People's influx into Karachi

This is an article on the large-scale movements of people in and out of Pakistan and how that has affected various aspects of life in the country since its founding as an independent state in 1947. I have already written about the movement of 14 million people that resulted from the division of the British Indian colony into the independent states of India and Pakistan. India became a predominantly Hindu state while the majority of the population of Pakistan belonged to the Islamic faith. My academic work on this movement suggested that of the eight million Muslims who headed for Pakistan, about 470,000 went and settled in what was chosen to be Pakistan's first capital.

The other large movement of people had occurred a decade and a half before the birth of Pakistan. This was to bring farmers from the eastern part of Punjab to the newly irrigated lands in western Punjab and upper Sindh. I will take up a study of this influx of people into Pakistan in a later article. For the moment, I will continue to work on the movement of people in and out of Karachi. The 'out' movement was mostly to the Middle East, another subject for a later article.

A building boom resulted from the arrival of 470,000 Muslim refugees from India to Karachi which then was a small seaport on the Arabian Sea. The British administrators of colonial India had expanded the port to handle the surplus grain that had become available from the irrigated lands of Punjab and Sindh. The grain surpluses were shipped to the ports in the eastern parts of India to deal with perennial food shortages in that part of British India. In 1943, a devasting famine had starved to death millions of people in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.

The arrival of 470,000 Muslim refugees to Karachi needed both urgent care as well as long-term accommodation. The result of the long-term care for the refugees was a building boom in the city. New residences had to be built both in the city centre as well as in the periphery. Office buildings had to be constructed in which the newly arrived refugees could work in both the public and private sectors of the city's economy. New commercial centres had to be set up to provide for the needs of the newcomers. Most of the refugees who came in from India belonged to the middle class; they could not be expected to work as construction workers. Such workers were imported from Punjab, interior Sindh and the Pashtun areas. The result was another wave of migration into the expanding city.

The construction workers had also to be housed. For them, houses were built not in the city but in the peripheral areas. The result was workers' bastis. One of these was Sohrab Goth, peopled by the Pashtuns who had come to work in the city but found it difficult to share lives with the long-term residents of area. The community came to be associated with the ethnic strife that was to mark life in the metropolis. Before the influx of the refugees, life in the city was dominated by Sindhis and the Khoja community. Jinnah belonged to the latter group of people. There were serious conflicts between the original population and the new arrivals. It was the persistent civic unrest that persuaded Field Marshal Ayub Khan — who through a coup état, had assumed control of the country, establishing the country's first military government — to shift the country's capital from Karachi.

Ayub became president in 1958; and three years later, in 1961, he moved the capital to a place near Rawalpindi, the headquarter of the Pakistan Army. The site chosen was along Margalla Hills, the foothills of the Himalayas. He called the new capital Islamabad to endear himself to the radical Muslim groups who were pressing him to bring Islam into governance. Besides being close to the military headquarters, he felt strong enough to ignore the Islamic groups when he issued a new Constitution after having abrogated the one adopted by the political establishment in 1956. The only concessions made to the religious groups in the 1962 Constitution was to call the new capital Islamabad.

Ayub Khan hired Doxiadis, a Greek architect and planner, to design the new capital. The central feature of the new capital was the "blue area" so named because it was marked in blue on Doxiadis' zoning maps. Over time, a large mosque was built overlooking the Margalla Hills. It was said to be one of the largest places of Muslim worship in the world. It was called the Faisal Mosque to indicate Pakistan's close relations with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Since then, Pakistan has linked itself formally with the Kingdom, signing a defence agreement that would come to Riyadh's assistance in case miliary help is needed.

Since this cluster of articles is about the movement of people, it is appropriate to bring in here a discussion of the formation of a large colony of Pashtuns near Islamabad who had left Afghanistan to escape the persistent violence in their homeland. This colony is called "Bara Koh" with many legends about the origins of its name, including that it is 12 (bara) miles from the centre of Islamabad on the road to Murree, a popular holiday resort in the Himalayan Hills at a height of seven to eight thousand feet. This was to become an important centre for Afghan migrants. Its importance for this movement of people was second to the one on the periphery of Karachi.

The large influx of Afghan refugees into Pakistan estimated to number three to four million has had serious consequences for Pakistan. The most important impact is the arrival of terrorism in Pakistan for which the country's policymakers blame the Taiban government in Kabul. The Tehreek-e-Taliban, TTP, is behind the dozens of attacks that were launched in 2025 to target the security forces in Pakistan, taking hundreds of lives in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Intelligence Services in Pakistan believe that the TTP and other terrorist groups in Pakistan have the support of India. In several formal exchanges between the officials of Beijing and Islamabad, China has indicated clearly that it will provide Pakistan whatever support it needs to deal with rising terrorism.