A new leader for Karachi

As ‘the world’s second best mayor’ returns to save his city, Karachi appears more apprehensive than excited while the rest of the country is amused at the prospect of Bhai finally losing his grip on the party he leads with an iron hand and a telephone line from London.

Can Mustafa Kamal be as good as his name and turn Karachi into Istanbul if given a second and, preferably, bigger chance or are those thinking on these lines being as naive as the proverbial Mir Taqi Mir?

Since the MQM came into existence in the mid-1980s, it has been blamed for almost everything that has befallen the city of lights – and not without good reason. The party’s opponents see it as a major hurdle to a peaceful and prosperous Karachi and some even link it with international conspiracies to harm Pakistan by destabilising its major economic hub. While the MQM may not be able to defend itself against all accusations, there are problems in Karachi that are larger than the MQM and to some extent the MQM may be a symptom than a cause of those problems.

Often termed as mini-Pakistan, Karachi reflects the problems of the whole country. To put it bluntly, Karachi is a convenient dumping ground for problems that originally belonged to other federating units. Every year, the city happily receives a gift of one million additional residents from the rest of the country. As the country’s major port city, Karachi has a strong pull factor, but we cannot ignore the push factors that are forcing people to relocate.

From 2000 to 2010, Karachi’s population grew more than 80 percent. According to some estimates, it has already crossed 20 million and the city is still warming up. While most large cities attract new residents from nearby rural areas, Karachi has attracted long distance migration from all over the country and abroad. The current increase in population can further increase due to climate change that has already started impacting Pakistan’s agriculture, playing havoc with the rural economy.

This transfer of population also shows that, despite all the bad press that Karachi gets, it is still a mother to the poor – a title bestowed by the poor themselves. That is why people from southern Punjab are not hopping on trains to Lahore, a city that gobbles up sixty percent of the development budget of Pakistan’s largest province, and not many people are keen to buy a second home in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa aka Naya Pakistan.

The demographic pressure faced by Karachi can push even a well-resourced city in a developed country to the brink, and Karachi is neither well-resourced nor well governed. Karachi’s housing, sanitation, transport, health, education and all other facilities are at a breaking point and only the Karachi or Sindh government cannot be blamed for that.

Karachi’s demographic cord linking it to the rest of the country also makes it extremely sensitive to whatever happens in other parts of the country. Perhaps, it is no exaggeration to state that when someone sneezes in Darra Adam Khel, Karachi catches a cold. For example, after Fata, Karachi has been worst hit by polio and the recent unrest in tribal areas has also affected the city disproportionately.

Large-scale demographic shifts and rampant urban growth invariably create anxieties and promote ethnic tensions all over the world. In this, Karachi resembles Mumbai. However, what makes Karachi much more violent is a ready supply of small arms. These small arms are so easy to find in the city because there are factories manufacturing arms in Fata, an area under the control of the federal government. The people of Fata enjoy this privilege because it is their ‘culture’ to bear arms.

The president of Pakistan and the honourable governor of KP, who rule the area on behalf of the federation, have never bothered to determine how many arms would be enough to fulfil the cultural needs of the area. But clearly, Fata produces more arms than its inhabitants can use in their folk dances. A good number of TT pistols, Kalashnikovs and other toys find their way to Karachi.

In 2013, ‘Foreign Policy’ magazine termed Karachi “the most dangerous megacity” in the world citing a murder rate of 12.3 per 100, 000 residents, “some 25 percent higher than any other major city”. Apart from the numbers, it is the nature of violence that has helped Karachi win such acclaim; when it comes to political violence, MQM is usually mentioned.

The MQM has built its politics on the anxieties of Karachi’s Urdu speaking population, giving them voice and identity, but in the process harming them more than their supposed enemies. The MQM has mainstreamed the student union model of capturing a campus and silencing all dissent to perpetuate the control – something it learnt from Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing, Islami Jamiat Talba (IJT) and perfected it. As all nationalist politics aims at marrying identity with territory, the MQM has tried to resist change in Karachi’s demography since its inception.

Over the three decades of its lifetime, the MQM has redefined its enemy many times, entering into conflict with one ethnic group after the other. It was able to stick to its model of politics because successive democratic and military governments were willing to have a Faustian transactional bargain with it that entailed ‘freedom’ for the MQM in exchange for political support.

The last fifteen years were perhaps the best time for the party and a chance for it to break from its past. But the MQM decided to continue with its time tested tools and technique and, as a result, it has once again fallen on hard times. Its current predicament has been complicated further due to its leader’s failing health and legal difficulties in Britain. That is why some observers see the arrival of Mustafa Kamal heralding a battle for succession. If it is a battle for succession, Kamal might have disqualified himself already by entering into the foray prematurely and dissociating himself from the legacy of the founder.

Many analysts see the emergent party, led by Mustafa Kamal, as an antidote to the MQM, based on the homeopathic principle of like cures like – manufactured at the country’s best pharmacy. They see a good MQM taking birth in the labour room after the bad MQM fell from grace. Unfortunately, we have never seen problems being solved through midwifery of a good splinter group from a ‘bad organisation’. Splinter groups either die out, leaving the mother party stronger than before or they become a bigger problem than the parent organisation. The MQM is an organisation packed with tons of TNT; any clumsy work at dismantling it can have serious repercussion for the city and the country.

While Mustafa Kamal embarks on his Herculean journey, with or without divine blessing, we must emphasise that Karachi requires and deserves much more than clean-up operations and a change of guard. It requires effective institutions, better governance, strong local government, more resources and a sense of ownership by all of Pakistan. It also deserves treatment worthy of a megacity. Most important of all, Karachi cannot be fixed in Karachi alone. It must be fixed in southern Punjab, KP, Fata and Balochistan as well.

The writer is a social anthropologist and development professional.

Email: zaighamkhan@yahoo.com

Twitter: @zaighamkhan