Perched atop a hill by the seaside in Karachi sits the mausoleum of Abdullah Shah Ghazi. About 1,400 years ago, the story goes, he came to these shores as one of the first Arab Muslim conquerors. When the armies moved on, however, Ghazi stayed. Today, he is revered as Karachi’s patron saint: watching over her citizens and granting the devout a route to God. Over the past year and a half, Abdullah Shah Ghazi may have had a lot of work to do.
Karachi, a sprawling metropolis of some 15 million people, has been wracked by fits of crippling violence. In 2011, 1,723 people were killed in the city – 476 of those homicides were politically motivated. This year, that number is already well into the hundreds, according to rights organisations.
One cannot understand Karachi’s violence, however, without first understanding her politics – and, specifically, the crucible of ethnic issues, crime and land that has shaped those politics.
SETTING THE POLITICAL SCENE:
Karachi, which generates almost 15 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product, is the country’s melting pot. From a population of 400,000 (mostly Hindu citizens) in 1947, when the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into mainly Muslim Pakistan and majority-Hindu India, it has mushroomed to become one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas.
The initial expansion was driven by migrants from India, referred to as Muhajirs (or Urdu-speakers, after their mother tongue). Today’s Karachi, however, has large populations of Punjabis (17 per cent), Pashtuns (14 per cent), Sindhis (eight per cent), and Balochis (four per cent).
Political affiliations are broadly perceived to break down along ethnic lines. Most Muhajirs tend to vote for the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), most Sindhis and Balochis back the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and most Pashtuns vote for the ethnic-nationalist Awami National Party (ANP). The ethnic political affiliations are by no means neat, however, largely as a result of diverging political identities of pre- and post-partition migrants to Karachi.
What is clear is that Muhajirs form the largest segment of Karachi’s population (44 per cent), and the MQM dominates the city – both in the assemblies, and on the streets.
When talking about politics in Karachi, two things are striking. First, how violence – or the threat of it (both as exercised by, and against, political parties)- is always lurking.
It is thus that the MQM’s frequent departures from Islamabad’s coalition government are often accompanied by days of crippling violence.
“It was in the 1980s, with the entry of the MQM into politics, that one saw violence seriously becoming a fact of life in Karachi,” Zohra Yusuf, the chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, told Al Jazeera.
“The MQM armed its workers heavily, and they claimed that [they did so] because they were being attacked [by other parties].”
“This switching on and off of violence in the case of the MQM is really an assertion of their power,” she added. “They want to prove that they have control over Karachi.”
Senior leaders of the MQM, speaking to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, admitted that the party may have engaged in violence when it was first formed, as a student organisation at Karachi University in the late 1970s. Now, they argue, as a locally dominant political party with national aspirations, it is no longer in their interest.
“Yes, killings have happened in the past – but we were protecting ourselves,” said one MQM member of parliament.
And this is where one encounters the second striking thing about talking politics in Karachi: almost every political leader Al Jazeera spoke to, in every major party, used a very particular phrase, when talking about political killings.
“Every action will have a reaction,” said Afaq Ahmed, the leader of a faction that violently split from the MQM in the 1990s.
His words were echoed by Farooq Sattar, the MQM’s parliamentary leader, Shahi Syed, the ANP’s Sindh chief, police officials and others.
The phrase evokes an image of Karachi as some incredibly complex experiment in human physics, suspended precipitously above chaos, being constantly pulled this way and that, struggling to find equilibrium.
‘A RIVER OF FIRE AND BLOOD’:
“It isn’t just every party in Karachi that has weapons,” the ANP’s Syed told Al Jazeera. “Every person in the city has weapons.
“There will be misuse of weapons in our party. There will be people [who use them]. But it is not party policy.”
Syed said there was an atmosphere of violence in the city, and that local party activists could not always been controlled by their leaders. He implicated members of his own party in being involved in extortion rackets and land grabs, for example – all “without the consent of the party”, he stressed. Primarily, however, Syed held the MQM responsible for Karachi’s violence, calling the party a “terrorist movement” and alleging it maintained a “militant wing”.
Muhammad Hussain Mehanti, the Sindh chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a religious party which held sway over Karachi before the emergence of the MQM, agreed.
“[The MQM] has captured Karachi since 1986, and … as a result, this city has become like a river of fire and blood,” he told Al Jazeera.
What do law enforcement officers make of politicians’ assertion that the violence was due to common criminality, not political parties?
“It’s bulls**t,” one senior police official told Al Jazeera – speaking on condition of anonymity because he remains associated with the government.
“Every major political party in this city is armed.”
