And poverty is becoming more pronounced. Local residents now get only a few hours of electricity daily, down from around six several years ago, and with Pakistan’s exploding population, jobs are ever harder to find.
“People are getting more and more desperate,” he said.
In recent years, there has been another shift in society. Mullahs of the fundamentalist Deobandi school have grown powerful in southern Punjab, spreading an aggressive, anti-Shiite, anti-state message during Friday sermons in the religious schools, or madrasas, that have proliferated since the 1980s.
The spread has touched Mueenuddin. A religious group was building a mosque on the edge of his property, and one day a young man on its roof shouted at him: “The first thing you’ll know is when the bullet hits you in the forehead.”
He ordered a wall erected along the property line.
The religious extremists’ view of world is not unlike that of the Utopians in W.H. Auden’s Horae Canonicae, Mueenuddin said, whose rigid views of the perfect society — oblique references to Soviet communism — are just as true today.
“I find it scary that extremists in Pakistan are trying to force their rigid prescriptions down our throats,” he said, invoking a comparison with Joseph Stalin, who ruthlessly consolidated his power by crushing any dissent.
The Utopian, he said, quoting from a book of Auden, dreams of “some august day of outrage when hellikins cavort through ruined drawing-rooms and fish-wives intervene in the Chamber,” and for a time when “those he hates shall hate themselves instead.”
But is the Pakistani elite in the same position as the Russian aristocracy before the revolution?
“It’s something that keeps me awake at night,” Mueenuddin said.
The fear recedes in daylight. It is unclear how strong the forces of extremism in Mueenabad are, and whether sweeping away the current order is among their aims. For the time being at least, the status quo seems likely to prevail.
“I don’t think the guys I’m dealing with are thinking in revolutionary terms,” Mueenuddin said. “They’ve not gotten that far.”
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