Often, in this column, I have explored the phenomenon of ‘lifestyle liberals’ following a political leader who has repeatedly tried to evoke the ‘religious card’ in a bid to negate his colourful past and safeguard an adopted pious persona. If what he says in this respect were to be turned into policy, the first to get impacted by this will be the lifestyle liberals.

I have been talking to lifestyle liberals to understand what I believe is something riddled with irony and loaded with the possibility of them getting ‘cancelled’ by the very ideas they seem to be supporting. It is like a businessperson hailing ideas that are likely to go against his or her business interests.

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I am trying not to sound patronising, but I must confess that talking politics with lifestyle liberals is not a very enlightening experience. Indeed, I do not expect them to carry any in-depth knowledge of the country’s politics outside of what they receive from populist TV channels, WhatsApp groups, the social media and, especially, from their political leader, Imran Khan. This is perhaps why all I get from them is what they consume as surface narratives, which to them are enough to understand politics.

These often include received spiels about looters, corruption, foreign conspiracies, etc. But how do they reconcile their lifestyles to ideas that are inherently antagonistic towards what they do?

How do Imran Khan’s socially liberal supporters reconcile themselves to his increasing religiosity?

Last week, I got the chance to closely observe a group of lifestyle liberals as they were standing in front of a TV screen on which Khan was busy delivering a speech. This happened at a glitzy event. In an area which (I thought) was for smokers (it wasn’t), a TV was mounted on a wall, and a channel was showing long passages of a speech delivered by Khan.

The rest of the screens at the venue were telecasting what was taking place on a huge stage nearby. I couldn’t figure out why this particular screen was telecasting content from a news channel. Anyways, the mentioned group was there — two women and three men — all dressed up in what, I’m sure, were very expensive clothes, pieces of jewellery, wrist watches, rings, et al.

Every time Khan would curse his opponents, calling them corrupt, looters and slaves, some from the group would raise their fists and hiss, ‘yes.’ One of them (a man who seemed to be in his mid-thirties) then announced, “This is why I love him!” Others raised their cola cans and hissed again, ‘yes.’

I pushed myself into a corner so as not to distract them with my presence. And then I waited for Khan to start his usual lectures on faith and morality.

‘Yes,’ they kept on hissing, until, as expected, Khan finally broke into his morality spiel. The joyful hissing suddenly stopped. As Khan began to spout rhetoric that he has weaved by joining the rhetoric of different (and even opposing) groups of Islamists, and of post-modernist South Asian academic hacks sitting in universities in the US and applauding Islamism as an admirable anti-thesis of ‘Western modernity’, the people in the group seamlessly took their eyes off the screen and began to talk about something entirely different.

It was as if they were forcing themselves to believe that Khan wasn’t on the screen anymore. So maybe this is how lifestyle liberals deal with the dichotomies that they are likely to face by supporting him? Through cherry-picking. Perhaps.

In 2013, a friend of mine who lives in Lahore, told me about two large milk/lassi shops in that city. They were located opposite each other and run by two childhood friends. The friends came from well-to-do middle-income groups, even though, I am assuming, they were not lifestyle liberals.

Nevertheless, one shop had a large portrait of Nawaz Sharif in it, and the other had painted the image of Khan’s face on one of the shop’s pillars. Both the owners would often engage in humorous political banter, deriding each other’s favourite political leader. I see this as two segments from the same economic class, jostling for space. Let me explain.

According to political economist Akbar Zaidi, if being upper-middle/middle class in Pakistan means ‘aspirational classes’ who are some of the most active patrons of consumer goods, then 48 percent of the population can be segmented as middle class. From the 1980s, the economic regime of the country has succeeded in bolstering the size of this class and also to provide it economic influence.

But there is only limited space in the country’s political system to fully accommodate this segment. So sub-sections from this class compete to occupy whatever space there is for them in the political system. They compete because political influence guarantees bigger material gains and better economic security.

Sharif’s PML-N was supported by a large section of this class that emerged in the 1980s. This segment was socially conservative. In the last decade or so, PML-N has tried to expand its electoral strength by also appealing to the more liberal segments of this class.

But most lifestyle liberals in this segment still understand PML-N as representing old middle-income groups. They view the PPP as a party of ‘feudal lords’ vying for the votes of the lower classes by putting them in places where only ‘respectable’ and educated middle class folk deserve to be.

Khan’s sculpted image of being worldly, educated, ‘incorruptible’ and, of course, handsome, was more than enough for lifestyle liberals to choose him as their leader. On the one hand, some completely ignore his increasing religiosity but, on the other, many lifestyle liberals actually identify with it.

In a February 2019 essay for Vox, Laura Turner spoke of a form of ‘seeker-friendly’ and ‘cool’ Christian evangelicalism that involves fashion, music and celebrity. This approach has been increasingly adopted by many Islamist evangelical outfits in Pakistan as well. And Khan has become a poster-boy for this approach.

But the overall impact of this approach on society is almost the same as that of old-school evangelicalism. Even though it attempts to dissolve the dichotomy between lifestyle liberal pursuits and religiosity, the fact is, it only seeds confusion, contradiction and, maybe, even a misplaced arrogance — by claiming that it has magically sorted out the clash between materialist amorality and religious morality. It hasn’t.

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 10th, 2022