Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [183]
This reinforced a sense among Mohajirs that they were losing the country – Pakistan – that ‘they had founded’, as the Punjabi elites had increasingly taken over from Mohajirs in the central bureaucracy – a shift symbolized and reinforced by the move of the capital to the new Punjabi city of Islamabad. By the 1980s, the Mohajirs also found their ethnic dominance of Karachi under pressure from growing numbers of Punjabi and especially Pathan migrants.
This decline has continued since. In 1981, Mohajirs made up 24.1 per cent of the population of Sindh compared to 55.7 Sindhis, 10.6 per cent Punjabis and 3.6 per cent Pathans. By 1998, the Mohajir proportion had fallen to 21 per cent and the Sindhi proportion had risen to 59 per cent. The next census is going to be an explosive issue, because it will almost certainly show that the Mohajir proportion has dropped still further. In addition, there is a well-founded suspicion that a desire to evade registration for taxes means that a large part of the Pathan population of Karachi does not even appear in the census.
The Mohajirs lack the inward migration of the Pathans, and their higher level of education has also meant a lower birth-rate than that of both the Pathans and the Sindhis. Part of the explanation of the ruthlessness of the MQM can be explained by the perceived need to compensate for inexorable demographic decline by rigid political control, and by the fact that, in the words of one MQM activist, ‘We cannot afford to give an inch, because we have our backs to the sea. The Sindhis have Sindh, and the Pathans can go back to their mountains; but we have nowhere but Karachi.’ The new influx of Sindhis and Pathans displaced by the 2010 floods has increased this Mohajir fear still further.
The break-off of East Pakistan in 1971 seemed to destroy the premise of Muslim nationalism on which Pakistan had been founded, in which most Mohajirs had passionately believed, and for the sake of which they had sacrificed so much. Most had genuinely thought that the different ethnicities of Pakistan would merge themselves in one Urdu-speaking Muslim nation – though one in which those who had ‘left their homes for Pakistan’ would have an especially distinguished place.
The symbolic moment when Mohajirs began to think of themselves as a separate nationality within Pakistan, rather than simply as the best Pakistanis, came in August 1979, when a young student activist, Altaf Hussain, burned a Pakistani flag at Jinnah’s tomb in Karachi, after making a speech on Mohajir rights – for which he was imprisoned and flogged by Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime. He went on to found the Mohajir Qaumi Mahaz (Mohajir People’s Movement), the political party that still dominates Karachi.
The result was a growth in ethnic violence between Sindhis and Mohajirs in Karachi and Hyderabad, language riots that split Karachi University, and the beginning of Mohajir organization along ethnic lines. Previously, the dominant party among the middle- and lower-middle-class Mohajirs had been the Jamaat Islami, with its mixture of Islamist politics, anti-feudalism and Pakistani nationalism. The Jamaat remains to this day strongly marked by its Mohajir middle-class and urban origins.
Strong Mohajir support for the protest movement against Bhutto’s government, and for the military regime of Zia-ul-Haq that followed, contributed further to Sindhi – Mohajir tension. Sindhi loyalty to the PPP, and dislike of the Punjabi-dominated army, made Sindh the centre of opposition to Zia’s rule. Extensive protests in interior Sindh in the early 1980s led to a military crackdown in which some 1,500 people were killed. This is still described by Sindhi nationalist intellectuals (with gross exaggeration) as ‘a genocide of the Sindhi