Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [181]
INDEPENDENCE AND MOHAJIR – SINDHI RELATIONS
The moment that conclusively wrenched Karachi into a separate path of development from ‘interior Sindh’ came with independence and partition. The very phrase ‘interior Sindh’ is suggestive, especially in the mouths of Urdu-speaking Karachiites, when it takes on some of the overtones of mid-Victorian references to the interior of Africa. Millions of Urdu-speaking Muslim ‘Mohajirs’ (a Muslim term meaning refugees for the sake of religious belief, after those who followed the Prophet from Mecca to Medina) left India for Pakistan, and by far the greater number settled in Karachi, and to a lesser extent in Sindh’s second city of Hyderabad, both of which they came to dominate.
The resulting growth in Karachi’s population was explosive even by the standards of the developing world – and it often seems a miracle that this growth did not overwhelm it completely, and that it manages to function better than most cities in Africa and many in Asia and South America. As of 2010, Karachi generates around a quarter of Pakistan’s state revenues and GDP, and contains more than half of Pakistan’s banking assets and almost a third of Pakistan’s industry.
This economic dynamism was above all a result of the influx of non-Sindhis. As a result of this migration, in 1998, according to the census, Urdu-speakers made up 21 per cent of the population of Sindh, compared to 59 per cent Sindhi-speakers. In Karachi, they were 48 per cent, with around another 8 per cent made up of Gujarati, who also left India after 1947 and so come under the same heading of Mohajir.
The balance was made up mainly of other migrants to Karachi: almost 14 per cent Punjabis (including a number whose ancestors were settled in the countryside under British rule) and 11 per cent Pashtospeakers in Karachi in 1998 (certainly higher today). Only 7.22 per cent of the population of Karachi in 1998 was Sindhi-speaking. The balance was largely made up of Muslim emigrants from Gujarat in India, who speak their own languages but as Mohajirs tend to identify with the Urdu-speakers and the MQM. In Sindh as a whole, although so many Sindhis are of Baloch origin, most speak the Sindhi language, meaning that Balochi-speakers account for only 2 per cent of the population.
The Sindhis helped the process by which Urdu-speakers came to dominate the main cities by their attacks on the Hindu minority, which, though not nearly as savage as in Punjab, nevertheless led to the flight of most of them by 1950, and of all their wealthy and influential elements. Sindhi Hindu refugees went to swell the commercial prosperity of Gujarat and Bombay, but also to increase anti-Muslim chauvinism in India. The leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Lal Krishna Advani, was born in Karachi in 1927.
Like Punjab, Muslim Sindh came round to supporting the partition of India very late, and might indeed easily have wrecked the entire idea. The strongest support for the Muslim League in Sindh before independence came from ethnic non-Sindhis: the urban middle classes and dynamic Punjabi farmers who had settled in Sindh to exploit the new lands made fertile by British irrigation projects. Opposition to the League came from the Sindh United Party, which, like the Unionist Party in Punjab, tried to bridge the gap between Muslims and Hindus and preserve a united India with increased provincial autonomy. The United Party’s Muslim membership was dominated by big ‘feudal’ landowners including Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, father of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and grandfather of Benazir Bhutto.
The Muslim League encouraged and exploited a wave of anti-Hindu feeling in the 1940s to defeat the United Party, but then itself split into two factions. The former President of the League in