When will they learn?
What Mustafa Kamal has managed to achieve so far is no more than the support of some half a dozen MQM turncoats. He has failed to win the sympathies of the MQM grass root activists despite appeals for general amnesty. The Sindhi nationalist parties have boycotted Kamal en bloc. Now that he has to put up a show of strength he is visiting provincial leaders of the PTI and ANP to invite them to his public meeting to make the gathering look respectable.
Accusing the MQM members of being RAW agents and calling for its ban indicates that Kamal has lost hope of ever making his party a viable replacement of the MQM as long as the later is present on the political scene. This amounts to an acceptance of defeat.
Among the positive achievements of the Rangers-led operation in Karachi is the suppression of the armed wing of the MQM. What is left behind is the political party purged of its sharp shooters, China cutters, extortionists and gangsters. Whether one likes it or not, the MQM as it exists now has established through successive by-elections that it still commands the support of the urban population of Sindh. There is a need to encourage the party to develop as a peaceful and law abiding mainstream political force instead of banning it which will not at all remove its hold over its constituency which it will continue to represent under a new name.
Allegations of a similar kind have been levelled against Jamaat-e-Islami, ANP and PPP in the past. A number of religious parties have been receiving funding from some of the gulf countries. All these have been spared because the charges could not have been proved in regular courts of law. The MQM remained a key ally of the King’s party knocked together by Musharraf. Sparing Musharraf and punishing MQM will be widely considered a discriminatory act and motives would be attributed. Banning political parties has never helped as the experience of NAP metamorphosing into ANP amply proves.