From General Musharaff to Imran Khan: Pakistani middle class has a messiah problem

The last three days were one of the worst in Pakistan’s millennial history; though we’ve seen worse before, the urban middle-class bore the brunt of their poly crisis host in the wake of their messiah’s arrest. Why though?

For the longest time, the Pakistani middle class, army and civil service officers, judiciary, corporate professionals, half-baked Toronto, and East London Pakistanis had nowhere to go. They couldn’t relate to the Bhuttos and Sharifs because they never had the means or access. The Muhajirs of UP and Bihar, now settled in Karachi, tried their luck with the MQM and Jamaat-e-Islaami, but that didn’t work out. The same class sucked it up to a military dictator, General Musharraf, until his last days in power, and once the old general was out, their next natural ally was Imran Khan.

They were fed this utopian dream for decades, a third force, an alternative epicentre of power, a parallel establishment, where the noble men and women relatively progressive will enter the corridors of power. But to be honest, Khan never had the numbers, even back in 2018, when, despite everything, he couldn’t secure an absolute parliamentary majority. To the same middle class’s dismay, a country like Pakistan runs on constituency politics, internal family rifts, hegemony, tribalism, favours, and WhatsApp groups.

What Khan did in 2013 was impressive, but he was only prime minister house material once he decided to welcome the likes of Perver Elahi, Fawad Chaudhry, Gujjars, Bakhtiars, Marris, Maliks, et al. His populist base was shocked to fathom those bitter pills of earlier demonised politicians. We had Pakistani-American doctors standing outside their grandeur homes with quacking ducks in the background, willing to return to serve their messiah. Did they?

With everything going on in our part of the world, Modi’s BJP already losing out in Karnataka, populism is dying a slow death in South Asia, and sooner or later, the said middle class yearning for Western passports yet despising them for moral absolutism, will find itself in search of a new messiah. It surely won’t be another seventy-year-old cricketer turned
philanthropist.