Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [149]
The other thing about the MQM that has become more apparent since the 1980s is their capacity for effective and progressive government. Although Karachi has more than doubled in size over the past twenty years, the city has not lapsed into the shambolic misery that many predicted. It is in fact not merely the best-run city in Pakistan (with the possible exception of Faisalabad) but one of the best-run larger cities of South Asia, without the appalling mass poverty that characterizes most Indian and Bangladeshi cities.
Communications and public services have considerably improved under the MQM’s municipal government – once again, something to set against the growing violence and misery of the Pathan areas of northern Pakistan. Finally, businessmen in the city confirm that while the MQM is not without corruption, its leaders’ corruption is both on a smaller scale and more orderly than that of the leaders of other parties, and sometimes at least is for the party rather than the individual concerned. ‘They take, but they deliver,’ as one banker put it to me.
The MQM built on its highly disciplined and ruthless student organization – both derived from and modelled on that of the Jamaat – to extend its organization throughout Mohajir society, with the partial exception of the richest and most cosmopolitan elements, which had dominated Karachi politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike any other party – except yet again the Jamaat – women are critical to the MQM’s organization, and have indeed kept the party going when its male leadership was in jail or on the run.
Women are especially important in the MQM’s social welfare wing, the Khidmat-e-Khalq Foundation, which helps people with everything from repairs to their homes to the education of their children and dowries for their daughters. The party’s organization thus permeates Mohajir society. Social work and social organization, at least as much as violence and intimidation, are central to the power and resilience of the party, and its enduring grip on the support of most of the Mohajir population, which has survived all the vicissitudes of the past twenty years and many years out of office. The MQM’s professionalism and modernity are reflected in its website, MQM.org, which lists its branches and achievements, as well as providing party videos and songs to actual or potential supporters. The websites of the PPP (ppp.org.pk) and the Muslim League (pmln.org.pk) do not begin to compare. Once again, the MQM and Jamaat (itself largely of Mohajir origin) are the only parties in Pakistan that do this in any systematic way.
Crucial to the nature and success of the MQM’s social and political organizations is that they are staffed and led by people of the same origins as those whom they are helping. I visited their local headquarters in north Karachi’s sector 11B, responsible for 12,000 MQM members out of a population of around 1.3 million. A small, scrupulously tidy place, well equipped with computers, printers and photocopiers, its walls were lined with ordered files of information on local issues and letters from the population – and with pictures of Altaf Hussain, of which there were no fewer than twelve in one room alone.
The local mayors (nazims) who had been invited to meet me seemed a good cross-section of the Mohajir middle classes: an electrical engineer, a salesman for Philips, a software manager and a couple of shopkeepers. Basharat Hasnia, a middle-aged man with a dark, deeply lined, thoughtful face, said:
The MQM is a party for lower-middle-class people, in a country where most parties are run by feudals. Their representatives are not really elected but selected according to their land, money and clan. The MQM gives us a voice against these people, as well as helping us solve the problems of our own city and neighbourhoods.35