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LET’s get this straight: the last few days of Ramazan see death and destruction in Quetta, Parachinar and Bahawalpur — reflecting the state’s utter failure to protect the life and liberty of its citizens — and our Eid gift is an announcement by the highest state functionaries that their ‘top priority’ is the security of Chinese lives and property.
Cue outrage amongst the ‘educated’ public? Not quite. We know that Pakistani officialdom has always been obsessed with ‘security’ and that the state — both our own and others to whom we are even more loyal — has generally been considered far more worthy of defending than ‘the people’ that are nominally the subject of public policy. But where, in this story, is the heroic bourgeoisie that provides leadership in society?
The history of the Western nation-state is, indeed, the history of the bourgeoisie. We read about this class fighting for liberation from feudalism, the church and the empire in the English, French and American revolutions. The modern system of government featuring the ‘rule of law’ and the immutable rights of every individual citizen is widely known as ‘bourgeois’ democracy.
Where is the heroic bourgeoisie that provides leadership?
A deeper reading of history confirms that the bourgeoisie has contributed far less to the establishment of democratic institutions in society than the working class, former slaves, women and other segments originally excluded from ‘citizenship’ in the polity. Ironically, this explains why large numbers of people in Western societies internalised ‘bourgeois’ values and contemporary Western states can be considered somewhat answerable to ‘the people’.
The bourgeois story in Pakistan — and other post-colonial countries — is even more tortured. To this day, democratic values have not been internalised by the ‘educated’ segments of society. They may not accept it at face value, but Pakistan’s bourgeoisie remains committed to caste (let alone class) privilege, is generally contemptuous of the ‘backward’ masses, and has little patience for the messiness of democracy.
These attitudes can be traced to the colonial genesis of the polity. The native bourgeoisie was junior partner to the British — if not employed by the state it thrived in private occupations such as law and medicine. Even when this native bourgeoisie decided it wanted self-rule, it remained largely committed to the bureaucratic paternalism that was the hallmark of the Raj. The ‘brown’ sahib replaced the ‘gora’ sahib and the rest is history.
There are variations in the story — the Indian bourgeoisie institutionalised a form of democracy while its Pakistani counterpart remained stubbornly faithful to (military) authoritarianism. But the long-term process of democratisation of society is far from complete in either country, and the bourgeoisie is largely responsible.
The truth is that privileged classes in society can never be expected to willingly relinquish their privilege. As suggested, the process of democratisation in Europe, North America and other ‘advanced’ societies (read: white settler colonies) is explained by the struggles of the downtrodden who demanded their share from a bourgeoisie that was content to keep ‘democracy’ within ‘respectable’ limits. These societies continue to be blighted by racism, patriarchy and classism and the struggle for democratisation continues.
In the subcontinent, this struggle is even more urgent; arguably the single biggest imperative is to critically question the notion that the bourgeoisie is always a progressive force. To the contrary, it is indirectly responsible for the rise of right-wing extremism and its continuing appeal, despite the claims of the ‘educated’ segments that they represent the major resistance to millenarian ideologies.
These ideologies have proliferated precisely because they promise — alongside eternal salvation — opportunities for upward mobility, opportunities that the bourgeoisie has for the most part been unwilling to concede to any social strata other than its own.
Indeed, a certain segment of the bourgeoisie has itself been the face of extremism. Take the highly educated leaderships of right-wing groups like the BJP and Jamaat-i-Islami. Thus we now have a society in which the bourgeoisie itself is divided; on the one hand are the self-styled liberals whose lineage can be traced to the (Western) modernists of the colonial era; on the other are numerically preponderant conservatives who wish for Pakistan to conform to the ideals of the khilafat (and India to Hindu raj).
Both factions claim to speak for ‘the people’, but, instead, are committed to an authoritarian state and capitalist globalisation, unwilling to lead a process of democratisation which could involve surrendering at least some of their privilege. It is easy to claim to be the vanguard of an ideal while living in luxury in Lahore or Karachi, as peripheries like Parachinar burn. Those who recognise the need for substantial social change would be better off eschewing the myth of bourgeois leadership once and for all.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2017
