Zulfiqar Mirza and his travelling Quran are on tour. Having slipped his senior minister shackles just in time to evade being called to Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry’s witness stand, the PPP politician will spend the next year pointing out how he single-handedly fought the MQM’s treacherous forces in Karachi. He will accuse them of collaborating with Americans, with the British and with his own party – against him.
Zulfiqar Mirza has taken a vocal stand against the MQM in Karachi, but for all the wrong reasons. The MQM gained unprecedented power in Karachi under former President Pervez Musharraf – partially due to the 2001 Local Government Ordinance, but partially due to the use of this party as a historic counterbalance to PPP in Sindh. According to Laurent Gayer and other writers on Karachi, the MQM took advantage of this period of political domination to cement its hold over Karachi’s land, extortion and protection rackets. And as the events of May 12th 2007 conclusively demonstrated, the MQM succeeded in establishing their reputation for having the city’s largest number of weapons, if not quite the largest share of votes. Karachi will not easily forget a time when the locus of violence was Sohrab Goth, when truck drivers and “transporters” were targeted and an entire migrant community held responsible for “Talibanisation.”
Yet this summer’s spate of violence – over 300 people in a space of a few weeks – has been referred to by some as hearkening back to the 1990’s. As researchers at the Karachi-based think tank Collective for Social Sciences point out in their excellent and oft-quoted study, the city historically tends to see peaks in violence when the MQM perceives serious threats from rival parties – in the form of electoral rigging, or a complete fracture in political coalition. A true child of large-city politics, the MQM doesn’t care who holds elections, as long as it wins. When MQM feels like it is winning, Karachi flourishes under an uneasy truce: highways (of the useful and useless variety) are built, mainstream businesses and protection rackets coexist, migrants take advantage of the city’s sprawling illegal economy of settlements and services and rival political parties hold their ground in an MQM-dominated landscape.
Zulfiqar Mirza speaks as if he’d like to take the entire city and its delicate balance head-on. This betrays an embarrassing lack of understanding of Karachi on the part of the former senior minister and the PPP. Never mind the fact that the other rival party, the ANP, with far more claim to any significant increase in vote share, has been chipping away at the MQM’s power for years and has been involved in bloody, drawn-out skirmishes with the party. Never mind that Sindhi nationalists have hitherto seemed only marginally concerned with the state of affairs in the city – on the one hand tempted by the skyrocketing land prices and the rich (and mostly illegal) economy, on the other hand recognising that they are well below the MQM and ANP in the pecking order inside the city limits. The PPP’s representative in Pakistan’s largest and most important city, with few good ideas and even fewer means to implement them, would like to shake things up in front of the cameras.
If Mirza’s aggressive stand on Karachi stemmed from the desire to appeal to his own Sindhi constituency, then this may be the costliest political campaign in Pakistan’s history. And already there is good electoral analysis around indicating that allowing Mirza free reign in Karachi to say any crazy thing he likes will not gain him, or the PPP, any significant shift in votes. This is no ordinary bout of pre-election campaigning – so what were hundreds of people killed for?
There is the argument that Zardari could not sack his hand-picked home minister and friend in Sindh without losing face. Mirza would have to resign in order for the MQM to consider rejoining the coalition and taking the government to the finishing line in 2013. Did Mirza decide that he would not go out quietly, but would take the MQM out with him? Here the plot gets twisted with theories and counter-theories. How everyone was in on the content of the first press conference and how no one was.
What is astounding is that standing on the media’s pulpit and putting a holy book on his head has made a hero out of a dangerous megalomaniac. Karachiites are not looking for a hero – either in the shape of Mirza brandishing “evidence” against target killers, or in the shape of the Chief Justice verbally ripping the government report to shreds. Or even, ironically, in the shape of trigger-happy Rangers placing the city and its citizens under indiscriminate curfew. Ironic, because the Police Ordinance 2002 grants more operational, administrative and financial autonomy to the police force than ever before, and yet we are back to requesting the army to step in.
Maybe what we need is a home minister who is less concerned with being a hero and more focused on doing his job. In order to continue being Pakistan’s economic powerhouse, the city needs more of the mundane: security, police reforms, and a decentralised ruling system that can be agreed upon by the major players. Maybe what was needed was an end to the deadlock on the KESC strike, and some respite from the gunmen and gangs that had the city on shutdown at a moment’s notice. Instead, we get a home minister whose idea of policy-making is to issue 300,000 arms licenses “to allow people to protect themselves.”
If a Karachi without protection and extortion rackets is not immediately possible, maybe what we need is a working political balance – one that will take time and political ingenuity, and that does not hope to sideline any of the major players. Maybe what we need is to use existing laws – such as the Police Ordinance, such as the 18th Amendment – to curb the extent to which political players can use militant outfits.
Instead, what we get is a gang-versus-gang bloodbath in Lyari and a PPP Home Minister who chose to use his final months in power to show the MQM he was not afraid of them. And the MQM, who gave all of us several more reasons to be afraid.
The writer works for an Islamabad-based think tank. All views are those of the author. She may be contacted at [email protected]
u must not use word " Think tank " for small volks wagon
Zulfiqar Mirza is the classical example of parochial mindset. In fact all Pakistan must try to find out the reason which compelled Zulfiqar Mirza to scream in such way when the rangers launched operation in the area of Lyari of Karachi, what is that which the mirza trying to hide behind this screaming. In fact Z.M. is the leader of such minor group in PPP who is hosting a great grudge and unspoken animosity against the Mohajirs of Sind and want every mohajir to be behind the earth. They are jealous of MQM and Mohajirs that how a span of peace and prosperity was enjoyed by all Mohajirs during the regime of Musharraf, how such a progress was achieved in Karachi and Hyderabad, and how the Mohajirs have got strong economical position, it is just intolerable and unforgivable to them. In fact this group wants Mohajirs as their Subordinate/Subservient/Mehkoom as they have made the simple Sindhies of interior Sindh who are compelled to live under worst oppression and are wretched in every mean.
Z.M. is the part and tool of feudalism in badin every body knows well about him what the person he is. Every body is laughing in Badin on Z.M. every body knows here that he has got no honour for Quran or even a single word of it. Z.M. is going to launch an intensive anarchy and civil war between different segment of society in Sindh he is just nothing except the extension of Mumtaz Bhutto regime. Sooner or later his real designs will be overt. I do think that it is the responsibility of every Pakistani to extinguish the fire which is going to be spread soon in far and wide of the Province of Sindh if the Z.M. is not prevented, he is not against MQM but in fact he is against Pakistan, matter of MQM can be seen later, we must discourage this guy just now. it is high time to save the country from the catastrophe of his insanity.
Comments are closed.