Khaled Ahmed - Killing Karachi The rivalry between PPP, MQM and militants is destroying Pakistan’s most important city
The Sindh Assembly’s
PPP majority is killing Karachi to avenge itself on the rival MQM that wins the
urban vote in all elections. Its streets are full of rubbish, its roads broken,
and its administration shot through with extractions in billions going to the
feudal elite from rural Sindh that lives in Karachi, empowered by the city’s
expanding underworld.
The latest arrest, of
a Karachi underworld don called Uzair Baloch, has opened a colossal can of
worms of politics-mixed-with-crime, destroying Pakistan’s economic backbone.
Two big political parties of the province — the rural Sindh-dominant PPP and
the urban Sindh-dominant MQM — are dreading what Uzair may confess in the
custody of the army’s border force, the Rangers.
Karachi is the heart
of Sindh, once populated by communities with a highly developed social
consciousness from Gujarat. Like Mumbai, Karachi too was developed into a
modern metropolis by Hindu, Parsi, Memon and Ismaili traders who lived in
harmony. The Sindhi was still in the process of slow gravitation to the big
city when Partition happened and Muslim refugees from India’s Uttar Pradesh
flocked to Karachi. As the non-Muslim Gujaratis fled to India, Urdu-speaking
Muslims filled the gap meant for internal Sindhi migrants. Today, Karachi’s 20 million
population has an Urdu-speaking majority, led by the MQM. It has changed its
name from the Muhajir (migrant) Qaumi Movement to the Muttahida (united) Qaumi
Movement, with ambitions of becoming an all-Pakistan party.
Migration usually
leads to violence. Few Pakistanis realise what the 1947 migration has done to
their most important city. Early administrative discrimination and local
reaction to the newly arrived pushed the migrant youth to underground
resistance. Dutch scholar Oskar Verkaaik in his book Migrants and Militants:
Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan (2004), examined how a students’ movement,
heavily mixed with religion as an identity-marker, became a political party in
the fascist mould, its leader Altaf Hussain gleaning its basics from Hitler’s
Mein Kampf.
The Pakistan People’s
Party was formed by a US-educated Sindhi feudal (wadero) leader Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, who won the 1970 election and thereafter ruled from Islamabad, thus
plucking the party out of its straitjacket of language-based Sindhi
nationalism. Today, it has increasingly shrunk from its national outreach and
begun representing the feudal power of interior Sindh. In his book Karachi:
Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City (2014) French scholar Laurent
Gayer has described the plunge of the MQM and the increasingly feudal PPP into
a relationship of patron-client with Karachi’s criminal gangs.
Sindhi leaders win big
in the provincial hinterland where voters are mostly captive communities living
as serfs. The wadero lords live above the law in castle-like, guarded
residences in Karachi. Within the PPP, they form a hierarchy of equals that
makes discipline impossible. Their usually unruly sons mix with the sons of a
growing elite of bureaucrats ruling in tandem with “wadero power”. Add to this
migrant-wadero mix a third element and you have a combustion no one can control
— the internal migration of people from the predominantly Pashtun north,
affected by terrorism in the “ungoverned spaces” created for mounting
cross-border challenges to neighbouring India.
The trio — the migrant MQM, wadero PPP and
Pashtun-Afghan militias — guided the common urban criminal to carry out activities
for two kinds of leverage: Funds and coercive power. A competently researched
book, Decade of the Dacoits (2005) by Imdad Hussain Sahito, had literally
predicted how the wadero feudal would lean on crime to shore up his power in
Karachi. In 1991, then chief minister of Sindh, Jam Sadiq Ali, was found to be
involved in the kidnapping-for-ransom of a group of Japanese visitors by
wadero-supported dacoits from interior Sindh.
Before the Rangers got going, there were
dozens of no-go areas in Karachi to suit the violent triumvirate. The MQM got
into trouble when the arrested killers started singing. The biggest irony hit
Pakistan in 2014 when a hired “target-killer” confessed he had been trained in
Mansehra near Abbottabad where Osama bin Laden was found — and killed — by the
Americans in 2011. Since the Mansehra camp belonged to the Jaish-e-Muhammad of
Maulana Masood Azhar — now in custody in Islamabad for the Pathankot attack —
the fate of Karachi became further complicated.
Both the PPP and MQM have a strong presence
in the parliament, batting off what’s clearly their symbiotic merger with
criminal gangs. The PPP’s protest against the Rangers’ remit in Karachi strikes
a chord in interior Sindh and the rest of Pakistan. The MQM is secure behind
the support it gets from the urban population of Karachi and other cities of
Sindh. Disloyalty is punished with certain death, even if you feel safe in a
city abroad like London.
Uzair Baloch is the don of Lyari, the
largest of Karachi’s 24 districts, where the PPP has regularly won while the
rest of Karachi has gone to the MQM. Gayer writes: “The romance Lyari and the
PPP culminated in 1987 with the wedding reception (walima) of Benazir Bhutto
and Asif Ali Zardari in the locality. The following year, Benazir Bhutto was
elected from Lyari at the National Assembly, followed by her husband two years
later.”
In the Rangers’ custody, Uzair Baloch is talking of “billions”
collected for the PPP leadership and hundreds of opponents killed to make
things easy for it. What may become really dangerous for the PPP leader living
in exile in the UAE may come from Uzair Baloch — who killed Benazir Bhutto in
Rawalpindi and, more frighteningly, who killed her “all-knowing” bodyguard
Khalid Shahenshah later in Karachi.
