Dr. Ikramul Haq
The fashionable trope of “Boomers v Gen Z” has recently entered Pakistani discourse, imported entirely from Western culture wars and amplified by social media echo chambers. It is emotionally seductive, media-friendly, and analytically shallow. More dangerously, it diverts attention from the real fault lines in Pakistan’s political economy—fault lines that are constitutional, structural, and distributive rather than generational.
Lack of economic justice, perpetual socio-political infights, false narrative of foundation of state on so-called Islamic idelogy and recurrent crises of goverance in Pakistan are not generational in stricto senso. These have their roots in history, elitist state structure, control over economic resources by a clique, weak political parties and culutre of unprecedented endurance of oprression by masses.
Our core prevalent crisis is constitutional and institutional—non adherence of the suporeme law of the land—and break down of state appartus. This crisis stems from collective failure of society to run the state on the principles enshrined in the Constitution of Islamic Republic of Pakistan [“the Constitution”] and resistance to reform the society as a whole with the changing realities. The consolidation and reinforcement of status quo of exploitative structures in Pakistan is a complex and perplexed issue.
In Pakistani milieu, the most crucial question remains largely uninvestigated or satisfactorily answered as to how the historic exploitative structures in Pakistan keep on perpetuating and becoming more powerful, notwithstanding long democratic struggle by pro-people organizations and individuals.
The process of recolonization, started soon after independence on Augist 14, 1947, is known to all, but is rarely countered through people’s power by any political force. We all know that it is not a mere question of institutional control but is also related to and aimed at capturing national resources to ensure perpetuation of power—absolute and unquestionable. It is in direct conflict with the Constitution, so debate should be how to enforce it. The struggle by all should be to make Pakistan a true constitutional democracy, where real power belongs to people.
The supremr law of the land does not conceive society as a battlefield of age cohorts. It is premised on equality before law (Article 25), free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years (Article 25A ), the guarantee that citizens shall be dealt with strictly in accordance with law (Article 4), protection of property subject to public interest (Articles 23 and Article 24), and an explicit commitment to social justice and economic democracy (Articles 3, 37 and 38).
Unfortunately, the above principles have been subordinated to rent-seeking, asset concentration, and selective enforcement of law, inequality deepens—not because one generation worked harder than another, but because the constitutional promise is systematically breached.
To frame today’s malaise as a conflict between older and younger Pakistanis is therefore a fundamental misdiagnosis. The hardships faced by young Pakistanis today are not the result of generational moral failure or cultural weakness. They are the predictable outcome of policy choices that rewarded asset ownership over labour, speculation over production, and political proximity over merit.
A young Pakistani graduate enters a labour market characterised by informality, underemployment, and credential inflation. Education—once a ladder of mobility—has become an expensive filter with diminishing returns.
Public sector employment, historically a stabilising force for the middle class, has shrunk in real terms, while the private sector remains largely unregulated and precarious. These realities are not cultural. They are economic and institutional, rooted in the abandonment of the constitutional vision of a welfare-oriented state. That vision was never abstract. The Objectives Resolution, later made a substantive part of the Constitution (Article 2A), envisaged a social order based on justice, equality, and collective well-being.
The 1973 Constitution translated this aspiration into enforceable principles: elimination of exploitation (Article 3), provision of basic necessities (Article 38), and promotion of social and economic justice (Articles 37 and 38). Over time, however, this constitutional commitment was hollowed out by ad hoc policymaking, fiscal expediency, and the systematic privileging of rent-seeking interests.
Nowhere is this betrayal more evident than in Pakistan’s fiscal architecture. The tax system violates the constitutional principle of equity by shifting the burden onto consumption and documented income while leaving wealth, land, and real estate largely undertaxed and politically protected. Article 38(d) obliges the state to reduce inequalities of income and wealth, yet our fiscal policies entrench them. This is not a failure of generations; it is a failure of constitutional governance.
Generational rhetoric conveniently obscures this reality. It collapses class into age. A retired government clerk and a real-estate tycoon may belong to the same generation, but they do not share the same constitutional position or economic power.
Yet both are subsumed under the caricature of the “boomer,” while an unemployed graduate in a peripheral district and a venture-backed professional in Islamabad are grouped together as “Gen Z.” This flattening of social reality is analytically dishonest and politically useful only to those who benefit from the status quo. Younger Pakistanis are frequently accused of entitlement, impatience, or disrespect for authority. What this critique ignores is that authority itself has suffered a profound crisis of legitimacy.
Institutions demand obedience while failing to deliver justice. Laws exist, but enforcement is selective. Accountability is promised, but rarely realised. Under such conditions, skepticism is not rebellion; it is rational citizenship grounded in constitutional expectation.
The Constitution does not demand blind deference; it demands accountability. Article 4 guarantees the right of individuals to be dealt with in accordance with law, while Article 25 mandates equality before law. When citizens observe that law applies differently depending on wealth, status, or political connection, trust erodes. The resulting alienation cannot be dismissed as generational temperament; it is a direct response to constitutional inconsistency.
Equally misplaced is the moralisation of historical advantage. Affordable housing, subsidised education, and stable employment were not rewards for superior virtue. They were products of a different demographic and economic moment, reinforced by policy choices that no longer exist. To treat these benefits as evidence of moral superiority is to convert timing into theology and to deny the role of the state in shaping opportunity.
The intergenerational contract has also been strained by environmental neglect and fiscal indiscipline. Younger citizens inherit public debt, degraded ecosystems, and climate vulnerability without having consented to the decisions that produced them. Article 38(f) obliges the state to secure the well-being of people irrespective of age, yet long-term costs are routinely externalised. Anxiety about the future is therefore not ideological; it is grounded in material risk and constitutional neglect.
This brings us to the question of federalism. Article 160, governing the National Finance Commission Award, was designed to ensure equitable distribution of resources between the federation and the provinces.
Persistent delays in NFC awards, reliance on ad hoc arrangements, and creeping fiscal centralisation have weakened provincial capacity to deliver education, health, and employment opportunities. Given Pakistan’s youth-heavy demographics, these failures disproportionately affect younger populations, particularly in less developed regions. Once again, the issue is institutional failure, not generational attitude.
No honest constitutional political-economy analysis can ignore the role of Pakistan’s bureaucracy. Over the years, our civil bureaucracy has drifted far from its constitutional role as a neutral executor of law and policy and has increasingly emerged as a power centre in its own right. Through control over postings, licenses, procurements, regulatory approvals, and enforcement discretion, senior bureaucracy exercises enormous influence over economic outcomes—often without corresponding accountability.
This power is accompanied by an entrenched VIP culture financed by taxpayers: official residences, fleets of vehicles, protocol-driven lifestyles, and privileges treated as entitlement rather than public trust. The cost of this culture is borne not by those who enjoy it, but by ordinary citizens—particularly salaried, documented, and younger taxpayers.
Such bureaucratic exceptionalism violates the spirit of Article 4 and Article 25. A system in which a privileged administrative class operates above ordinary legal and fiscal discipline corrodes constitutional legitimacy and deepens public alienation. For many young Pakistanis, the bureaucracy is experienced not as a facilitator of opportunity but as a gatekeeper of scarcity—where delays, discretion, and rent-seeking matter more than merit.
By shielding itself from reform while exercising authority over elected representatives and citizens alike, the bureaucracy becomes a silent partner in the very inequalities that generational rhetoric seeks to explain away. The state demands compliance but resists accountability, reinforcing distrust across generations.
By transforming economic failure into cultural conflict, the “Boomer v Gen Z” narrative performs a vital political function: it deflects responsibility. Policy failure is rebranded as moral decline. Structural injustice is reframed as youth impatience. Meanwhile, the real questions—who pays, who benefits, and who decides—are left unanswered.
Pakistan does not need a generational reckoning. It needs a constitutional one.
The way forward lies not in lecturing younger citizens about resilience, but in restoring the constitutional foundations of economic justice: progressive and equitable taxation, genuine asset taxation, protection of labour, meaningful federalism, civil-service reform, and equal application of law. Only a political economy aligned with constitutional principles can rebuild trust across generations. Until we abandon imported culture wars and confront our own constitutional deficits, we will continue arguing about age while inequality deepens, institutions erode, and the future is quietly mortgaged.
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Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.