Why the army finally lost Pakistan's middle class

A country fluctuating between instability and chaos

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Niaz Murtaza as one of the few Pakistani commentators he reads consistently — not because he agrees with everything, but because Niaz holds a single analytical line rather than switching with the political weather. Muzamil sets the question plainly: why does it feel, right now, that ordinary Pakistanis are being beaten from every direction at once — politically, socially, economically?

Niaz’s framing is the spine of the entire conversation. “If you want to describe Pakistan’s situation,” he says, “we are in a cycle with two ends, and we keep fluctuating between those two ends. The two ends are political instability and near-chaos. When things get very bad we move toward chaos, like what happened in Islamabad a day or two ago. When things improve a little we move back to political instability — and we get very happy about it.”

The ideal end — political stability — is, in his reading, nowhere on the horizon. And the reason is structural: political stability comes from political legitimacy, but Pakistan has spent seventy-five years trying to manufacture stability on the basis of illegitimacy. In a country this diverse and this large, that model has never held.

The end of the one-window American model

Muzamil pushes for the mechanics of why the old equilibrium is collapsing now. Niaz lays out the external shock first.

For decades, he argues, Pakistan ran on a model he calls “one-window aid.” If you needed money, you went to America. If you needed arms, you went to America. Intelligence support, technology, IMF loans, World Bank loans, veto protection at the UN — all of it came through a single door in Washington. The elites distributed what arrived, a thin trickle reached the public, and the model held.

That door is now closed. “The relationship that ran for decades has ended,” he says, “and it’s probably a permanent structure.” Layered on top of the rupture is a difficult global decade — the 2008 crisis, the slow recovery, COVID. The aid is gone, and the conditions that would let Pakistan replace it with something else have also tightened.

Muzamil draws a sharper version of the point: the relationship souring is one thing, but the cost of sustaining Pakistan’s internal patronage has also risen so high that nobody is willing to keep paying it. Niaz agrees, and adds the comparison that matters. The American relationship with South Korea has been consistent for seventy years. The American relationship with Pakistan ran on an on-off cycle — present in the sixties, absent in the seventies, present in the eighties, absent in the nineties, present under Musharraf, gone after. In Korea, dictatorship-era growth produced a steel mill and downstream industries. In Pakistan, the same window of opportunity produced consumer goods and nothing durable. The aid ended; the extremism, the terrorism, and the dependency mindset it bred did not.

The five legs of army power, and the four that are wobbling

The most analytically tight stretch of the conversation comes when Muzamil presses Niaz on whether the army can sustain its current grip. Niaz refuses to answer in the abstract. Instead, he lays out the five sources of military power explicitly.

The first is raw military force, used sparingly and mostly in the peripheries — ex-FATA, Balochistan. The second, and the one that does the day-to-day work of running the country, is the intelligence apparatus — controlling political parties, judiciary, media, civil society. The third is ideological: the army as the self-appointed custodian of piety and patriotism. The fourth is Milbus — the economic empire that employs thousands directly and runs a vast patronage system through contractors. The fifth is the network of non-state actors historically under its influence.

Four of those five, Niaz argues, have weakened. The arms flow from America has dropped. Some favoured non-state actors — the TTP — became enemies; others had to be visibly clamped down on because of FATF. The right-wing parties that used to march in lockstep with the establishment have broken away one by one — Jamaat-e-Islami first, then PMLN, then PTI. And the middle class, which was historically the army’s most reliable civilian base, has ruptured. What remains intact, and what continues to sustain army dominance, is the intelligence apparatus and Milbus — the two things that, he notes, distinguish Pakistan from Indonesia and Bangladesh, where the military did not have the same economic footprint and did not survive the transition with the same hold.

The middle class that stopped clapping

Niaz spends real time on the middle class because the rupture there is, in his telling, the single most important political change of the last fifteen years.

For decades, the middle class hated the patronage politics of PPP (the landed elites) and PMLN (the commercial elites). It had no organic connection to either. By default, it supported the army. Professional middle-class men in uniform felt closer to the urban professional middle class than the feudal lords of Sindh or the industrial families of Punjab did.

Then, beginning in the eighties, middle-class parties began to emerge. MQM in Karachi was the first. Religious parties — where the clergy functioned as a kind of professional middle class — were a second. PTI was the third and largest. The middle class found its own political vehicles, and the army lost its civilian floor.

Muzamil reads the February 2024 election as the public proof of that rupture. “A lot of myths broke that day,” he says — the myth that the public could be bought with a plate of biryani, the myth that the public was too uneducated to understand what was being done to it, the myth that switching off the internet would scramble the vote. The state took the symbol, took the name, created confusion, shut down the phones — and the public still went out and elected no-name, no-brand candidates. “If anyone won this election,” Muzamil says, “it was the Pakistani public — because they proved they are willing participants in wanting something better.”

Niaz adds one structural factor Muzamil does not raise: the unprecedented integration of social media reaching all the way down into rural areas. The 2024 result was the combination of high inflation and a model that has been dying for years. The real test, he says, will be the next election — when, if PMLN has managed to bring inflation down and run its full distribution machine, the public will face the choice cleanly. If they still reject the old order, then the verdict is structural, not cyclical.

Why the constitutional amendments are not judicial reform

Muzamil asks Niaz to explain, in plain terms, what the proposed constitutional amendments actually do — and why an ordinary citizen, who just wants cheap roti and a cheap mobile phone, should care.

Niaz’s answer is direct. The judiciary, like the media, is another middle-class group that has begun to break free of the establishment. Some IHC and Supreme Court judges are visibly pushing back. The constitutional court structure being proposed — where the prime minister appoints the chief justice — is, in his reading, “not parliamentary supremacy. This is executive supremacy.”

He is careful not to oversell the alternative. An independent judiciary, even a fully free one, will focus on middle-class issues, not on the egalitarian rural agenda Pakistan actually needs. “It’s not that rivers of milk will start flowing if the judiciary becomes free.” The point is the negative consequence of the army succeeding. If the establishment locks the judiciary down again, then the same apparatus that controls political parties, media, and civil society gets a fourth leg back. The crackdown on mass-based groups — PTM was banned days before the recording — gets easier.

The amendments, he concludes, have no judicial rational purpose. Their only purpose is to relock the door the middle class kicked open, and to ensure the next election can be won on the old terms.

Where the new mass politics is actually emerging

A long stretch of the conversation maps the parties that are emerging outside the establishment’s permission — PTM in ex-FATA, the BYC and the Mahrang Baloch movement in Balochistan — and the strange fact that they are emerging from the most marginalised, most conflict-affected parts of the country rather than from the core.

Muzamil presses on the asymmetry. Upper Sindh is desperately poor, with no shortage of grievances — why has no equivalent movement risen there? Niaz’s answer is sociological. In Sindh and South Punjab, the hold of the waderas — feudal landlords — is enormous, and the patronage system they run is robust. In Balochistan’s coastal belt and in ex-FATA, the sardars and the maliks were either weaker to begin with or were physically wiped out by the Taliban, leaving a vacuum that mass-based movements have moved into.

The core areas — Sindh, Punjab, the Peshawar valley — have just enough economic prosperity flowing from the old order that mass politics has not been able to put down roots. Until it does, the new movements will remain trapped in the periphery, and their ability to bend the whole country will stay limited.

The Imran Khan question, and what happens if you remove him

Muzamil asks the question that sits underneath much of Pakistani analysis: is PTI’s support base really about Imran Khan, or is he simply the man who placed himself at a junction where the grievances were already gathered?

Niaz is unambiguous. Social grievances come first. Mobilisation follows. Leaders emerge to give voice to what already exists. The middle-class grievances PTI channels predate Imran Khan by decades. Altaf Hussain emerged from Karachi’s middle class the same way. Remove Imran and the grievances remain. Remove the channel that PTI provides and the grievances find another channel — possibly TLP, possibly worse.

Muzamil takes the argument further. “If you remove the figurehead, how do you remove the grievance? You’re not doing any reforms. You’re not making any concessions. You’re closing protest. You’re closing elections. When you close every non-violent channel, where do you expect this to go?”

Niaz does not predict a TLP sweep. He predicts fragmentation — PTI’s vote splitting across TLP, PTM, MQM, and back to PMLN. That, he notes, makes the establishment’s job of stitching together coalitions easier in the short run, and the country’s job of governing itself almost impossible.

Why no leadership has emerged in seventy-five years

Muzamil — who notes that he was born in 1990 and has watched the same theatre for his entire political life — asks the question that haunts the conversation. Why has Pakistan, with all its talent, never produced a generation of genuine national leaders?

Niaz’s answer is the cleanest single paragraph of the episode. Since 1958, every genuine grassroots leadership formation has been crushed. NAP was crushed. The Awami League was crushed. Leftist politicians at the grassroots were checkmated. To do the checkmating, the establishment promoted extremist parties, fascist parties, populist parties. The traditional patronage politics of PPP and PMLN grew “too big for their boots,” and to crush them, the same playbook produced PTI. Every single political model Pakistan has tried has been built on the suppression of the model that should have come naturally — ideological, grassroots, mass-based politics. The result, four decades in, is a country whose social, political, economic, security, and foreign policy systems have all been blocked from developing normally at the same time.

China has already decided Pakistan is not an investment destination

The foreign policy section of the conversation contains the line that should worry policymakers most. Niaz is blunt: the American relationship is over, possibly permanently. The block forming around Russia and China is the new gravitational centre, and China — economically — is the dynamic power inside it.

But, he says, China has reached its own conclusion. “Pakistan is not a destination for major foreign investment by China.” Chinese capital is going to Vietnam and Bangladesh. Beijing has watched CPEC, watched the attacks on Chinese nationals in Karachi and the north, watched the governance system that frustrates a country used to moving at lightning speed — and quietly decided to keep Pakistan afloat with small disbursements rather than to bet on it.

The detail that should land hardest is the new India-to-Europe corridor. On a map, the straight line runs India → Pakistan → Iran → Turkey → Europe. The actual proposed corridor goes from India into the sea, around Pakistan and Iran into the Gulf, and only then up through Turkey. The world is now drawing its trade routes specifically to avoid running through Pakistan. “We are seen as a problem child,” Niaz says, “that nobody wants to throw money at.”

The Congress model, and the only realistic interim

Muzamil pushes for what comes next. He notes that technocratic governments have been tried — under Musharraf, under SIFC — and the magic never arrives. Even with all the power the military can muster, the results do not show up. So if not technocracy, what?

Niaz does not pretend to have a clean answer. Single-party authoritarianism — China, Vietnam — only worked in ethnically homogenous societies whose parties were forged in long civil wars. Pakistan has neither. The long-term goal is grassroots mass politics emerging from below, but realistically, that is two or three decades away.

For the interim, he points to what he calls the Congress model. After Rajiv Gandhi’s death, the Gandhi family stepped back from governing and focused on running the political party. They appointed competent cabinets. Narasimha Rao became prime minister with Manmohan Singh as finance minister in 1991 — and that combination put India on the path. BJP took the baton later. But the start was Congress staffing a competent cabinet on top of a political mandate.

The ask, then, is narrower than it sounds. Civil society needs to pressure Pakistan’s existing parties — PPP, PMLN, PTI — to do exactly that. Keep the politics where it is. Put competent people on top of it. “The country desperately needs a merit-based governance,” he says. “Otherwise this country can collapse.”

By the end of the conversation, the through-line is unmistakable. The old order — American aid, elite patronage, an army standing above politics with the middle class clapping — has broken at every joint. The forces that should be replacing it are either being actively crushed in the peripheries or refusing to update in the core. Muzamil closes by asking what the next six to twelve months look like. Niaz’s answer is sober: it depends almost entirely on whether the constitutional amendments succeed. If they do, the repression cycle deepens. If they fail, the country gets a narrow window — one new chief justice, one slightly freer election tribunal — to begin doing what it has not done in seventy-five years. He does not sound optimistic. He does not sound resigned either. He sounds, throughout, like someone who has been writing the same warning long enough to know that the warning itself is now the work.