Pakistan’s middle classes are trapped in a specific type of loop. They have too much education to accept what is happening without understanding it and too little power to change it. They file their taxes. They send their children to private schools because the public ones have been abandoned. They pay for their own water filtration because the municipal supply is unsafe. They pay for their own security because the state’s protection is unreliable. And now they pay Rs.321 per liter to move through the city they were promised was theirs.

Prices of electricity increased more than twice (2022-2025) due to subsidies being lifted to comply with IMF requirements. Whenever the IMF seals it with the seal, the middle classes have to pay. Not the elite, who have already insulated themselves with solar panels and imported generators. Not the very poor, who receive targeted protection. The middle—always the middle—absorbs the policy.

There is a silence in Pakistani homes right now. Not the comfortable kind. The kind that happens when a father stares at a fuel pump receipt and doesn’t say anything. When a mother quietly moves money out of the savings she doesn’t have. When a young, desperate engineer in Lahore fills the tank of his motorcycle and does the calculations in his head.

The government declared an unprecedented emergency rise of Rs.55 per liter in the prices of petrol and diesel, the new prices coming into force at midnight. And now petrol stood at Rs.321.17 per liter. One of the highest fuel prices in Pakistan’s history.

You would like to know what all that means in the real world? The population of motorcycles registered in Pakistan is more than 25 million. Millions of daily commuters and delivery workers do not own cars but rather use a motorcycle as a........

© Paradigm Shift