THERE is a word in Urdu, beyhisi, that has no precise English equivalent. It means something between numbness and indifference, the condition of a person who has seen enough suffering that it no longer registers as something requiring a response. Pakistan’s ruling elite has achieved a collective beyhisi of remarkable consistency. They announce austerity measures in the morning and board private planes in the evening. They speak of the people’s sacrifices in parliamentary speeches delivered from podiums that cost more to maintain than a schoolteacher earns in a year. They reduce ministers’ salaries by 25% and then claim Rs 200 billion in annual savings while the circular debt stands at Rs 4.7 trillion and 107 million Pakistanis live below the poverty line. The arithmetic does not add up but indifference does.
The data describing ordinary Pakistani life in 2026 is not complicated. Real wages have declined by 27% since March 2022. Unemployment stands at 18.8 million, with 6.7 million youth entirely idle. The poverty headcount remains at a ten-year high despite GDP growth of 3.7% that the government announces with celebratory fervour. Nearly 20% of the population has an insufficient caloric intake. 40% of children under five suffer from stunting. These are not numbers from a conflict zone or a failed state. They are numbers from a country whose stock exchange index crossed 169,000 points and whose finance minister presents budget documents to a noisy National Assembly while describing the economic trajectory as encouraging. The stock exchange and the stunted child exist in the same country. They do not appear to exist in the same conversation.
Against this backdrop, the behaviour of those in power is difficult to ignore. Senior political leaders have repeatedly travelled abroad on private aircraft for personal and official visits, including such trips in both 2025 and 2026, while questions over who pays for them often emerge only after public criticism. Provincial authorities have also faced criticism for spending heavily on official aircraft and then using them for journeys that appear difficult to reconcile with the language of austerity. This sits uneasily with repeated calls for ordinary citizens to accept sacrifice and governments to cut spending. The message is hard to miss: austerity is preached to the public, but those in power often seem to live by different rules.
A few hundred families have dominated virtually every Pakistani legislature since independence, maintaining their grip on power through generations of patronage, landownership, and the strategic deployment of democratic participation as a method of power circulation rather than power accountability. The World Bank’s own assessment, released in September 2025, documented that party and electoral politics are dominated by wealthy families, clans, and networks of regional influentials who co-opt even those from non-elite backgrounds into their culture of extraction. The budget for FY2026-27, like every budget before it, left the fundamental economic architecture of Pakistan untouched. Agriculture, contributing nearly a quarter of GDP, remains substantively untaxed. Real estate absorbs enormous domestic liquidity and contributes a fraction of what comparable economies extract from property. The informal sector, estimated at 40% of GDP, operates largely outside the fiscal system. And 5,800 schools in Punjab were handed to the private sector in 2025 alone, with an estimated 700,000 children leaving education following the outsourcing.
The contrast with countries where governing elites have understood that their credibility depends on visible shared sacrifice is instructive. When Portugal faced its sovereign debt crisis in 2011, the prime minister took a 10% pay cut, cabinet ministers took 5% cuts, and the measures were implemented before the public was asked to accept austerity rather than after. When Estonia rebuilt its economy in the 1990s through radical reform, its leaders operated with a transparency and frugality that made their credibility with the public a policy instrument rather than an accidental feature of governance. The argument is not that Pakistani politicians must live like monks. It is that a government asking 107 million people below the poverty line to absorb higher utility bills, reduced subsidies, and compressed purchasing power has a basic obligation of visible proportionality: to be seen making sacrifices comparable in spirit, if not in absolute terms, to what it is demanding from those who have the least.
Pakistan’s crisis is not a shortage of policy knowledge. Every IMF document, every World Bank assessment, every independent economic analysis identifies the same structural failures and the same required reforms with remarkable consistency across decades. The shortage is of political will to impose costs on the constituencies that sustain the governing class in power, which means the landed, the retail sector, the real estate operators, and the informal economy whose untaxed proceeds fund the lifestyles that austerity announcements are periodically designed to obscure. The beyhisi is not accidental but structural. A governing class whose wealth is protected by the same system it is nominally reforming has no rational incentive to reform it, and every incentive to perform the language of sacrifice while boarding the plane.
The family that buys fewer medicines because the bill is too high, the father who delays a hospital visit, the student who gives up a course because the fee is unaffordable, and the household that cuts meals when prices rise are not anecdotes. They are the real outcomes of economic policy. This is what austerity looks like from the ground. The people being asked to sacrifice are counting every rupee, while those making the decisions continue to travel, spend and live in comfort,and then they preach austerity from business class.
—The writer is PhD in Political Science, and visiting faculty at QAU Islamabad.
