The phrase that I heard the most often in the half decade or so that I was confined to Pakistan full-time was “elites”. It’s a mutable word: I’ve seen Deep State sympathizers use it to skewer authors at a literary festival accused of pandering to non-local audiences. I’ve heard it used to dismiss misogyny as an imported fear on otherwise neutered political talk shows. Most of the time it was used like a blank scrabble piece used to stand in to refer to whoever had power in Pakistan.
But overwhelmingly it was flashed as a badge of honour, mostly at boozy themed parties in Karachi or Lahore, populated by an entire cross section of people with varying bank accounts but a uniform air of decrepit delusions of grandeur, happily convinced that they were this country’s aristocracy, anointed by history and circumstance to exert complete control because their parents and schools told them so. Reality had little to do with this.
In a sense the self classficialion as “elites” was a self aggrandizing way for them - us, if some of my readership is honest with itself - to feel better about their place in a society that had moved so far away from their country club bars and Fez nights that they felt like actual moral fugitives in a rapidly right wing, religiously bigoted country. That the actual elites, the real power brokers of Pakistan, were not coming out of the English-speaking colonial boarding schools but cadet colleges was never discussed with any measure of self-awareness. I’ve grown up surrounded by people like this, and because liberalism is a collapsing foxhole in Pakistan, still am to a degree. Most of them (I want to say all but one must be generous) have grown up to be little more than became functioning addicts - to alcohol, drugs, their own opinions or their parents’ money - a bitter salve to the realization that they were serving life sentences in gilded prison cells they do not have the keys to open.
The term 'elite' is often used interchangeably with Westernized 'liberal' segments of the population
Whenever they spoke half-heartedly about affecting “some kind of change” in the country, it was only as a conversational stop gap between hor d’oeuvres. I saw in them - particularly the landed gentry of Punjab - a rot that all but guaranteed a rapid slide away from anything their education had pretended equipped them to handle. The truth was that all the things that said they found abhorrent. - blasphemy charges, sectarian firestoking, miscarriages of justice - were prevalent because large swathes of the country’s actual power elites used them to their own advantage.
That the actual elites, the real power brokers of Pakistan, were not coming out of the English-speaking colonial boarding schools but cadet colleges was never discussed with any measure of self-awareness. I’ve grown up surrounded by people like this, and because liberalism is a collapsing foxhole in Pakistan, still am to a degree
This week was perhaps the first time in my lifetime that I am dimly hopeful that any real change to the status quo can actually happen. Because now the powers-that-march are no longer fighting against simply the easily dismissed, out of touch self professed “elites” they usually blame, but their own powerbase: middle class, conservative, Punjabi businessmen. Those men, who for so long have never given credence to the cries of any other province, or missing people, or beleaguered religious minorities, now feel threatened. The economy had failed them, their businesses aren’t growing, their social mobility has, like the rest of the country, hit a security check-post. And they want a change.
The words I heard coming out of the Gujranwala rally agains the so-called “hybrid government” (it’s shorter to just say neutered) are things that are routinely censored on TV and in print. They are the reason newspapers editors have been shot and leftists assassinated. To hear them being spoken out loud felt like breaking a spell of silence that has gripped the county for so very long, and it took the very people who by and large supported those injustices to do it. That they are doing it out of self-interest rather than any sense of altruism doesn’t matter in a sense. For once civilian goals are aligned in common, and it is my urgent hope that they remain so. It only took 75 years.
