Pakistan's politics won't change until the economy is fixed

From Wharton to Gujrat: the making of a reluctant politician

The episode opens with Muzamil tracing Moonis Elahi’s early life — a path that moves from Lahore American School to a brief, unhappy stint at Aitchison College (“it was more ratta-based and a lot of other things were happening”), back to American school, then to a graduation in Surrey, a community college in California, and finally a transfer to Wharton for a degree in management and marketing. The detour through Marymount Community College, Moonis explains, was accidental — he had planned a law degree in the UK, missed the US application deadlines, and had to rebuild his GPA from scratch. “The good thing about the American system is that you consistently get that chance to improve,” he says.

He returned to Pakistan in 2000 and walked straight into the family’s sugar mills in Punjab and Palia, which were being run by managers with little oversight. “Obviously it wasn’t efficient,” he says. “It took me some time but, alhamdulillah, we turned those around.” He was the first of the second generation to join the business. The family later split its holdings, and Moonis sold his stake in the sugar factory, moving into real estate and passive investments. He also helped set up a fresh-milk dairy business for his brother — a category that, at the time, was so unfamiliar that supermarkets like Jalal Sons and Al-Fattah refused to stock it. “You don’t compete with Nestlé,” he says, laughing. Five or six years later, the brand had broken even and was widely available across northern Pakistan.

Politics, he insists, was never the plan. “When you said doing everything quietly — that’s more of what I like to do. Just stay in the background, get things done. Because once you come into the limelight, it’s really hard to achieve things. Even experimentation is not possible anymore.”

The first election, the lost seat, and learning to sit in the counting room

Moonis entered politics formally in 2007, helping his father and eventually asking to contest a seat from Gujrat — his father’s own constituency — while also running in Lahore. His father kept deferring the conversation until Moonis enlisted his grandmother to force the issue. He won Gujrat without visiting it. In Lahore, he went to bed with a 2,600-vote lead and woke up having lost by 1,600.

“Do you think there was more than that?” Muzamil asks. “I don’t think — I know that,” Moonis replies.

The lesson stuck. “Every election after that, right after voting ends, I go and sit in the courtroom where all the results come in and the judges tally right in front of you. Because that is where most of the manipulations were done during earlier days.” In 2013, he called his father and uncle at 10 or 11 pm to tell them the results were already being controlled from one side — but that he had a 25,000-vote lead and they needed to hold their ground. They did, and won.

He is cautiously optimistic that this era of direct manipulation is ending. “Gone are the days. Unfortunately, Mian Sahab and Zardari Sahab — they’re still living in the old Pakistan. They have no idea that the whole environment has changed behind them.” The Punjab by-elections, he argues, proved the point: ballot stuffing happened, but the sheer volume of PTI support made it irrelevant.

Why Moonis crossed the floor — and why it wasn’t just ideology

The most politically charged section of the conversation concerns Moonis’s decision to side with PTI against the no-confidence motion, effectively defying the broader Chaudhry family position. Muzamil frames it as a moment of political courage that, in hindsight, looks prescient — but asks what it looked like at the time, when powerful voices were calling it political suicide.

Moonis is careful to resist a purely ideological framing. “It was a bit of everything. If I say it was just ideology, that wasn’t right. So it was pragmatism as well — knowing the Sharifs, knowing PM, knowing that we can work with him in order to achieve the goals.” The goals, he says, are constituency-level: Gujrat had stuck with PML-Q even when the Noon League tide was running strong, and “we owe them.”

His deeper reason is personal experience with the Sharifs. “Knowing the Sharifs — unfortunately the rest of my cousins and other generation haven’t dealt directly with them. I’ve been on the other side. And walking with them is impossible. They can’t walk with anyone.” He describes a final conversation with his uncle Chaudhry Shujaat — a man he credits with grooming his entire political career, someone who operates on “95% logic and 5% emotions.” On that day, he says, the ratio was reversed. “I said, you’re not saying this — something else is happening. He gave me that half smirk and I said, it is what it is.”

The PDM delay trap and PTI’s structural weakness

Later in the discussion, Muzamil and Moonis turn to the broader political landscape. Moonis’s read is blunt: the PDM government is making a strategic error by postponing elections. “The longer they linger on, the more PTI’s majority grows. If two-thirds is coming now, I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes three-fourths.” He attributes the post-April 9th surge in PTI support to a simple narrative: “The public has been convinced that these are all thieves, and they’ve all gathered against one man. And then in Punjab, one man stood alone.” People who are not necessarily PTI supporters are voting PTI because they have nowhere else to go.

Muzamil pushes on the succession question — a point he says he raised directly with Imran Khan on a previous episode. Moonis agrees it is a genuine vulnerability. “You’re absolutely right. Within PTI, I don’t find the structure for succession. It’s as simple as that.” The assassination attempt in Wazirabad, he says, made this fear visceral: “People were thinking — without Imran Khan, there’s nothing. It’s Imran or nothing. And that’s disastrous.” He draws a direct line: without a succession plan, evolution is impossible. “You don’t get evolution — you get disaster.”

On the question of whether a third political force could emerge, Moonis is sceptical in the short term. “Right now, today, there’s no space for anything else. It’s very black and white.” PDM’s unity, he argues, is entirely temporary — “their objective is achieved, then they’ll fight each other, because they can’t stand each other.” But he acknowledges a section of the public that is anti-establishment without being pro-PTI, and for whom no political home currently exists.

The economic roadmap nobody has agreed to sign

The conversation’s most substantive stretch is on economics. Muzamil raises Pakistan’s chronically low tax-to-GDP ratio and the Indonesia comparison: if Pakistan simply matched Indonesia’s ratio — a country with similar demographics and a comparable corruption history that undertook a governance reset in 1998 — it would generate an additional $13 billion in revenue. “You don’t have to go to the IMF. Government becomes self-sufficient.”

Moonis does not dispute the arithmetic. His prescription is a cross-party economic charter — a document all parties sign, committing to a ten-year roadmap that is insulated from political turbulence. “You can protest, you can do whatever you want, but at minimum the system should keep running. There should be a baseline agreement.” He uses the example of an exporter whose trucks were never stopped even during dharnas: “You need to evolve to that.”

On digitisation, he is unequivocal. “I absolutely support that.” He points to the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard and the rapid global exchange of financial data as forces that are already making it harder to hide money offshore. “Politicians come up first as PEPs. Escaping that has become difficult for anyone — which is a good thing.”

On amnesty, he draws a careful distinction. A one-time, broad-based amnesty is legitimate; repeated, sector-specific amnesties that exclude the very people — bureaucrats, politicians — who hold the most undeclared wealth are not. “You’ll be surprised the amount of money bureaucracy has. If you give them amnesty, bring them on board — they will do wonders for your system.” The PTI real estate amnesty, he implies, was the wrong kind: it pumped money into an asset class where construction barely followed, producing valuations that “make no economic sense.”

Bureaucracy, digitisation, and the file that never moves

Muzamil raises the dysfunction of Pakistan’s civil service — the bloated headcount, the politically motivated hirings, the paper files that travel between offices in a country where every office has internet access. Moonis describes his experience as Water Resources Minister: his ministry had gone fully digital, with files appearing on his desktop each morning, comments added and forwarded to the secretary the same day. When he came to Punjab and asked PITB to implement the same system, he was told the software already existed — nobody had just made anyone use it.

“Ideas were great, they’d happen, but then they just get lost and no one would remember them,” he says of the federal cabinet. “Then someone would remember, another meeting would happen, and then time would pass.” His current project is to give Punjab cabinet members tablets so they arrive at meetings already briefed, rather than carrying stacks of paper agenda items.

His broader point is structural: implementation is the bureaucracy’s job, not the politician’s. Politicians legislate and set frameworks. But bureaucrats will only implement if they feel protected — which means a liveable salary, a credible amnesty, and the assurance that their children can go to a decent school. “I am sure the whole system will improve and they’ll implement it. Otherwise, I saw in the federal cabinet — ideas were great but they just got lost.”

Dynasty politics and the natural expiry date

Muzamil raises the dynasty question directly — pointing to the Gandhi family’s collapse in India, the Rajapaksas fleeing Sri Lanka, and the growing public rejection of the Sharifs and Bhuttos in Pakistan. He asks Moonis how he sees his own family’s political future, and whether PML-Q will open itself up to internal democracy.

Moonis’s answer is more self-aware than expected. “Dynasties in Pakistan — you’ll get one chance, maybe two. After that, if you aren’t able to deliver, even your constituency won’t ask about you. Because Pakistan has changed.” He describes returning to Gujrat after the no-confidence vote, sitting with elderly constituents who told him, in Punjabi, that he had done something bold — and that people could see it. The implicit message: the public is now watching, and performance matters more than lineage.

He goes further. “If I am not capable enough to retain that name and to deliver to my people, I honestly don’t deserve to be an MNA from that constituency. That’s perfectly fine.” On the question of whether someone from outside the family could lead PML-Q, he says: “If there is someone who ticks all the boxes, keeps everyone together, and takes things forward — I would be the first one to give him my slot.” He draws the analogy to a family business that eventually needs professional management: “You take a back seat, derive your dividend, and the party keeps going. Your political capital keeps accumulating. There’s no problem in that.”

The Wazirabad attack and the limits of political control

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Moonis to contextualise the assassination attempt on Imran Khan — which took place near Gujrat, with the FIR eventually registered in Wazirabad. Moonis gives a detailed, first-person account: he was in Gujrat without his phone when the shooting happened, returned to find missed calls from Hussain Nawaz Niazi and others close to Khan, arranged a helicopter within twenty to thirty minutes, and tracked the convoy’s live location to Kalashakaku before deciding the motorway landing was too risky given the crowd. The FIR ended up in Gujrat because that was the closest police station.

What followed — the videos, the apparent confusion, the questions about who was in control — he attributes partly to a police system that no government has ever fully controlled. “Has any government ever had full control over police in the history of police? This is a myth.” He describes a senior police officer claiming his system had been hacked, and his own response: “Give me the name of the SHO of the police station nearest your village. In the next twenty minutes, that same SHO will be posted to Wazirabad. You can get whatever FIR you want. Silence.” Nobody answered.

Muzamil closes by asking Moonis to describe Pakistan in 2050. His answer is economic, not rhetorical. “Economy is the only thing I’m concerned about. Once you have the economy figured out, the rest most definitely follows. Focus should only be on the economy. That should be set in stone. Everyone should know — this is what we follow. Ahead of that, do whatever politics you want.”