Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [182]
The nationalism of Syed and his followers was greatly increased by the influx of Mohajirs to Karachi and Hyderabad after 1947, taking over homes and property abandoned by the Hindus. The Sindhis dubbed the Mohajirs makhar – after the locusts which still sometimes devastate parts of the Sindhi countryside. The Mohajirs hit back with paindu (‘villager’, with a connotation of ‘country bumpkin’) or even choupaya (domestic animal, beast of burden).
The Mohajirs were and remain far better educated than the mainly rural Sindhis, and came mostly from middle-class urban backgrounds in India. According to the 1951 census, only 15 per cent of Mohajirs were unskilled labourers, with almost 40 per cent classified as clerical or sales workers, and 21 per cent as skilled workers. More than 5 per cent were from professional and managerial backgrounds. Karachi in consequence has the highest literacy rate of any city in Pakistan – which at 65 per cent is admittedly not saying very much. These origins continue to mark the Mohajirs out not merely from Sindhis but from the vast majority of Pakistanis, and the self-identification as a modern urban middle class is at the heart of Mohajir cultural and – later – political identity:
The middle-class faction of Mohajirs has defined the core characteristics of Mohajir cultural identity: education, Urdu, resistance, urbanism. These characteristics are the privileges and qualities that were taken for granted for decades but were threatened in the 1960s and 1970s. These privileges and qualities are of central importance in the reading of history and have become part of Mohajir culture. Therefore, all Mohajirs are considered middle class – even the slum-dwellers in Usmania Mohajir Colony and the men who take their lunch in five-star hotels.5
The Mohajirs spoke Pakistan’s new national language, Urdu, at home. This gave them a colossal advantage in competition for government jobs, which was increased still further by their residence in Karachi, which until 1958 was Pakistan’s capital and a separate federally administered district. Mohajirs naturally also dominated the Urdu- and English-language educational establishments in Karachi, relegating Sindhis to a severely underfunded Sindhi university in Hyderabad. Sindh itself was dissolved as a province from 1955 to 1970, and incorporated in the ‘one unit’ of West Pakistan, intended to create a balance against the other unit of East Pakistan, with its somewhat larger population. Under ‘one unit’, Mohajirs and to a lesser extent Punjabis dominated the bureaucracy and police in Sindh at the expense of Sindhis.
RISE OF THE MQM (MOHAJIR QAUMI MAHAZ OR MOHAJIR PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT)
By the early 1970s, however, the advantage had swung back heavily in favour of the Sindhis. The shift of the national capital to Islamabad in the 1960s had reincorporated Karachi in the province of Sindh and reduced the Mohajirs’ access to government positions; and the rise of the Sindhi Z. A. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) for the first time gave the Sindhis a grip both on a national political party and (from 1971 to 1977) on national government. Bhutto established quotas in education and government service for people from the rural areas of Sindh – in other words, ethnic Sindhis – that drastically reduced Mohajir opportunities in these fields.
Bhutto’s anti-capitalist rhetoric was particularly directed at the non-Sindhi commercial elites of Karachi, and his establishment of Sindhi as the official provincial language hurt Mohajir prospects in Sindh. In the words of Feroz Ahmed, this confronted the Mohajirs with ‘a sudden need to face the reality of Sindh’.
For 23 years the Mohajirs of Karachi had never even thought of being in Sindh; a majority of them had never seen a Sindhi nor heard their language being spoken. Their youth