Who is minding the MQM store?

The Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM), even after having delinked itself from the London-based Altaf Hussain’s MQM, continues to complain about its missing workers blaming the law-enforcement agencies, especially the Rangers of having a hand in their disappearance. The Rangers on their part have lately started countering the allegation by saying that these workers, in all probability, may have gone underground in response to the latest directive from Altaf Hussain.

Another one of Altaf’s latest directives has asked Nadeem Nusrat to launch a new party comprising the ‘genuine’ MQM supporters. This does not sound such a far-fetched idea. One recalls that until the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) had not turned itself into the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) Altaf’s candidates used to contest the national, provincial and local polls as independents under the label of ‘Haq Parasat’ with kite as their election symbol.

So, Altaf could go back to this indirect hold on urban Sindh by putting up his candidates as independents in any future election under one label and one symbol with his toughs ensuring how Altaf’s captive voters would vote. A closer analysis of the arithmetic of the result of by-election held on September 8 in Karachi’s PS-127 and the immediate circumstances under which the election were conducted makes one wonder if Altaf has not already started giving practical shape to his idea of launching a new party in urban Sindh. In the by-election, the PPP had bagged 21,187 votes, the MQM-Pakistan 15,553 and the PTI 5,880. The by-election day reports had said Malir area had turned into a battleground as soon as voting started. Unidentified men tore MQM-Pakistan posters at a Malir UC-11 polling station.

On the face of it, the result does give the impression that the MQM has started losing its ground in urban Sindh. But a closer look at the result also raises the possibility that the obvious could be misleading. The total votes polled in the 2013 election were a little more than 110,000 as opposed to 60,000 polled in the by-election with the rest boycotting (?) — almost the same number of votes polled by the MQM (59,811) in the 2013 poll. This makes one wonder if there was a managed boycott of the by-election by the original MQM voters at the behest of someone. And perhaps this someone is none other than Altaf himself and that his toughs are still as effective as they have been all these 30-35 years. Perhaps all that these toughs had to do during the by-election was to provide an excuse for the low turnout and they did that very successfully. And interestingly enough they went around tearing out the posters of the MQM-Pakistan candidate and not those of his rivals!

The PPP candidate polled about 6,000 votes more than what its candidate had polled in the 2013 poll. In the first flush of calculations one perhaps reached the conclusion that these were originally MQM votes and went to the PPP candidate in the by-poll. But if one took into consideration the votes polled by the PTI candidate in the 2013 election (little more than 11,000) and those that he polled in the by-election (nearly 6,000) the possibility that it could actually have been the PTI’s votes that went to the PPP candidate and not those of the MQM’s (London?) would seem more probable. So, on the basis of the above assessment one does not feel so sure about the reversals in the political fortunes of Altaf. And if what is being speculated is what exactly had happened in PS-127 by-election, then the immediate future does not hold much hope for the people of urban Sindh.

More importantly, the immediate future of Farooq Sattar, Mustafa Kamal or any other Altaf rebel harbouring leadership ambitions appears rather murky. It is possible that the majority of voters of PS-127 have signalled with their boycott of the by-election, if it was a managed boycott, that they do not recognise any MQM minus Altaf. This scenario is perhaps what seems to have emboldened Nadeem Nusrat, the London-based convener of the Rabita Committee, to claim the other day that Altaf Hussain was MQM and any other entity calling itself MQM was doomed to be rejected by urban Sindh voters.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2016.

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