Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [187]
He denounced the ‘feudal’ leadership and character of the other parties, and spoke of the MQM as a progressive middle-class alternative for all Pakistanis:
For the past sixty years, forty families have ruled Pakistan. They have been re-elected seven times in one form or another, but in all that time they have never done anything for the people even on their own estates. They send their children to school in London, but they have never built a single school in their own villages ... The MQM is the hope for the people of Pakistan, in which ordinary people will rule, and not these forty families.7
Concerning Karachi, his main refrains were his administration’s commitment to building infrastructure, the hopelessness of the other parties in this regard, and the dysfunctionality of Pakistan’s federal system, which left responsibility for the city’s development and services in many different institutional hands, only some of them his:
All our efforts are being undermined by the law and order situation, but I have no control over the police – not even the traffic police. So we build roads, and then we film the police holding up traffic and taking bribes along them.
Much of this is true, by the way, even if not the whole truth. He continued:
Karachi generates 68 per cent of all the revenues of Pakistan, yet until we came to power, the city never had a master plan, even as its population grew to 18 million. So you can imagine the job facing me. Forty-five per cent of neighbourhoods never even had a service plan. Four out of five industrial zones had no water or sewage provision ...
Our aim has been not to develop Karachi so as to compete with the rest of Pakistan, but to make it internationally competitive – a far harder job. To achieve this, the first thing we need is world-class infrastructure. We have done more in four years than the other parties in fifty, but I know very well that it is only a beginning. We have to struggle and struggle just to keep pace with the growing population.
The MQM administration does indeed have a good reputation among independent observers and journalists in the city, and its achievements are visible: above all in the construction of new roads and flyovers to alleviate the previously dreadful traffic jams, in improvements to sewage and drainage which have reduced the flooding which used to follow the heavy rains, and in the creation of parks – the mayor’s particular pride. Some of these projects were started under the Jamaat administration that ruled after the MQM boycotted the first elections under Musharraf – but then, the Jamaat in Karachi is also very much a Mohajir middle-class organization. Desperately needed metro-rail systems are planned, but their scale is beyond the constitutional competence of the municipal government and, as in Lahore, they are therefore held up in endless political infighting, battles over patronage, and bureaucratic lethargy at the levels of the Sindh and national governments.
After the meeting with the mayor, I drove along one of his new motorways, a 13-kilometre-long ‘signal-free corridor’ with underpasses for pedestrians and cross-traffic, and a belt of trees and greenery down the middle; once again, not a remarkable road by Western or East Asian standards, but a very remarkable road for Pakistan, and a vast improvement on what was there before.
This road also led me back from the mayor’s optimistic vision to the other side of Karachi, and of the MQM: the ethnic violence which constantly threatens to tear the city apart. An MQM party worker, Nasir Jamal, took me to see some of the scenes of the violence between Mohajirs and Pathans which had cost several dozen lives in previous days – and which the MQM was accused of having orchestrated. The tragic element to this is that the MQM and the leading Pathan party, the ANP, were coalition partners at the time in both the national and the