How can these people be so ungrateful? How come they don’t see unprecedented economic growth under his majesty’s rule?
Pakistani Middle Class, Beneficiary of Musharraf, Begins to Question Rule
By DAVID ROHDE
Published: November 25, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — For the last eight years, Tanveer Ahmed, a 40-year-old pharmaceutical company manager, has prospered under the economic reforms put in place by Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
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In that time, Pakistan’s economy has grown about 6 percent a year. Mr. Ahmed rose from an entry-level employee to a regional manager. Today he sends his five children to private school, drives a new car and rents a home in Islamabad, one of the country’s most expensive cities.
But Mr. Ahmed says that he now feels disdain for the man who brought prosperity to the urban middle class he is a part of. General Musharraf’s Nov. 3 emergency decree was illegal and embarrassing, he says, and is crippling the economy that has changed his life.
“It’s not democracy,” said Mr. Ahmed, wearing a striped tie, blue V-neck sweater, pants and dress shoes as he shopped for DVDs on a recent night. “What he’s doing is to promote himself.” He asked that his picture not be taken for fear of arrest.
General Musharraf’s loss of support among people like Mr. Ahmed is one of the great setbacks of his rule, which has shaped Pakistan into a vastly different country from the one he seized control of in a 1999 coup.
As he fights to hold on to power, General Musharraf finds himself opposed by the expanded middle class that is among his greatest achievements, and using his emergency powers to rein in another major advance he set in motion, a vibrant, independent news media.
Since he took power, Pakistan’s gross domestic product has doubled. The number of cellphones has soared to 50 million, from 600,000 six years ago. The privatization of banks has led to a huge increase in the sales of cars, motorcycles and, perhaps most important, television sets. Globalization has taken hold, as it has in other countries.
That spreading economic success — and exposure to the outside world — has filled Pakistan’s white collar office workers, stockbrokers and small-business operators with a belief that their country can be more than the backward fief of a few generals, many said in interviews.
While increasingly dissatisfied, however, their ranks remain too thin to exert much influence over Pakistan’s politics, political scientists say. Nonetheless, their emergence could prove decisive, particularly if growing anger translates into greater political activism and broader alliances.
“The emerging urban middle class is very important to Pakistan’s future,” said Teresita Schaffer, South Asia program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But by themselves, they are not numerous enough to swing elections or spearhead a major social movement.”
**The size of Pakistan’s expanded middle class is in fact debated. Tara Vishwanath, the World Bank’s lead economist for South Asia, said 5 percent of Pakistan’s 160 million people — or roughly 8 million Pakistanis — appear to have moved from living in poverty to being part of the lower middle class between 2001 and 2004. She said data being collected this year was needed to confirm whether the increase was permanent.
While they have no precise figures, Pakistani political scientists say the upper and middle classes may now include 10 to 20 percent of the population.
But, they caution, the recent economic growth has been uneven and concentrated in the banking, cellphone and construction industries while the agriculture and textile sectors have remained stagnant.
Lagging behind has been the roughly 65 percent of the population that lives in rural Pakistan and that has long been where politics is played.**
For decades, Pakistan’s moderate elite has been dismissed as “the chattering classes,” who have shied away from the political arena and rarely voted.
Instead the political system has been dominated by feudal landlords who could deliver huge blocks of votes from poor tenant farmers. The key to winning elections was striking the right alliances and spreading graft, not developing a coherent political platform or putting in place broadly beneficial social policies.
Yet the country is slowly changing, in ways that have left a growing number arguing that Pakistan is more prepared than ever for democratic rule.
Growing political and economic clout from the upper and middle classes has helped fuel the creation of the booming cable television industry, which shows programs from around the world and includes a dozen aggressively independent news networks.
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Business owners mounted a sweeping private relief effort during the 2005 earthquake that devastated northern Pakistan.
This spring, the middle class vigorously supported a successful campaign by the country’s lawyers to reverse an attempt by General Musharraf to dismiss the country’s chief justice.
For now, greater mobilization is hobbled by a deep distrust of their political leaders and the United States. A perception is growing that the United States will betray middle-class Pakistanis — Washington’s greatest long-term ally in the fight against terrorism — and continue backing an unpopular military ruler who refuses to give up power.
Many said they believed that General Musharraf had tried to contain — but not eliminate — a dangerous rise in militancy in the country because it allowed him to garner billions in American military aid for Pakistan’s army.
“The U.S. needs to realize that Musharraf is not fighting against terrorism and will not fight against terrorism,” said a student at one of the country’s elite universities who said she feared arrest if her name was printed. “He’s only interested in his own survival.”
Since the emergency decree, small pockets of upper- and middle-class activism have emerged. Lawyers are carrying out protests. Students are writing blogs. Journalists are resisting government censorship.
Yet so far few have joined the small protests by the country’s main opposition political parties. They express disdain for the main opposition leaders, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, two former prime ministers whose rule in the 1990s was plagued by allegations of corruption.
“I don’t like anyone,” said Tahir Mehmood, a 23-year-old cellphone shop owner, referring to the country’s political leaders. “Whoever comes, they fill their own pockets.”
Instead, the protests by middle- and upper-class Pakistanis have been quieter. On a recent Friday, Mumtaz Ali, a 27-year-old lawyer who studied law in London, typed e-mail messages on his laptop before heading to a small protest rally.
The messages were thank-you notes to the heads of the American Bar Association and New York City Bar Association for recent protests they held against General Musharraf.
Other wealthy Pakistanis have contacted members of Congress — as well as classmates from American colleges they attended — and urged them to cut American aid to Pakistan, according to Western diplomats.
If free and fair elections are held, new political leaders will emerge in Pakistan, Mr. Ali said, and middle-class apathy will decrease. “The reason they are not going into the streets, is only because they do not have a leader before them,” he said.
Political scientists here agreed. “I think they will vote this time if there is a level playing field,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. “The middle class that we are talking about is about changing the system.”