The electric car policy Pakistan's auto mafia killed

A policy that was a no-brainer, and the cartel that killed it

The most useful story in this two-and-a-half-hour conversation is also the most deflating. In 2019, a research unit at LUMS walked into Malik Amin Aslam’s office with a finished policy document on electric vehicles. He read it and saw a clean win for Pakistan. EVs would cut a driver’s energy cost by roughly 60% and vehicle pollution by about 70%. Better still, if the day-time tariff was set correctly, the country could finally use the off-peak electricity it was already paying for — the capacity payments owed to power plants whether they run or not — to charge a fleet of cars instead of letting that supply sit idle.

The cabinet approved it. Aslam refined the document, built phases around it — two-wheelers first and most aggressively, then three-wheelers, then four-wheelers — and everyone in the room could see the upside. Then it was sabotaged from inside.

“I knew there was a timber mafia and a land mafia,” he tells Muzamil. “This was the third — a car mafia, and a very strong one.” Two conglomerates, Honda and Toyota, had cornered around 80% of the market. They had never honoured their own localisation and deletion commitments — the products, Aslam notes, of the same import-based assembly economy the two men dissect earlier in the episode — and when the EV policy threatened them, they warned that factories would close and jobs would go. The policy stalled. “Today, in EV, we are nowhere to be seen,” he says. “We could have become the player in the region.”

Muzamil presses on the part listeners rarely get: this was not foreign interference. It was friendly fire. Mafias, Aslam explains, are “equally ingressed” across every party — each has a sugar baron, a real-estate baron, an auto baron — and taking them on is a lopsided fight. “They are fighting for billions in interest. You are fighting for a principle.” He won that fight against the timber mafia in KP and the land mafia on the tree project, but only because Imran Khan’s political ownership sat behind him. On EVs, that backing did not hold. And the window has closed: China was aggressively looking for places to park manufacturing then, and Pakistan’s own market is too small to justify EV plants without exporting. “The ship has sailed.”

Born into politics, trained as an engineer

Aslam was born in Karachi and raised in Lahore, where his family moved from the Attock area — the seat of his political constituency — for the education. His father was a politician, a People’s Party national-assembly man from 1970, and Aslam grew up campaigning: 1977, 1985, 1988, 1990. “That responsibility has always been on my shoulders,” he says of serving the area his family has represented since his great-grandfather.

He studied electrical engineering at UET Lahore, in an era he remembers for its student unions. Boycotts were constant; he and his whole batch finished a four-year course in six. He is clear-eyed about what those unions became: a “good nursery” that produced real political leaders, but one that degenerated once parties started using students “as fodder,” empowered to fail exams and still demand passing grades. The intellectual debate died, and the unions were banned. He drifted away from engineering toward something wider, eventually becoming a freelance consultant for the World Bank and UNDP for three or four years, traveling across Central Asia and authoring two consequential studies for Pakistan — including one estimating climate adaptation would cost the country between six and twelve billion dollars a year, a figure the subsequent floods proved close to the mark.

In 2001 he entered electoral politics directly and lost the district nazim seat by seven or eight votes.

The IPP death trap

The conversation’s first deep dive is the structure of Pakistan’s energy debt, and Aslam knows it from the inside, having worked at the Private Power and Infrastructure Board. The original sin was the 1994 IPP wave: contracts that were front-loaded, so the heaviest payments fell in the early years, and later deals struck on a cost-plus basis that guaranteed investors an 18% return on whatever they spent. Then came capacity payments — the obligation to pay a plant a fixed share of its tariff whether or not a single unit of its electricity is taken.

The fatal detail is the sovereign guarantee. Pakistan didn’t let private producers compete and fail like a market; the state itself guaranteed these contracts, and they are enforceable in international courts, not Pakistani ones. The justification at the time was “the economic cost of unmet demand” — the argument that load-shedding was suppressing so much economic activity that even 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour was worth it. “In hindsight,” Aslam says plainly, “that was not right.” Dams take twenty years and credit goes to a successor; IPPs took two and won elections. It was a quick fix, and under cover of the quick fix, “a lot of money was made, and they are still making it.”

He dates the relief carefully: the bulk of the 1994–95 plants clear between 2024 and 2026, easing the cycle that traps Pakistan with more capacity than demand.

The options Pakistan threw away

What stings Aslam most is that Pakistan had alternatives and squandered them. Hydro development “stopped completely, which was a really criminal act.” He points to the Indus cascade — some 50,000 MW of unmet potential — and to projects like Neelum-Jhelum and Suki Kinari finally coming online after years lost to a global wave of anti-dam sentiment that reversed only when climate change reframed dams as zero-carbon power.

Coal is the cleanest illustration of the waste. While most of the grid’s generation hovered around 40 to 50 rupees per unit, Thar coal came in at roughly 3 to 4 rupees. Pakistan instead based its IPPs on furnace oil — expensive and imported — and the country can now choose coal gasification, which turns Thar coal to gas and sharply cuts emissions, or the “best available technology” in any fuel. The most damning episode he recounts: a previous government, cozy with furnace-oil IPPs, capped renewable IPPs at 50 MW per province, stalling 1,200 MW of wind projects that already had worldwide financing lined up. His own government got that cap removed.

On hydrogen, he is more measured. He recounts sitting beside a Saudi power-company CEO during an Imran Khan visit; the Saudi praised the pitch but later described a Pakistani section officer killing a hydrogen plant deal with paperwork, then contrasted it with India’s office in Saudi Arabia that handles every back-end approval so the investor only has to bring money. Hydrogen has a big future, Aslam says — but it is costly, and unlike Saudi Arabia, which has no hydro and no coal, Pakistan has options and no real pressure to chase the most expensive one. Pakistan sits below 1% of global emissions. “We can decide to do the right thing because we have options. There is no pressure on us.”

Why the money always disappears

The two men keep circling one pattern. Twice now — Cold War aid, then the war on terror — Pakistan received a flood of cheap dollars and chose to “import things and live well” rather than build an export economy. Aslam calls it the cardinal mistake of the early-2000s government: with the dollar pegged at 60 and money pouring in, it became an import-based consumer economy. “Bring in parts, make a car, bring in parts, make a motorcycle, take things from China.” A semblance of prosperity that “haunted Pakistan for the years that followed.” The 2008–2018 decade he labels a “death trap” of fat project loans — motorways, the Orange Line — whose returns never materialised and whose debt now sits on the country’s books.

The deeper failure, in his telling, is that nobody analyses policy; the entire popular discourse reduces to “that government was corrupt, the other was corrupt too.” Corruption, both men agree, often rides alongside development in any growing economy. The harder question is competence: were the decisions themselves smart? On that, the record is poor — and Aslam argues it traces back to a system where, however many good people you put forward, “in the end only the electables come, and they have all taken money from the same set of real estate, auto and sugar folks.”

The three D’s, and the leadership vacuum coming

Asked where Pakistani politics goes, Aslam offers a framework he keeps returning to: the three D’s. Delivery — voters increasingly want to see whether you actually solve inflation, hunger, electricity, not just chant slogans. Decency — the polarised, social-media-fueled politics of who can hurl the bigger insult is unsustainable and will phase out, because nothing productive comes of two people fighting for an hour. And democracy within parties, so good leadership can emerge on merit instead of being treated as betrayal.

He sees a vacuum approaching. The mainstream leaders — Imran Khan, Nawaz Sharif, Shehbaz Sharif, Zardari — are all near or past 70, likely in their last elections, and no party is building the teams or plans to replace them on credentials rather than legacy. Muzamil draws the parallel to Congress in India and the dethroned dynasty in Sri Lanka, arguing the region rejects power-politics families over time. Aslam agrees the same pathway is inevitable for Pakistan, only slower.

Trees, water, and the leverage hiding in plain sight

The billion-tree tsunami, which grew into the ten-billion-tree programme, is Aslam’s clearest case of policy done right, and he is precise about why it worked: strong political ownership from the very top, a flexible design not locked to one idea, sustained funding, and the willingness to take on the timber mafia. The cost discipline was real — about 14 cents per tree, against the $1-per-tree cost of a comparable project India announced at the G20. That earned Pakistan a rare positive acknowledgement and a “nature leadership” position, which Aslam then converted into climate diplomacy. It reopened a stalled relationship with Saudi Arabia, with MBS announcing his own ten-billion-tree project, and produced the US–Pakistan Green Climate Alliance during an otherwise frozen period. The point, he stresses, was never to play the victim — everyone is affected by climate change — but to show up as a solution provider asking for partnership and financing.

He extends the same nature-based logic to Recharge Pakistan, a programme to capture floodwater into the wetlands on either bank of the Indus and recharge the groundwater aquifers being drained by tube wells — a single year’s flood waste, he notes, can equal the storage of three Tarbela dams.

Which brings the conversation to the issue both men think is most neglected: water. It is underpriced and over-used. Aslam pays a flat quarterly bill of a few thousand rupees for unlimited household water, with no meter and no incentive to conserve. Agriculture takes 80% of supply, sugar gets protected despite being one of the thirstiest crops, and Pakistan — which sits on the world’s third-largest freshwater aquifer — is becoming water-scarce through mismanagement alone. His warning is the gas analogy: Pakistan burned cheap domestic gas in stoves and cars until it ran out, and now imports it at fifty times the price. Water can go the same way. Muzamil pushes on whether desalination, especially solar-powered as in new Saudi projects, could be the eventual answer for a depleting south. Aslam’s instinct is that storage comes first; desalination remains a high-cost venture for a population this large.

He closes the way Muzamil asks every guest to — picturing Pakistan in twenty-seven years if nothing changes. He refuses the easy outs (youth bulge, “if only”). Instead he plants himself: he had options abroad, he says, and chose to stay, because people who were given everything by this country owe it something back. The vibrant population and, more specifically, the quality of ideas it produces are the two things investors keep telling him Pakistan ranks number one on. What’s missing is the ecosystem — and, the whole conversation implies, a politics willing to fight the mafias long enough to build it.