Rushdie’s fiction conflates a ruling elite’s corruption with an entire society.

Evidence

The main difficulty does not arise in his portrayal of this structure of power and cruelty at the apex; this he accomplishes, on the whole, superbly. The difficulty arises when this ferocious fable of the state is elided, again and again, in his own recurrent rhetoric throughout the book, with a society which is declared to be coterminous with this state structure, equally deformed and irretrievably marked by its purported civilization (Islam) and its genetic origin (the Partition), more catastrophically wounded even than Naipaul makes out India to be in A Wounded Civilization. The rulers and the ruled seem to be joined together, each mirroring the other, in a Satanic compact. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 241

Categorization

• XREF: The critique of conflating elite and society connects to the reader’s curations on class, social capital, and how single-class perspectives masquerade as whole-world views. — connects to: Rushdie’s Pakistan novel frames a narrow ruling elite’s experience as a whole nation’s.

Related

• Rushdie’s Pakistan novel frames a narrow ruling elite’s experience as a whole nation’s. (similarity 0.97)
• Conflating the ruling class’s portrait with the whole country is a social-imagination error. (similarity 0.80)
• Presenting all antagonists as one family mirrors the narrowness of dictatorial power. (similarity 0.79)
• Reading Rushdie through ‘Nation’ and ‘Third World’ frames obscures his class moorings (similarity 0.79)
• Confusing rulers for the whole society is a political and imaginative error. (similarity 0.79)