The MQM in Karachi

Last month, MQM Chief Altaf Hussain pushed many people on the defensive by articulating their ill-concealed desire for a regime-change. He was not far wrong in his pulse-taking. The army is not happy with the PPP, the PML-N wants mid-term change, TV anchors are quivering with their toppling recipes, and small parties like Tehreek-e-Insaf want it because they smell “national government” in the air.

It develops that those who want the PPP out don’t like the MQM either. The army has a reason to be wary. General Aslam Beg was friendly, but General Asif Nawaz was not. Then General Musharraf was friendly, but General Kayani may not be friendly to the same extent. General Kayani, safe in his tenure-plus-extension, may yet be wary of both the PPP and the PML-N.

Under General Musharraf, the MQM was anti-Taliban and anti-Lal Masjid. It was also anti-judiciary after Musharraf sacked the judges. The MQM showed muscle when a popular Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry tried to enter Karachi. But it shrank from the NRO and mended fences with the restored Supreme Court after accepting the reopening of criminal cases against hundreds of its workers. In the process, the MQM has made absolute putty of its thinking process.

Pakistan’s leaders acquire wisdom when abroad. Altaf Hussain was the first to do so. He was followed by Benazir and Nawaz Sharif, which led to the signing of the Charter of Democracy. Altaf Hussain embraced secularism even as mainstream parties fought shy of such labels. The coalition of three secular parties— PPP, ANP and the MQM— looked natural till ethnicity undermined wisdom. In a Mohajir-versus-Pakhtun contest, the MQM thinks only of its supremacy in Karachi.

Karachi gives the MQM the seats it has in the Sindh Assembly and allows it to become the make-weight party in the National Assembly. If the army wants regime-change, the MQM can oblige by getting out of the coalition in Islamabad. Two migrant communities — Mohajir and Pakhtun — had clashed in the drugs ghetto of Sohrab Goth in 1986. A third migration is on the cards now: the Sindhi flood migration. Altaf Hussain cannot like it.

Brigadier AR Siddiqi thinks Mohajirs revere Altaf Hussain because of their traditional respect for father figures. Urban communities never do that, and Mohajirs were urban in India. On the other hand, Shahi Syed is scared of sections of the community he seeks to protect. Ethnic charisma rests on partisan violence as assurance of security. The Baloch of Lyari loved Rehman Dakait for the same reason.

Bertrand Russell in Power (Routledge 1992) said: “The power impulse has two forms: explicit in leaders; implicit in their followers” (p.12). He could have added a more primordial factor causing desire for power: fear. The Sindhi influx to the cities after 1947 was postponed by the migration of Partition. Now the flood has made it possible. Fear will push the new migrants to violence and, depending on the size of this migration, the PPP will benefit from it. Karachi, up to 75 per cent ghettoised, is no longer a melting pot. It is an ethnic battlefield till it is normalised by democracy.

The Pakhtun counterforce in Karachi comes from the drug mafia, the Taliban and al Qaeda plus the madrassa network. The army fights this counterforce elsewhere with a strong lacing of ambivalence which stumps the Americans. It may do the same in Karachi. Democracy, while undermined by ethnic politics, is on the side of the MQM. Any attempt at using ambivalence as policy will harm democracy.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 5^th, 2010.