Let them eat cake

Let them eat cake

YET another World Bank report has been published highlighting the unending immiseration of Pakistan’s working people. Pakistan’s economic plight is described as largely on par with war-torn countries in the Arab region like Syria and Yemen. Unsurprisingly, the bank makes only limited mention of its own role in relentlessly enforcing the ‘structural adjustment’ policies which have greatly contributed to mass impoverishment. But the report is damning nonetheless. Almost 20 per cent of Pakistan’s 260 million people now fall into the extreme-poor category, defined as a daily income of less than $3. Extreme poverty has increased three-fold in less than a decade. If the poverty line is simulated at the slightly higher daily income level of $4.20, almost half of Pakistan’s people are poor. It is not all doom and gloom, of course, because Pakistani capitalists, landlords, and state mafias are doing very well. This is reflected in inequality markers. What economists call the Gini coefficient is at its highest level in almost 40 years. The report goes on to name a series of ‘shocks’ which have triggered the huge uptick in poverty; the Covid pandemic and the 2022 floods top the list. Missing is a meaningful political economy analysis in which class exploitation, colonial statecraft, and aid dependency are accorded the centrality that our sordid experience demands. In a nutshell, Pakistan’s masses are the targets of a scandalous class war that becomes more intense with each passing day. The main protagonists of this war are Pakistan’s own militarised ruling class and its external patrons, including the World Bank, IMF and bilateral ‘partners’. Even where the World Bank report notes that rising poverty and inequality is partly the result of a “prolonged period of economic adjustment that weakened real household incomes and employment opportunities”, the mention of the actual players that push the adjustment agenda is conspicuous by its absence. And there is nothing about Pakistan’s own state mafias, capitalists and landed magnates who happily pass on spiralling debt burdens to the people, whilst profiting endlessly through real estate and trade, with no concern for livelihoods and ecologies. Working families are eating less on the whole. There have been donor reports, which go beyond superficially describing social crises and actually name some names. In 2020, the UNDP’s annual Pakistan National Human Development Report explicitly stated that Pakistan’s militarised ruling class benefits from hidden — and sometimes overt — subsidies to the tune of $17.4 billion per annum. Six years later, one can assume that this figure has grown; it is another matter that donors are seemingly unwilling to name the protagonists of this class war as explicitly now as in 2020. The truth deficit extends to our own political classes and intelligentsia. Yes, one could argue that ‘elite capture’ has become a widely used phrase. Petrol bombs and other markers of inflation come in for regular criticism and parties like the Jamaat-i-Islami are given licence to undertake sanitised protests. But the political and intellectual mainstream is least concerned with the banality of everyday class war in comparison to intra-elite palace intrigues and diplomatic ‘successes’ in the geopolitical realm. Indeed, mainstream political conflict in Pakistan features only shades of the right, and the object of politics is to secure the good graces of the establishment, which in turn continues to rely on the age-old policy of securing geostrategic rents from external patrons. It is thus that the mass of Pakistan’s people has been thrust further down the class ladder for at least a decade, and arguably longer. Throughout this period, the actual political-economic order has remained largely unchanged, irr­espective of who has occupied the formal seat of government. The accumulation of crises has made the present moment particularly desperate. The ruling regime proclaims its macroeconomic achievements while promising that the windfalls of its great accomplishments abroad will materialise soon. But the statistics that they do not advertise tell the real story. Working families are eating less on the whole and even less nutritiously than before; kids are pulled out of school and forced to work to supplement meagre household incomes; even those who imagine themselves as white-collar workers, let alone those who are in the category of extreme poor, contemplate killing themselves and their offspring to preserve their dignity. It is thus that one is reminded of the 18th-century ‘French princess’ to whom the reply ‘let them eat cake’ was attributed, when her advisers explained that the mass of her subjects were not able to afford bread. The French Revolution followed some years later. The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2026