The unfolding Sindh game

The new party will also fail at what other parties have already failed

Every politician in Pakistan and Sindh is nervously awaiting step number two of what is widely presumed will be a cascade of events triggered by Mustafa Kamal and Anees Qaimkhani’s rebellious return to Karachi. Given the shortened life expectancy of known MQM dissidents like Azeem Tariq and Bader Iqbal, everyone is aware that this is not a step that would have been lightly taken by anyone let alone someone savvy like Mustafa Kamal who was comfortably placed abroad.

However, what was disappointing was that apart from the defiance of the party leadership and “RAW” allegations, there was little in the shape of political thought evident in the initial introductions. For example, there appeared to be no mention of bridging the hidebound ethnic divide that has been the bane of Sindhi politics since Mumtaz Bhutto’s government in the 1970s in Sindh. The thought process displayed by the “new-old” players is apparently not to bring anything new but to capitalise on the disaffection within the parent party.

If anything, the initial political introductions of the new Mustafa Kamal group have been more along the lines of mohajir nationalism which means that what Altaf was doing was right; however, he is a bad man taking money from bad sources so we are better placed than him for carrying out his mission. If anything there is talk of a presidential system and more provinces which are narratives that will inflame and harden the political divide in Sindh. This is also very similar to the traditional brand of anti-MQM Sindhi politics that PPP dissidents like Zulfiqar Mirza have been known for. This indicates that the think tanks behind the newly emerging political fragments do not feel that at the moment there is political appetite to create a party that spawns the ethnic divide which has defined and been the bane of Sindhi politics for the last forty five years. One hopes for the sake of Sindh that such think tanks are wrong.

Politics around the world is the process used by societies to apportion patronage. While advanced Western democracies tend to generally see society divided across class lines, even they are unable to entirely exclude factors like race and ethnicity. However, the damage that the black vote or Hispanic vote does to the Republicans in the United States or for that matter the minority Asian vote to the Conservatives in the United Kingdom, has traditionally been enveloped within the large national party frameworks. This system which should also have existed in Pakistan broke down in Sindh as the larger political parties of Pakistan reeling from Zia-ul-Haq’s onslaught in the early 1980s were unable to understand or address the issues causing the rise of militant political sentiment among the largely Urdu speaking communities concentrated in Karachi and Hyderabad. At the time, the urban dwellers in Karachi and Hyderabad had lost trust in the PPP which although was then a federal party but was seen by urban, largely Urdu-speaking Sindh, as a party advancing at their cost rural Sindh’s largely Sindhi speaking interests. No other national political party was able to tap into the disaffection and the MQM arose as an ethnic party.

The MQM which was built on the bulwark of defying the patronage structures that the Sindhi political majority generated tried to create and protect its own patronage structures by allying with either military dictators like Musharraf or federal parties like the PML-N or later even with the PPP. However, the ethnic division drove both public emotion and the actions of the leaderships on both sides. This division was actually a blessing in disguise for both MQM and PPP leaderships as they ended up with ossified vote banks which were built on security fears and rejection of the other rather than of the normal socio-economic development demands that electorates tend to have. While the PPP and the MQM both at times tried to extend their influence to the other ethnic group, the process required sacrifice of important patronage structures to new leaderships who would need to be created in the other camp and who would be the vanguard of such a change. This was a price both appeared unable or unwilling to pay. Consequentially, the PPP was never able to patronise an Urdu speaking leader and vice versa the MQM does not have any Sindhi speaker of note.

Sindhi intellectuals and middle classes, on one hand, blame the PPP for the socio-economic deterioration of Sindh, and, on the other hand, their inborn fear of Sindh’s cultural heritage being overrun by migrants makes them ignore the impact of the fault line that divides Sindh. They ignore that while dealing with this fault line the PPP and MQM ended up creating an economy where rural Sindh initially was only able to compete with its urban part through a complex mix of patronage, dubious degrees and barriers to merit. The MQM then extended this unfortunate dynamic to the urban areas as well and built their own patronage structures around such practices too. The damage to Sindh of this polarisation has been colossal. A whole generation of youth with degrees of dubious merit and lack of vocational training has grown up and has joined an economy where progress is only possible through patronage networks. The confidence of the middle class in any system outside the patronage networks is zero. This has resulted in a labour force in Sindh that is progressively less able to compete with the migrant labour that keeps flooding in from other parts of the country due to the economy generated by the port. This causes continuous population pressure, slums and the destabilisation in Karachi.

If a new party has to gain political space in Sindh, it will need to bring something new which spawns rather than maintains the political divide and at the same time offers new hope to both Sindh’s urban and rural populations alike. A real political alternative strategy would focus on uniting Sindhi intellectuals to say goodbye to ethnic-divide politics. It is early days but the current strategy adopted by emerging PPP and MQM dissidents does not do this and therefore does not promise a new vision for Sindh. They look intent on grabbing and then playing the current political dynamic rather than advocating a game-changer. This is bad news for Sindh’s political future and a strategy with limited dividends.