Roller coaster for MQM

The MQM came into being in the early 1980s due to a number of genuine political reasons. But very soon it was adopted by the establishment to keep the city of Karachi out of the reach of mainstream political parties. General Zia used the MQM effectively to counter the political anger in Sindh in the aftermath of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s judicial murder. Chaudhry Nisar is on record having admitted that during the no-confidence move against the first Benazir government, then COAS General Aslam Beg had delivered the MQM to the opposition.

When the establishment had wanted to bring Benazir Bhutto back after having ousted the first Nawaz government, the MQM was asked not to contest the National Assembly (NA) seats in urban Sindh to enable the PPP to mobilise enough NA seats to elect Benazir as the PM. The MQM obliged by boycotting the NA elections on some flimsy ground but wholeheartedly participated in the provincial elections because the establishment had wanted to keep the PPP pinned down in Sindh so as to force Benazir to rule the country in accordance with the establishment’s political road map. The first clash between the MQM and the establishment occurred when COAS General Asif Nawaz in 1992 tried to apply the minus-one formula to eliminate Altaf Hussain from the party because he was convinced that the MQM chief had tried to persuade then PM Nawaz Sharif to give extension to Aslam Beg instead of promoting General Asif Nawaz. By the time the next general elections came around, General Asif Nawaz had passed away and his successor, COAS General Kakar, and then President Ghulam Ishaq Khan found himself rehabilitating the MQM because GIK, in order to keep Nawaz out of power, needed to bring Benazir back but without giving her enough space to rule on her own.



As soon as Benazir came back for the second time, she replaced the army contingent that was bunkered in Karachi for more than two years with Naseerullah Babar’s police force and there began a running battle between the Karachi police and the MQM workers. This continued until about the time Benazir was ousted from power by President Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari who charged her, among other things, with criminal persecution of the MQM. The second Nawaz government came to power with the MQM rehabilitated as the establishment had wanted the party’s votes to keep the PPP out of even the provincial government. But the partnership did not last long as the murder of Hakeem Saeed created a serious wedge between the two and once again, the MQM found itself at the receiving end.

But then as soon as the second Nawaz government was sent home by General Musharraf, the MQM was once again, back in the good books of you-know-who. This was the period when Karachi saw for the first time after many years an extended period of peace and tranquility. But this phase ended by January 2010 by which time the MQM had lost both the provincial home ministry as well as the mayorship of Karachi. And urban Sindh once again was subjected to a seemingly neverending bloodbath. Currently, the party seems to be once again on the wrong side of the establishment. The ongoing operation in Sindh against militancy appears to have neutralised the MQM’s militant wing. However, without its militant wing, the MQM becomes politically a non-entity because of two reasons: one, its Mohajir political plank has an inbuilt sunset clause sustained only by the use of violence; two, without its militant wing, the MQM loses its utility for the establishment.



So, the latest attempt to tackle the political fallout of the Karachi operation, essentially aimed at restoring law and order in the city by going aftee the MQM, seems to have ended up producing a headless chicken furiously running in circles trying to escape the inevitable, but splashing blood all over, further undermining efforts to restore law and order in Karachi and forcing the law-enforcement agencies to use ever more harsher tactics to eliminate the MQM’s violent elements. But the question begging an answer is: has the establishment finally decided to concede Karachi to mainstream political parties?

Published in The Express Tribune, September 3^rd, 2016.

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