Further misery for the MQM

Out of power, hurt by defections

Prominent members resigning parliamentary positions in a huff, going incommunicado, not doing the leadership’s bidding – these are not the antics you associated with the MQM’s leadership and legislators. Such shenanigans, and even worse like changing of loyalties, may be treated as a business hazard in other parties. But the MQM is definitely an exception. Organized more on the pattern of an authoritarian party where one man’s word is law and any deviation is known to have consequences that are dire – extremely dire. In that backdrop, topflight leaders Mustafa Kamal and Anis Qaimkhani, respectively the former mayor of Karachi and deputy convener of the highbrow coordination committee, developing differences, going out of contact with the party’s rank and hole up abroad with the intent to give a wide berth to Karachi is major news that has taken its time to filter out. It is not difficult to understand that the inspiration for this disappearing act comes from the innate instinct for survival.

So few and far between have been ‘freezing out’ of the higher leadership or defections that, unless some who have been found dead in mysterious circumstances with no details ever made public for dead do not speak and the party would not enlighten us, since the emergence of Haqiqi in the mid-1990s or parting of ways and murder of Imran Farooq in London, this is the first instance of a duo ditching the MQM in this manner. Political parties are not supposed to be secretive, but with regard to the MQM it can be safely said that only the information it wants to be disseminated about its inner workings gets into public domain.

Being out of power for the first time in over a decade – actually other than brief snatches of time when an action was going against it in Karachi, the only time in the last 30 years – has its own ramifications. Then, it has at the moment issues with both the PML-N and the PPP. Fed on the perks of power, the rank and file is difficult to persuade to keep on toeing the line. Mustafa Kamal’s loss is particularly going to weigh heavy; in the forthcoming local government elections, the absence of his savvy may hurt the MQM’s prospects. The MQM needs to mull at the way it has been run. And unless it reforms from within, and shuns violence against people both from outside and inside, it would increasingly find its top talent ditching it.