Karachi’s predicament is often linked to the rise of ethnic politics and the excruciating violence that visited the city with Mohajir-Pashtoon riots (1985-1987), Mohajir-Sindhi riots in 1988 and Mohajir-Pashtoon riots again starting 2009-2010. In the early to mid-1990s, Karachi was the site of a state security operation against the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). The party was accused of using criminal and fascist methods against its political rivals. Why the brutal violence in a city which prides itself on its educated middle class and its positioning as Pakistan’s economic nerve centre? Where did it all go wrong for Karachi?

The conventional answer has to do with the marginalisation of the Karachi’s youth as a consequence of Bhutto’s quota system, dividing Sindh into its rural and urban regions. This quota system had the effect of depriving the urban Mohajirs whose numbers in the federal bureaucracy suffered a decline in the 1980s and 1990s. This fed into larger grievances such as lack of health, education, transportation and other civic facilities. The question to be asked though is whether the quota system was exclusionary (completely denying employment to the Mohajirs) or restrictive (curtailing their number)? If one mines through the Federal Public Service Commission’s data on recruitment from urban Sindh in the 1980s and 1990s and even beyond, one finds a higher percentage of empty seats from urban Sindh. This suggests that meritorious Mohajir candidates wilfully chose to ignore civil service employment despite seats being available to them. This entails seeking an alternative explanation beyond the marginalisation discourse to the unappealing rigours of bureaucratic employment, specially its politicisation – after Bhutto’s reforms in the 1970s – with Mohajir youth finding employment in the private sector or other professions. In short, marginalisation-via-the-quota -system discourse needs more careful scrutiny.

This still does not explain ethnic violence. If Karachi’s youth found employment in the private sector and the public sector was also relatively open, why did Mohajir-Pashtoon and Mohajir-Sindhi violence take place? More importantly, why would the educated Mohajir youth engage in brutal violence against the relatively underprivileged ethnic groups in Karachi? Were the Mohajirs competing for jobs with the Pashtuns who in Karachi resided in economic sectors with which the Mohajirs were largely unconnected, for example, the transport industry? Surely, educated Mohajirs were not aspiring bus drivers or entrepreneurs in the transport industry as their grievance was against the quota system. Two explanations are on offer: the displacement theory of aggression, whereby a group picks out relatively underprivileged sections of society for targeted violence. This transpires because of the lack of capability in the target group(s) to foment similar violence against the more powerful groups or state institutions. In Karachi, thus, the Mohajirs targeted their aggression against the relatively under-privileged Pashtoons despite the absence of an exploiter-exploited relationship between the two ethnic groups. The second explanation has to do with how violence itself is constitutive of identity. That is, ethnic identity instrumentalises violence as a means of group mobilisation and identification of potential enemies as a form of gratification for their own ethnic group. When another group is identified as the enemy, this aids in the solidification of one’s own ethnic group for the us-versus-them dynamic comes into play. The MQM, thus, wilfully utilised violence and aggression to solidify the rising Mohajir identity consciousness which combined with their perceived grievances – over the quota system – served to augment their popularity and street power in Karachi.

This changed, however, in the 2000s with the MQM’s own empowerment via Gen Musharraf’s local government system which privileged districts and cities over and above not only provincial governments and politicians but also the bureaucracy. In this new administrative setup, the nazim or mayor exercised more authority with powers over police, land allotment, transport, education, health and other sectors. This fact benefited the MQM in Karachi when Mustafa Kamal assumed the nazim’s position in 2005. This empowerment dealt a crushing blow to the MQM’s deprivation-marginalisation discourse, a disjuncture which saw it losing ground to the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf in the 2013 elections relatively and in 2018, almost completely. In short, people in Karachi asked questions of the party in the sense that its political-institutional authority over the city did not sync well with its usual rhetoric of Karachi’s neglect by state authorities?

The deprivation-marginalisation discourse on MQM’s part is once again at play as the politics of the 18^th Amendment in Sindh (and also in other provinces) does not sufficiently transfer enough power to the local governments. Specially, since 2016 when Waseem Akhtar was elected mayor, the MQM is rallying its supporters and wider sections of Karachi’s population on the institutional deficits in the Local Bodies Act passed by the provincial assembly in 2013, which has now appropriated administrative powers under its authority. This interplay between provincial autonomy/authority and dilution of the local governments has generated an empowerment-disempowerment paradox in Sindh. The paradox is, should the power of one agency (provincial government) come at the expense of another (local government) or vice versa? Cannot the PPP and the MQM as well as the PTI find a formula for sharing power in Karachi for the sake of the ordinary citizens? Recently, the MQM has increased calls for elevating Karachi’s status to that of a separate province. The PPP continues to stick to its provincial autonomy/authority language and politics while the PTI speaks of taking control of the city under a federal mandate. They should reconsider their positions lest these political divides, specially between the MQM and the PPP, simmer into another round of Mohajir-Sindhi violence, Perspectivising Karachi’s reality as a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian and multi-lingual domain alone can lead to enduring solutions despite ethno-political polarisation. Looking at recent post-rain protests, Karachi is once again clamouring for a formula for political reconciliation.

The author is director of the School of Politics and International Relations at    Quaid-i-Azam University,  Islamabad