Pakistan election: rise of the middle classes

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Its a little simplistic narrative about the current Pakistani political scene but it does provide some useful insights.
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The election has been a quiet triumph for upwardly mobile urban Pakistanis

• Jason Burke
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday February 19 2008

Supporters of Pakistan's former prime minister Nawaz Sharif celebrate early results in Pakistan's general elections. Photograph: Jerry Lampen/Reuters

Drive down the Grand Trunk Road from Lahore to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad and you would be forgiven for thinking that the idea that the strip of ragged bitumen symbolises Pakistan's new prosperity is a bit far-fetched. The road slices across green fields with their bent-backed peasant farmers, scruffy bazaars and through rubbish-strewn cities such as Gujranwala. The landscape is hardly a picture of wealth and stability.

But, if you had travelled the road 10 years ago, you would be less inclined to argue. You might notice the number of new factories, the cheap concrete "shopping malls" with their tile and glass facades and the swarms of Suzuki Mehrans, the tiny four door car which is Pakistan's best-selling vehicle.

It is this that explains one major trend in Pakistan's politics which has slightly drowned in the alphabet soup of all the parties and sub-parties over the last days: the broad success of the Pakistan Muslim League. Though the late Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party seems set to just win the largest single number of seats in the national assembly, in many ways it is the PML – which is likely to unify its two main factions in the near future – that is more tapped in to the deeper currents in Pakistan. After all, the opposition PML faction barely had enough time to organise candidates for all national seats. And even though half its leadership was based overseas until very recently, it still did almost as well as the PPP.

The PPP and the PML broadly represent two different faces of Pakistan, and the election maths shows clearly which way the country is heading.

The classic PML voter is urban, lower middle class, relatively educated, with a world-view informed by Pakistani nationalism and a very contemporary moderate Islamism. He is relatively pious, but likes lascivious Indian movies and probably enjoys nehari, the famous western-Pakistani stew, and parathas, deep-fried savoury pancakes. He is not particularly politically sophisticated, speaks Urdu or Punjabi not the elite's English but reads local newspapers and watches the new satellite television channels. So, and this is no coincidence, does the most popular politician of the PML, Nawaz Sharif. (I am making an educated guess about the Indian movies in Nawaz's case but not the nehari.)

These people are likely to personify the modern Pakistani, if such a person exists. In recent years, as one economist told me in the teeming, bustling southern port city of Karachi, those who had a bicycle now have a motorbike (which uses a teaspoon of fuel for 50 miles and can, if you are a lower middle class Pakistani family, carry two adults and two kids) and those who had a motorbike have a Mehran. Though it is these people who have been hit hard by recent price hikes in rent, food and fuel, they are still better off than they were.

And there are millions of them, in all the main cities, in Karachi, in Lahore, in Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Hyderabad and Islamabad.

By contrast, the PPP's voter, by and large, lives in a different world, a world that was dominant up to a decade ago. It is a world that is much more rural, more deferential, more rooted in tradition. Its nationalism is less marked and its Islam less influenced by the international trends of the last 30 years and thus much less politicised and much more based in centuries-old Sufi traditions.

This is a Pakistan that is disappearing. One PPP candidate in rural Punjab recognised this last week, telling me that his party needed to "re-invent itself". Unless it does, it will soon find itself entirely reduced to the poor, rural southern province of Sindh. The PPP's showing in this election has been distorted by a variety of positive and negative factors: the death of their leader, the multiple splits of the PML, the vote against those politicians tarnished by their association with President Pervez Musharraf and the unpopularity of the party's new chief, Bhutto's widower.

Of course there are other wild cards. The MQM in Karachi, for example, have hovered up a strong middle class and popular vote, based partly in ethnic politics (which also articulate the PPP-PML split) and in their social activism.

And in the west, it is the religious parties who have suffered, revealing that even a Pashtun on the north-west frontier votes like anyone else in the world — for those who he thinks will best secure him an honest, efficient government which will provide security, stability and development, all of which the outgoing "mullah alliance", in power locally since 2002, were manifestly incapable of delivering.

So the votes cast yesterday indicate the future direction of Pakistan. That said, if you continue through Islamabad and take the stunning new six-lane motorway to Peshawar, with its tree-lined central reservation, picnic sports and service stations, you will notice the villages on either side of the immaculate hard shoulder. Fenced off from the road, mere clusters of mud and stone huts, with the mosque the only concrete building, with limited electricity and often no real sanitation, they show that the trickle-down effect from Pakistan's recent years of economic growth has yet to alter the lives of many, many people. There is still plenty to play for in Pakistani politics.

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/19/pakistan.benazirbhutto1