After successive failures in his political career, Imran Khan visited his spiritual guru, Mian Bashir, to seek advice and solace: “Will I ever succeed in politics?” he asked. Mian Bashir closed his eyes for a minute and said, “You will succeed when you are ready for the job.” His preparation for the job was complete by October 2011 when he formally re-launched his political career in a huge gathering in Lahore. At his moment of glory, Khan said that he knew his qaum (people) would rise one day and that all of them would rise together. His qaum was a synonym for the new middle class who had come of age in the early 2000s. The ‘Naya’ Pakistan – a slogan popularised by Imran Khan for his brand of politics – was already in place. It was simply looking for a new leader to capitalise on it. Imran Khan was that leader. Naya Pakistan is a symptom of the new middle class which would now be commanded by Imran Khan.
The arrival of Imran Khan as the undisputed leader of naya Pakistan is the highest point of a new middle class’ ‘bourgeoisie revolution’ in Pakistan. I would like to draw upon Partha Chatterjee’s theorisation of Gramsci’s concept of civil and political society to offer my understanding of what is meant by naya Pakistan. In one of his early writings, Chatterjee argued that “when a bourgeoisie generalises its mode of production in society, it establishes its leadership not only over the economy but overall structures of society.” At the ideological level, bourgeoisie ideals are of every individual as a citizen with individual rights, securing legitimation of private property, seeking to create “an individualistic world-view which again seeks to de-emphasise cultural distinctions in the realm of political life”, thus, resulting in the creation, in economic parlance, of a homogenous consumer with relatively similar tastes and culture values, and a citizen, in the language of the state, severed of distinctions unaffiliated with the oneness of the nation. However, Chatterjee said, owing to its own weakness, the bourgeoisie was deprived of the opportunity to play its historical role in the transformation of state and society in India.
In an era of neo-liberal economy and general global resentment against rights-based politics, the new middle class and its naya Pakistan does not even rhetorically champion land reforms, or limit the role of market economy – especially in health and education sectors
In a later piece, Chatterjee developed a more nuanced approach by highlighting the difference between citizen and population, civil society and political society. He wrote:
“Citizen inhabit the domain of theory, populations the domain of policy. Unlike the concept of citizen, the concept of population is wholly descriptive and empirical; it does not carry a normative burden. Populations are identifiable, classifiable, and describable by empirical or behavioural criteria and are amenable to statistical techniques such as censuses and sample surveys. Unlike the concept of citizen, which carries the ethical connotation of participation in the sovereignty of the state, the concept of population makes available to government functionaries a set of rationally manipulable instruments for reading large sections of the inhabitants of a country as the targets of their “policies” - economic policy, administrative policy, law, and even political mobilization.”
Here, Chatterjee falls upon Foucault and calls this process the governmentalisation of state. He reminds us that much of the enlightenment notions of participatory citizenship have been replaced by governmental technologies for managing the population. Referring to a myriad of issues from pedagogy, disease, poverty and terrorism, Chatterjee says that “all of this made governance less a matter of politics and more of administrative policy, a business for experts rather than for political representatives.” This results in a conceptual demarcation along the lines of a civil society connected to the nation-state and founded on the logic of popular sovereignty, and a population connected with the government and its agencies for various projects and policies relating to security and welfare. The former is the domain of civil society which is an associated form of life limited to a specific section of right bearing “culturally equipped citizens,” while the latter refers to the political society with a much larger expense covering a myriad of inhabitants. For its overwhelming numerical majority and the nature of the very constitution of the term population, as amenable to governmentalisation and bureaucratic rationality, the political society has been at the centre of Indian democracy, causing much distrust among the bourgeoisie elites of the civil society. They view it as an abandonment of a modernizing mission at the expense of electoral expediency.
What is common to all these epochs of dictatorial rule is an urge to introduce a ‘grassroots’ level of democracy through a structured system of local bodies
The power equilibrium has changed significantly since the neo-liberal economic reforms of the 1990s. With the abolition of a license system and relaxed rules for foreign direct investment, Chatterjee says, the class of corporate capitalist has gained immense power, almost hegemonising the civil society. Political society, remains the domain that is managed as non-corporate capital. The Indian middle classes are, therefore, more strongly tied with the global capital order, amassing way more power and influence in the process, to the point of influencing state policies towards the political society. Partha Chatterjee foresaw that this distinction between corporate and non-corporate capital, and its coinciding with the divide between civil and political society respectively, would have serious consequences for Indian democracy. Elsewhere, such as Thailand (2006) and Bangladesh (2007), military intervention had backing from the middle classes for ‘cleaning the system’ of ‘corrupt politicians’ who, for electoral expediency, were responsible for wasteful expenditure on schemes aimed at wooing the rural population. In the case of India, Chatterjee observed a gradual withdrawal of the Indian middle classes from the political arena and widespread resentment against what they identified as corrupt practices and populism of appealing to the masses for the sake of electoral benefits. For Chatterjee, this reflects the “hegemony of the logic of corporate capital among the urban middle classes.”
What has been missing in the case of India is then the emergence of a political party that could address the frustrations of this middle class, bigger and stronger in size than ever before, who – as elsewhere in the global order of politics and capital – were anti-political in their approach, and wanted to get rid of the remnants of ‘traditional’ politics that reminded them of patronage networks, corruption and dynastic politics. In case of Pakistan, the PTI offers that political platform (party dominated by professionals, voted for overwhelmingly by the new middle class) and Imran Khan the leadership (not corrupt, not from a dynasty, a personal success story) required to perform this function. It comes with a sense of self-righteous, selfless devotion and messianic spirit to ‘liberate’ the poor and the ignorant who lack the capacity to exercise their right to vote in a rational manner.
Chatterjee’s theorisation helps one understand the dynamics of a democratic polity in which the modernising bourgeoisie, heavily outnumbered outside of the narrow confines of civil society, have increasingly felt frustrated in its attempt to impose its hegemonic agenda. In Pakistan, on the other hand, the national bourgeoisie of Hamza Alavi’s theorisation has performed this task in collaboration with military-bureaucratic oligarchy in an authoritarian state structure. This nexus served as the basis of governance for the ‘modernist’ era of General Ayub Khan which witnessed large-scale reforms in agriculture and industry. The Ayub Khan regime went further and took over many of the country’s shrines as well to transform them into ‘useful’ spaces for the nation-building project. This model for reform and citizen-making was replicated under General Ziaul Haq and General Pervez Musharraf as well. What is common to all these epochs of dictatorial rule is an urge to introduce a ‘grassroots’ level of democracy through a structured system of local bodies. In his quest to find a democratic system that would ‘suit the genius of the people of Pakistan’, Ayub Khan came up with ‘Basic Democracies’ in which 90,000 members were chosen directly by the people who, in turn, acted as electoral college to elect the president and members of the national assembly. General Ziaul Haq, similarly, started with local bodies elections in 1979, followed by non-party based elections at the provincial and national level in 1985. General Parvez Musharraf’s ‘devolution plan’ transferred vast powers to locally elected district administrators. All these models for local governance, ostensibly introduced to facilitate democracy, were in fact aimed at preventing popular politics. The military, to tackle popular politics or prevent the rise of national-level leadership, was eager to project an idea of politics that was strictly local and dealt mainly with the provision of civic facilities. It’s no wonder that whenever democracy was restored and elected governments came to power, they abolished these local bodies introduced by military regimes.
Another aspect of the modernising role performed by the bourgeoisie in collusion with the authoritarian state is its direct co-option in government agencies. Successive military rules in Pakistan have essentially been ‘rule by experts’ in which civilian technocrats have been hired to devise policies and implement ‘structural reforms’. The best example of this was Pervez Musharraf’s tenure. After staging a coup, Musharraf interviewed candidates who had applied to become members of cabinet. One such member was Dr Ataur Rehman who was inducted as minister for education. He later helped set up Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan. With Musharraf’s support, HEC received generous funding. But as soon as Musharraf was ousted, the new government under the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) did not share the vision or enthusiasm of Ataur Rehman, resulting in a substantial drop of funds for HEC. Rehman, since then, has contributed regularly to local newspapers, arguing for an American style presidential form of government in which the president gets to select his team of advisors from top men and women in their respective fields. He unapologetically holds the parliamentary form of government responsible for Pakistan’s misery.
In my reading, Rehman represents the quintessential agent of the modernising bourgeoisie who abhors the ‘political class’, recognises them as ignorant, poor and incapable of exercising proper judgment. This image of the poor and the uneducated as lacking the qualities of a rational self, capable of exercising sane political judgment is widely shared among the members of the new middle class, most of whom vote for Imran Khan. They are ridiculed for selling their votes for a plate of biryani. Yet, the number of these poor and ignorant voters, vastly outnumbers that of the new middle class. Thus, military dictatorship is the only way in which the modernising bourgeoisie has been able to perform its legitimate function in Pakistan. That is why all military dictators, especially Parvez Musharraf, drew a lot of support from this class. They were otherwise, apolitical and did not take part in elections with great enthusiasm.
It is only with the coming of Imran Khan that they believe their moment has arrived. Imran Khan enables an opportunity for the (former) modernising bourgeoisie to play its historical role – for the first time – through a democratic process. I use the term former because the new middle class is a more expansive and sociologically different category though it does share an overall civilizational zeal couched in the language of self-righteousness. While numerically speaking, electoral balance is tipped heavily in favour of a ‘feudal class’, it is the ability of the new middle class to assert its modernising mission with political legitimacy that enables a subordination of this class in the name of eradicating corrupt old practices of traditional and dynastic politics.
Whereas ‘traditional’ politics were all about management of power in which distribution of portfolios was to keep balance between various power groups, in naya Pakistan, politics is now replaced by the language of governance. Cabinet positions and various government organisations will be headed by ‘experts.’ Unlike the previous experiments of ‘rule by experts’ under the military regimes, this time the project of citizen-making will be pervasive and long-lasting as it will emerge as a result of political legitimacy, rather than a dictate. It will, therefore, not be possible to call this into question, unlike the policy reforms introduced under the military regime. What comes out of this process of citizen making is not an unleashing of political liberties or economic equality, but an ideological submission to the state-speak of the idea of an abstract individual. Other than formal equality of citizen and right to property, it does not further the cause of addressing structural inequalities. In an era of neo-liberal economy and general global resentment against rights-based politics, the new middle class and its naya Pakistan does not even rhetorically champion land reforms, or limit the role of market economy – especially in health and education sectors. With its ability to assert itself over landowning classes (though still electorally dependent on them since their ‘loyalty switch’ helped PTI win elections in the rural areas), the focus of naya Pakistan is more on such themes as corporate farming to align the agrarian sector more closely with the global capital. Even on such issues as the military’s exercise of power without any responsibility, the question of conflict does not arise because of the historical affinity between the military and the modernizing bourgeoisie, and a shared vision for a regimental society and homogenized citizenry.
It is in this context that Mohammad Hanif’s statement can be understood; when he said that Imran Khan has helped ‘deliver’ the next generation of Pakistanis to the old establishment, he meant that the bulk of Pakistan’s new generation – currently at 65 percent of the population – who are set to play a decisive role for the next 30 odd years, buy into the idea of Imran Khan’s ‘anti-political’ populism which has helped reinforce state-speak in an unprecedented manner, that is based on a worldview unmediated through any knowledge of history or critical thinking.
The writer teaches history at Lahore University of Management Sciences
