here is something peculiar about austerity. It is always announced as an economic necessity, but experienced as a moral question. When governments tell citizens to conserve fuel, close markets earlier, reduce consumption, tolerate higher prices or accept fewer public services, they are not merely asking people to change their spending habits. They are asking them to accept a new social bargain: everyone must bear the burden because the country is facing difficulty.

That is precisely where the trouble begins.

The moment sacrifice becomes a national obligation, people start looking upwards. They look at ministers, parliamentarians and senior bureaucrats. They look at the official cars, foreign trips, allowances, residences, protocol, privileges and institutional conveniences.

They ask a deceptively simple question: if we are in this together, why does together seem to have different meanings at different levels of society?

Pakistan’s latest austerity measures amid worsening global energy crisis provide a particularly revealing backdrop. The federal government has announced a 50 percent reduction in fuel allocations for government vehicles, restrictions on official travel and purchases, curbs on official lunches and dinners as well as other measures.

These measures are understandable in an economy facing external shocks. Pakistan’s vulnerability to energy prices is not imaginary. Disruptions connected to the conflict in the Gulf have already pushed energy costs higher and increased pressure on households and businesses.

But economic necessity does not automatically produce political legitimacy; it has to be earned.

There is an important distinction that often gets lost in angry public debates. The problem is not necessarily that political leaders have privileges. Leaders, legislators, civil servants and other officials require salaries, security, transport, staff and institutional resources to perform their functions. A state cannot demand public service while pretending that those who provide it need no material support.

The more important question is when does privilege cease to be socially legitimate. This question becomes particularly urgent when the state asking citizens to sacrifice appears unwilling to ask the powerful to sacrifice proportionately.

This is not an argument against inequality. Human societies have always had hierarchies. They have always produced elites—political, religious, military, economic, intellectual and social. The existence of an elite is almost universal. What is not universal is the basis upon which that elite is considered legitimate.

Across societies, hierarchy has historically come with obligations. The chief was expected to protect the community. The elder was expected to provide wisdom. The ruler was expected to provide security and justice. The wealthy were often expected to patronise, employ or support those around them. In other words, status has traditionally carried a price: responsibility. Modern political systems have transformed the basis of authority, but they have not eliminated this expectation. In fact, democracy has intensified it. A politician does not simply possess power. He or she exercises power on behalf of the citizens. That makes the behaviour of political leaders unusually consequential.

There is a reason societies observe their leaders obsessively. People at the top are not simply richer or more powerful. They are symbols of what the society considers important.

This is particularly true in times of crisis.

A society experiencing economic insecurity wants to know what its leaders consider expendable and what they consider essential. If ordinary citizens are told to reduce fuel consumption, they notice whether government allowances are also being reduced. If families are told that money is tight, they notice whether official spending is restrained. If the government says the country cannot afford something, citizens inevitably ask what the state can still afford.

This is not envy. It is political interpretation. The citizen is trying to understand the hierarchy of priorities. This is why apparently small acts by powerful people can acquire enormous political significance: a minister travelling in economy class will not rescue the national economy; cancelling an official dinner will not eliminate a fiscal deficit; reducing the number of government vehicles will not solve Pakistan’s structural economic problems.

But that is not why these actions matter.

They matter because political leadership is partly theatre—in the anthropological sense, societies communicate values through visible behaviour. People need to see what the political system believes: the symbolism of sacrifice.

Austerity is therefore not merely about how much money is saved. It is about who visibly gives up something. Pakistan has already seen how sensitive this symbolism can become. In July, public controversy surrounded reported increase in parliamentary remuneration, while government employees and pensioners were granted substantially smaller increases. Earlier, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly faced intense criticism over legislation extending privileges to lawmakers, after which the government announced that the provisions would be withdrawn.

The recurring public reaction tells us something sociologically important. People are not simply comparing rupees. They are comparing sacrifices.

Every austerity programme quietly answers a political question: whose consumption matters? But if certain privileges remain protected, the state is also communicating something else: some forms of consumption are less negotiable than others.

This is where austerity becomes political. The public begins to distinguish between necessary privilege and protected privilege. The first can be legitimate. The second becomes difficult to defend.

This distinction is crucial because a functioning state cannot operate on the fantasy that everybody must possess exactly the same resources. Equality of outcome is neither possible nor necessarily desirable.

But citizens do expect something close to equality of moral obligation. They want to believe that when the country is in trouble, those with the greatest power understand that power carries greater responsibility.

The greatest danger is not that a politician has a better car than an ordinary citizen. The danger is the creation of a political class that appears to inhabit a different economic reality altogether. A worker worries about petrol; a family worries about bills; a small shopkeeper worries about declining customers; a young graduate worries about unemployment; a pensioner calculates the price of medicine.

Against this background, every visible privilege at the top becomes magnified. The citizen begins to wonder whether the crisis is genuinely shared—or merely administered. That distinction can destroy trust. Once trust declines, even sensible policies become harder to implement.

This is why austerity cannot be treated merely as an accounting exercise. The state is not only collecting and spending money but is distributing hardship. This distribution of hardship is one of the most profoundly political acts a government can perform.

So every decision is political.

A decision does not become political only when it concerns elections, political parties or parliament. Politics begin wherever resources, opportunities, burdens and recognition are distributed. When a government decides who receives a subsidy; who pays more tax; which public service gets protected; whose salary increases and whose purchasing power falls—everything is political.

So when leaders decide whether they will visibly share the restrictions imposed upon the population, that too is political. So is a foreign trip; a new official vehicle; or a photograph of a lavish event during a period of public hardship.

Societies are not held together by spreadsheets alone. They are held together by perceptions of fairness, reciprocity and belonging.

A citizen expects the person asking him to sacrifice to understand the sacrifice. This is the difference between equality and solidarity. Solidarity does not require everyone to have the same income, house or car. It requires people to believe that their different positions within society carry corresponding obligations.

The powerful may have more. In a crisis, they must also be seen to carry more.

Pakistan’s National Assembly Secretariat, for example, has reported savings of Rs 4.5 billion— 27.3 percent of its projected budget—through austerity measures in the ongoing fiscal year. At the same time, reporting on the 2026 budget has raised questions about large supplementary grants and expenditure overruns despite the government’s austerity claims.

These contradictions are political because they make the public ask whether austerity is a governing principle or simply a measure applied selectively. That is the question governments cannot answer with speeches. They answer it through behaviour.

Ultimately, a country does not need its leaders to become poor in order to demonstrate solidarity with its citizens. It needs them to demonstrate that privilege has limits.

It needs a political culture in which public office does not automatically become a gateway to greater entitlement precisely when ordinary citizens are being told that entitlements must shrink. What becomes corrosive is privilege without reciprocity. That is the point at which hierarchy loses its moral explanation.

Once that happens, an economic crisis can become a crisis of legitimacy. The government may still have the legal authority to impose austerity; the parliament may still have the constitutional authority to grant privileges; officials may still enjoy privileges. But legitimacy requires that citizens believe that the system is fair enough to deserve their cooperation.

That is why, in difficult times, the powerful should understand that their choices are never entirely private. The citizen wants to know whether, when the country asks everyone to tighten their belts, those at the helm are willing to tighten theirs too.

That is the real politics of austerity.

The writer is a published anthropologist. She has taught at the International Islamic University, Islamabad, and National University of Medical Sciences. She is also a Red Cross/ Red Crescent Youths as Agents of Behavioural Change trainer.