On Nivedita & Archer’s joint request (Mamnoon/Tashakor/Merci for the kind words); I’m going to expand on my comment:
āKabir is definitely right. Ethnicity in Pakistan is complex; there are three tiers of society. The English speaking elite (Imran is part of that so is Kabir), who are āPakistanisā and ethnicity isnāt really reflected on…ā
This comment, which the BP archives have tons of similar posts on (BP was venerable even in 2014), sketches the bones of Pakistanās sociological map. But what lies beneath the skin?
Pakistan is feudal; India is not.
That one statement alone explains much. Landholding elites dominate politics, rural economies still function on patronage, and class mobility is rare. Caste, though ādenied,ā is real and sharper, in some ways, than it could ever be in India (the reservation system does not really exist in Pakistan except for religious minorities but not for socio-economic castes). Pakistanis can sniff out class in one another with a dexterity that’s probably only matched in the United Kingdom, which is the home of class stratification (I remember reading Dorian Gray in Karachi in the early millennium and shocked how similar late Victorian early Edwardian England was).
The postcolonial state froze itself in amber. There has never been a serious leftist rupture, excepting 1971’s successful Bengali revolution. Even Imran Khan, who styled himself a reformist, is a product of elite schools, Aitchison College, Oxford, and aristocratic lineage. His āIslamic socialismā was only ever viable because Pakistanis still believe in myths of the benevolent landlord.
And yet, Pakistanis sometimes seem happier than their Indian counterparts, even if not remotely successful. Why? Continue reading Pakistanās Inner Logic
