Another sad sight of a standstill city of Karachi over the killing of MQM lawmaker must have worried all political forces who are anxiously waiting for coming elections. The city has been in the grip of all sorts of violence for the last 25 years. The MQM appeared as a strong and mainstream representative of urban middle classes of Karachi in 1987 for the first time in their sweeping victory in local body elections. Since then, they have largely dominated the city politics with little challenge from other political forces. The dominance of MQM meant the end of an era of city’s political support to right leaning forces. Political meetings of the MQM always began with political slogans combined with music of political nature from late 80s to all through the 90s.
In all those years, right wing forces were doing their own trick by opening seminaries and embarking upon religious activism through public gatherings and mass campaigns of reaching out to people belonging to all walks of life. Some 25 years ago, there were hardly any religious seminaries in MQM dominated localities but today if you tour around you find strings of such small to large sized seminaries producing entire generations of right leaning men and women. The MQM has also tried to keep pace with this change by putting lot of religious stuff into their public meetings in the last few years but it seems the party is struggling to keep pace with radicalisation in the biggest Pakistani city. The recent attacks on MQM from ultra-right forces must have rung bells for all the liberal left forces in Karachi who always look to the party as the flag bearer for all such forces. The situations is going to be a big challenge for MQM to not only retain their political position but to ensure that they don’t lose their base to fast advancing institutional radicalism in a city which has till today been the citadel of whatever has left of liberalism in Pakistan.