Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [148]
The MQM demonstrates one of the ‘Indo-Pakistani’ political trends mentioned in the Introduction: an ethnic political movement which emerged through violence and still intermittently uses great violence against its enemies, and which has had violent clashes with the state, but which also over time has been co-opted by the state through repeated deals and grants of patronage, and which has abandoned its most radical demands. Thus the MQM now never raises its original demand of a separate province of Karachi, knowing that this would make it impossible for even moderate and opportunist Sindhi politicians to form coalitions with the MQM.
It would be quite wrong to see the MQM as just another bunch of corrupt, opportunist and brutal ethnic politicians. They are a remarkable party by any standards, and a very remarkable party indeed for Pakistan. The loyalty of their activists is especially impressive. One of them, Nasir Jamal, a greying, rather intense thirty-four-year-old who joined the party when he was sixteen, described to me how his family had fled first from India to East Pakistan in 1948, and then to Pakistan from the new Bangladesh, and then from the new Bangladesh to Karachi in 1974. ‘We felt that we had lost everything twice over and no longer had any country of our own at all.’
When the MQM was created, there was a crisis of identity for all those like us who had migrated from India. We felt that we had no identity because we had no land of our own, unlike the Sindhis, Punjabis or Pathans. But the MQM gave us our identity, and if I could describe it in one sentence, the MQM is a passion for us. Identity is self-respect, freedom, honour. I now feel that I am also something, that there are some things that are in my hands, that I am helping my community to solve their problems, if only in a small way.33
Iftikhar Malik sums up the MQM’s leading features as follows:
[A] comparatively recent, totally urban, predominantly middle-class party with a specific ethnic consciousness, characterized by wider literacy, meticulous organization, effective propaganda campaigns and an impressive level of youth organization.34
He lists their ‘inherent weaknesses’ as ‘personality-centred politicking, factionalism, intolerance towards other ethnic communities, and coercive tactics against the media’ (if the latter can be described as a ‘weakness’ rather than an ugly but effective manifestation of strength). I can confirm much of this from my own observations. Certainly the fear of the MQM on the part of journalists is very striking. Even at the height of the killings in Karachi during my stay in April 2009, it was very difficult to find any explicit criticism of the party in the mainstream media; and time and again, when I interviewed local journalists or analysts, they said that all their words could be ‘on the record’ – except the bits criticizing the MQM. They were full of stories about how closely the MQM monitored their movements, including supposedly my own during my visit to the city. Some of these stories sounded to me highly paranoid, but they were certainly widespread and believed.
Dr Malik’s essay was written in 1995, and fifteen years on a couple more things need to be added. The first is that despite the factionalism of which he speaks, and which has been very evident in the MQM in the past, the party has retained an impressive public unity compared to any other party in Pakistan. One reason for this may be precisely