Pakistan: A Hard Country (56 page)

Much of this is true, by the way, even if not the whole truth. He continued:

Karachi generates 68 per cent of al the revenues of Pakistan, yet until we came to power, the city never had a master plan, even as its population grew to 18 mil ion. So you can imagine the job facing me. Forty-five per cent of neighbourhoods never even had a service plan. Four out of five industrial zones had no water or sewage provision ...

Our aim has been not to develop Karachi so as to compete with the rest of Pakistan, but to make it international y competitive – a far harder job. To achieve this, the first thing we need is world-class infrastructure. We have done more in four years than the other parties in fifty, but I know very wel that it is only a beginning. We have to struggle and struggle just to keep pace with the growing population.

The MQM administration does indeed have a good reputation among independent observers and journalists in the city, and its achievements are visible: above al in the construction of new roads and flyovers to al eviate the previously dreadful traffic jams, in improvements to sewage and drainage which have reduced the flooding which used to fol ow the heavy rains, and in the creation of parks – the mayor’s particular pride. Some of these projects were started under the Jamaat administration that ruled after the MQM

boycotted the first elections under Musharraf – but then, the Jamaat in Karachi is also very much a Mohajir middle-class organization.

Desperately needed metro-rail systems are planned, but their scale is beyond the constitutional competence of the municipal government and, as in Lahore, they are therefore held up in endless political infighting, battles over patronage, and bureaucratic lethargy at the levels of the Sindh and national governments.

After the meeting with the mayor, I drove along one of his new motorways, a 13-kilometre-long ‘signal-free corridor’ with underpasses for pedestrians and cross-traffic, and a belt of trees and greenery down the middle; once again, not a remarkable road by Western or East Asian standards, but a very remarkable road for Pakistan, and a vast improvement on what was there before.

This road also led me back from the mayor’s optimistic vision to the other side of Karachi, and of the MQM: the ethnic violence which constantly threatens to tear the city apart. An MQM party worker, Nasir Jamal, took me to see some of the scenes of the violence between Mohajirs and Pathans which had cost several dozen lives in previous days – and which the MQM was accused of having orchestrated. The tragic element to this is that the MQM and the leading Pathan party, the ANP, were coalition partners at the time in both the national and the Sindh governments, and were also ideological al ies against the Taleban.

In the 2008 elections, the ANP for the first time won two provincial assembly seats in Karachi. This is not many out of 130 seats in the assembly (and they won no National Assembly seats at al ) but it seems to have severely rattled the MQM, which had got used to a monopoly of the Karachi seats. It was after this that MQM

denunciations of the supposed Taleban infiltration of the Pathan community in Karachi real y took off.

The MQM also genuinely disapproved of ANP-sponsored peace deals with the Taleban, and in the preceding months had warned with increasing vehemence of the al eged growth of Taleban influence among the Pathans of Karachi – something which ANP leaders denounced as a mere ‘plot to seize Pathan property and businesses’, as the ANP leader in Karachi, Syed Shahi, told me.

While Taleban terrorism could certainly make the ethnic situation in Karachi worse, the tension between Pathans and Mohajirs in the city has other roots, which Nasir Jamal sketched for me as we drove through the northern suburbs. On either side, great greyish-white apartment buildings rose like castles – and, like castles, they were topped with fluttering banners: red, green and white for the MQM, red for the ANP, green, red and black for the PPP, and the sinister red flag of the Jiye Sindh nationalist party, with in the centre a black hand holding a black axe: party flags which are also the badges of ethnic al egiance, and which marked most of the apartment blocks as now inhabited by a single ethnicity.

In between the apartment blocks were patches of wasteland with the occasional fine tree left over from the days when it was countryside, some of it covered in roughly built shanty towns, vehicle parks or impoverished-looking markets. This, Jamal said, was evidence of the way in which the Pathans were ‘encroaching’ on municipal and state land in the city. His words were a litany of standard MQM and Mohajir complaints about the Pathans:

Those ANP flags on that kachi abadi [shanty town] are to show that Pathans have seized the land and wil never let it go. The ANP seek to support every Pathan, even Taleban, demand in order to claim a share in the government of the city ... You see those trucks and buses over there, half blocking the road?

When our government tried to get them to move to a proper vehicle park that we had built, they refused, because then they would be registered and would have to pay taxes ... As it is, they use drugs gangs and other criminals to take over more and more property by force, then use the ANP to demand that the municipal government give them services for their new colonies, but pay no taxes. We are not against Pathans, but we have to be against these il egal occupations because they are a threat to everybody ... You see those fine new housing complexes over there? They were built for Urdu-speakers but now they are empty because our people were threatened by the Pathans and had to leave ... And there are more and more Pathans al the time. Pathans are barely educated, and none of their women can read or write at al . So their birth-rate is very high compared to our educated women.8

I suggested that since the MQM and ANP were coalition partners and al ies against the Taleban, and since after al the Pathans were a large reality in Karachi which could not be removed, a compromise real y should be possible: a deal whereby the MQM would agree to al ocate the ANP certain municipal lands and apartment buildings for the Pathans, and a guaranteed share of political influence, through a certain number of seats in the provincial and national assemblies.

Jamal replied in words that had become depressingly familiar to me from interviews with much more senior MQM figures over the previous weeks:

No, that is completely unacceptable. It would mean Mohajirs paying taxes to build houses for them, who pay no taxes at al .

Not because they can’t but because they won’t. We are ready for compromise, but it has to be on the basis of accepted principles, not just giving them shares – they would only demand a share in every project in the city ... As to parliamentary seats, we have free and fair elections here, and they can stand for them and win them if they can.

At this, I had to cover a smile, given what I had heard about election rigging by MQM activists – and heard from journalists and analysts who in other ways admired the MQM as a party. The real reason for the MQM’s intransigence seems to be that they feel that time and demographics are against them, and that if they give even an inch to the steadily growing Pathan population they wil end up losing control of Karachi altogether.

Jamal took me to Zarina Colony, a Mohajir settlement in the shadow of the low hil s that fringe northern Karachi, which had seen several deaths in the latest fighting. Mohajir and Pathan fighters have repeatedly battled to control these insignificant hil s, like a slowmotion, low-level urban gang version of the battle of Ypres; and as the sky darkened, the MQM guards became visibly uneasy.

As we entered the colony, we moved from Karachi to rural South Asia. Decrepit one-storey mud houses haphazardly lined the roads, and the street was dotted with heaps of rubbish. Looking up at the summit of the closest hil , I could see ANP flags against the sunset, the hil having been occupied by the Rangers, however, when they stepped in to end the fighting. The crowd that met us seemed to have been careful y put together to blame the ANP and present the MQM case over the latest fighting and, as far as I could judge, some of their stories were highly exaggerated. To Jamal’s embarrassment, however, they departed from script by admitting that their colony was il egal. ‘We wil be registering it very soon,’ he cut in. Many of them, like Jamal himself, were Urdu-speakers who had fled Bangladesh in the 1970s – twenty-five years after most of the Mohajirs, which helps explain why they were stil unhoused.

They grew silent and looked uneasily at each other and at Jamal when I asked if they were satisfied with the city government. ‘Wel , the local nazim has done something,’ Bilquis, a fat, formidable-looking local woman replied. ‘At least we have a sewage line now [which according to my nose was not sufficient] and we have been promised a water pipe.’ In one way, however, Zarina Colony was stil Karachi, and not the rest of Sindh – in the way that the women like Bilquis pushed forward past their men to shout their complaints at me.

In previous days, I had visited Pathan areas to get their side of the story. Before the latest fighting, I saw Syed Shahi, the ANP president, at his home. Shahi is a self-made businessman who made a fortune in various enterprises after coming to Karachi in the 1970s, and had become a community leader. His luxurious home is decorated in eye-wateringly bad taste even by Pakistani standards, with a huge il uminated photograph of a Canadian lake dominating the glaringly lit, quasi-rococo drawing-room. Next to the drawing-room is a large hujra, or traditional Pathan male gathering place, set out in traditional style with cushions along the wal s, a sign that, whether from culture or astuteness, Mr Shahi remained close to his community roots. Indeed, he looks that way, with a smal moustache set in an enormous face, craggy and extremely tough-looking. His English is poor, and his son – who is studying in England to be a doctor and says he probably wil stay there – had to translate for him.

Syed Shahi said that his aim is to ‘defend Karachi as place where al different peoples can live’. He claimed that of these people, 4

mil ion are Pathan – which most people say is a gross exaggeration, though none of them can agree on what the real figure is. He complained bitterly that ‘the MQM says that other peoples can come here, but in fact they try to stop them from getting jobs, businesses, or an education.’ He said the ANP is against the Taleban, but that the MQM’s warnings of Taleban penetration of Karachi are just an excuse to seize Pathan land and business.

Asked about ANP mobilization of the community, Mr Shahi said that two weeks earlier his party had set up a Ladies’ Wing. ‘They wil go to homes and register females to vote. We have never done this before because Pashtun women don’t want to leave their homes or are not al owed to by their husbands.’ Asked about social work and urban renewal, he didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about: We can only do something like this once we are in power here.

Only then can we set up NGOs. At the moment we are focused on getting access to education and government jobs for our people. In any case, most of our people are workers. They have no money, so can’t do anything like this for themselves.9

The contrast with the MQM leadership could hardly have been more marked.

The longer-established middle-class Pathans of Karachi do however have a rather different face. After the fighting, I visited the ANP president for eastern Karachi, Yunus Buner, who owns a smal ish construction business and whose family has been in Karachi for three generations. His home is an apartment in a smal block, with a hujra furnished with armchairs rather than cushions, and decorated with artificial flowers. A smal , clean-shaven man with glasses and an urbane manner, he introduced with great pride his two English-speaking teenage sons. About the MQM however he was not polite.

We would have won several more seats from Karachi, but in mixed areas like this one the MQM seized the pol ing stations with heavily armed gunmen. When I went to cast my own vote, the pol ing staff said that my vote had already been cast. That happened to thousands of our people, and there was nothing we could do about it – we would have been kil ed. We don’t have enough weapons to fight with them. Whatever the MQM

says, we are not armed the way Pashtuns are on the Frontier, and the MQM have the whole administration, police, army and intel igence agencies to back them up. The police refuse even to register FIRs [First Information Reports – see Chapter 3]

against their men, while eleven of our men have been arrested ...

I am on the peace committee with MQM, ANP and PPP

members to try to keep the peace, but in fact there is no point talking to the MQM politicians here about this, because they just deny everything and anyway don’t control the kil ers. The MQM’s armed wing is control ed by Altaf Hussain in London ...

As a businessman here, I want to keep the peace. I don’t want a war that would destroy this city, but we won’t accept this for ever. If our businesses go on being burned, we wil have nothing to lose, and then there could be an Afghan situation here.10

He bitterly denounced the Taleban, saying that his own relatives in Buner District of the NWFP had been targeted by them, and he was helping refugees from there in Karachi; but that there were very few Taleban sympathizers in Karachi. ‘Just because you are Pashtun and have a beard does not mean you are Taleban. The MQM are just using this to attack the ANP and Pashtuns in general.’