The complex reality of the MQM

Altaf Hussain is crying. The ISPR is raging. The Rangers are raiding. And once again we are in the midst of a tamasha that seems to occur in Karachi every few years. Law-enforcement agencies have claimed that hundreds, if not thousands, of petty criminals, extortionists and target killers have been taken off the streets. The army chief has vowed to continue the operation to ‘its logical conclusion’, while credible reports have also emerged that the establishment wants to pull-off another one of its famous ‘minus one’ formulas to reign in the MQM. However, taped confessions and numerous encounter killings notwithstanding, it is the opinion of this author that the recent operation completely ignores the structural causes behind the recurrent bouts of violence in Karachi. Moreover, the establishment and its non-Karachi based constituencies’ inability or unwillingness to understand the MQM phenomenon – beyond crude notions of coercive ‘support’ and foreign funding – will ultimately provide the party with a new lease of life. In fact, this is quite evident in the resounding victory the MQM obtained in the recent heavily mediascrutinised, Rangers-managed byelections in NA-246. Let us examine briefly why an inability to understand the MQM only leads to heavy-handedness and frustration for those who would have it exterminated by force (including instituting treason cases and media trials). There is a persistent refusal by non-Karachi based middle and upper classes to look at the MQM as anything beyond or more complex than merchants of extortion and death. With mainstream suspicion of the MQM’s ‘ethnic’ politics and in clinging on to this image of the party, critics seldom take account of the MQM’s complex and highly organised – though rigidly hierarchical and violently policed – structure through which it has been able to ingratiate itself into the networks of patronage and service delivery that characterise everyday politics in Karachi and many other parts of Pakistan. It is this intervention in the everyday, quotidian politics of electricity connections, telephone lines, water supply and channelling of youth energies (through collective activities) that generates the spontaneous consent the MQM generates among large swathes of Karachi’s Urdu-speaking middle and working classes. Moreover, it is exactly such mechanisms of service delivery that interact with its minutely organised local units and militant wing to generate the MQM’s ‘dual power’ structure in Karachi as (almost) an alternative state. The refusal to see the MQM as a complex reality beyond its militant wing also obscures the very real imbalances in Pakistan’s power structure and Karachi’s political economy which laid the groundwork for the party’s emergence. Most serious observers and scholars of Pakistan are aware of the shift in Pakistan’s civil-military state apparatuses since the 1960s, and especially following Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s civil service reforms. Since the late 1970s, the suppression of Karachi’s once vibrant labour movement, weaponisation due to civil-military elites’ participation in American imperialism’s ever-expanding war machine, demographic changes due to in-migration from other parts of Pakistan, state patronage of fundamentalist groups, and intensification of certain forms of labour control and informality, have created ripe conditions for the rise of various types of exclusivist, proto-fascist groups. Thus, the relative marginalisation of Urdu-speaking middle classes from Pakistan’s power structure and changes in Karachi’s political economy due to the above mentioned factors created ideal conditions for the emergence of a new type of political subject which, while drawing upon historical tropes of sacrifice, would interact with existing narratives of regional/ethnic marginalisation of other communities in Pakistan, to forge a ‘threatened’ Urdu-speaking community. The MQM also channelled existing discourses of modernisation which intersected with its class and ethnic bases to create the image and rhetoric of a ‘liberal’ and ‘secular’ party. However, a detailed elaboration of the MQM’s political identity is beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice it to say, the popularity of its brand of politics was less a conspiracy of indiscriminate coercion and/or foreign forces than the result of contingent political articulations growing organically out of Karachi and Pakistan’s changing social realities. Coming to our present predicament, it has to be recognised that many of the structural conditions that led to the rise of the MQM and other exclusivist groups in Karachi remain in force today with even greater intensity. These include Pakistani elites’ continued embroilment in the American war machine, continuous retreat of the welfare arm of the state, the unprecedented in-migration into Karachi (unparalleled in any other mega-city in the world) post-2005 earthquake and civil war in northwest Pakistan, and intensification of informality in both workplace and residential area politics. However, while conditions still remain ripe for the rise of protofascist and violent political forces in Karachi, in light of the changing demographics of the city and the MQM’s inability to reinvent itself – name change notwithstanding – as ‘Muttahida’ rather than ‘Mohajir’, the days of untrammelled dominance of the MQM in Karachi are inevitably bound to come to an end. This is amply evidenced in the rise of equally (if not more) violent political groupings in Karachi under the banner of, among others, the Lyari Aman Committee, ASWJ and various factions of the TTP which compete with the MQM over rent-streams and, crucially, as alternative nodes in the ‘commonsense politics’ (as termed by Aasim Sajjad Akhtar) of patronage, service delivery and territorial control. Even though ethnic affiliations are notoriously hard to determine, research by Arif Hasan has shown that while Urdu-speakers remain the single largest linguistic group in the city, they are now far from a majority of the city’s population. Moreover, the growth of ‘professionalised’ fractions of the middle class in Karachi and the concomitant shifts in political-social articulations will work against the MQM unless it is able to reinvent itself as a much broader and inclusive party that it currently stands. However, predictions of longterm demographic and social changes working against the MQM notwithstanding, the (routine) heavy-handedness of police, Rangers and military in Karachi will – paradoxically – prolong and deepen the party’s appeal. As elaborated above, a central part of the MQM’s appeal is in its ability to give vent to and shape certain classes’ and linguistic groups’ feelings of marginalisation. As such, the practices of police/Rangers and the military establishment’s machinations – none of whom are strangers themselves to extortion, land-grabbing and violence in Karachi and beyond – against the MQM will only serve to galvanise the party’s core constituency as demonstrated by the result of recent by-elections, the PTI’s mediadriven hype notwithstanding. Moreover, even with the MQM or its head ‘surgically removed’ from the scene, a completely unrealistic scenario in any case considering the party’s deep organisational roots and ‘dual power’ structure, the structural conditions in Karachi which give rise to exclusivist and violent politics in the absence of a credible, progressive alternative will remain in place. However, the short-sightedness of the Pakistani establishment and high-flying, over-the-top and implicit (and explicit) elitist histrionics of the PTI will ensure that the MQM will continue to feed off very real practices and narratives of victimisation, instead of making its inevitable way into a significant but not over-domineering player in Karachi politics which the city’s changing social realities threaten to turn it into. The writer is a PhD candidate in Canada with research interests in urban politics and political economy. Email: ayyaz.a.mallick@gmail.com