle class, most typically if not universally, hates democracy. Partition shaped the
social, cultural, political and economic views of the emergent middle class along security-
oriented lines and a state-centred rather than society-oriented policy framework.

This class lacks a social reformist vision and a public conscience. It distrusts the capacity
and thus the right of what it considers the uneducated, irresponsible, superstitious and
‘primitive’ masses to exercise their vote and elect governments.

An absolute majority of the middle class is rightist in its collective thrust for policy and
ideology. This includes: the moneyed right, i.e. the commercial elite committed to the
preservation of the current privileged structures; the moral right, as the upholder of a
conservative code of ethics; and the religious right, with its increasingly radical Islamic
worldview. The rightist middle class, or parts of it, often served as a constituency of army
rule in Pakistan.

At the other end, the political class comprises electoral heavyweights vying for power.
Politicians are strong in the locality but weak in terms of institutions such as political parties
or parliament. They are more pragmatic than visionary. While the middle class vows to
serve the ‘national interest’ conceived in an idealised form, the political class pledges to
serve ‘the public interest’ understood in terms of the distribution of resources on the
ground.

Instead of mosque and madressah, the political class adheres to pir and shrine. The vast
rural hinterland of Pakistan is studded with a number of devotional sites belonging to Sufi
orders. The political class reflects the social structure based on caste and tribe. Partisanship
rather than consensus is the hallmark of its political imagination. Ultimately, it depends on
the civil bureaucracy for the articulation of its interest.

The political class considers nationalism as the outermost expression of collective life, not as
a mission-mantled agenda. It adheres to various sub-national identities based on ethno-
linguistic ties, and seeks to build alliances across communities and regions. If ideology is at
the heart of the middle class ethos, identity is the rallying point of the political class in
pursuit of electoral victory or a popular movement.

The middle class has enhanced awareness about the issue of corruption. It finds it
extremely difficult to understand why people vote for ‘corrupt’ politicians. It fails to
appreciate that the state structure, run by an administrative elite rooted in the middle class,
bars people’s access to the system of governance. People seek to break open the gates of
the remote, impersonal ruling mechanism with the help of politicians, corrupt or otherwise.

The middle-class public officials have been generally more powerful than those from the
political class, ranging from Ghulam Mohammad and Iskandar Mirza to Ayub, Yahya, Zia,
Ghulam Ishaq and Musharraf. Among politicians, only Z.A. Bhutto was a strong ruler,
preceded by Liaquat Ali by a generation.

However, it is the less visible and more powerful bureaucrats, generals, judges and ulema
from the middle class who wield real power in the administrative, legal, economic, security,
cultural and ideological spheres of public activity. Their stock-in-trade is: democracy is
hijacked by ‘feudals’; politicians are corrupt and inefficient; society is not yet fit for
democracy.

Of course, there are liberal, progressive and public-spirited intellectuals, lawyers, civil
society activists, trade unionists, poets, writers, playwrights and media persons, all from the
middle class, who uphold the cause of democracy. They speak, write, demonstrate, sing,
strike, organise, and perform, all for democracy. Unfortunately, they are only a fraction of
the middle class.