Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [188]
In the 2008 elections, the ANP for the first time won two provincial assembly seats in Karachi. This is not many out of 130 seats in the assembly (and they won no National Assembly seats at all) but it seems to have severely rattled the MQM, which had got used to a monopoly of the Karachi seats. It was after this that MQM denunciations of the supposed Taleban infiltration of the Pathan community in Karachi really took off.
The MQM also genuinely disapproved of ANP-sponsored peace deals with the Taleban, and in the preceding months had warned with increasing vehemence of the alleged growth of Taleban influence among the Pathans of Karachi – something which ANP leaders denounced as a mere ‘plot to seize Pathan property and businesses’, as the ANP leader in Karachi, Syed Shahi, told me.
While Taleban terrorism could certainly make the ethnic situation in Karachi worse, the tension between Pathans and Mohajirs in the city has other roots, which Nasir Jamal sketched for me as we drove through the northern suburbs. On either side, great greyish-white apartment buildings rose like castles – and, like castles, they were topped with fluttering banners: red, green and white for the MQM, red for the ANP, green, red and black for the PPP, and the sinister red flag of the Jiye Sindh nationalist party, with in the centre a black hand holding a black axe: party flags which are also the badges of ethnic allegiance, and which marked most of the apartment blocks as now inhabited by a single ethnicity.
In between the apartment blocks were patches of wasteland with the occasional fine tree left over from the days when it was countryside, some of it covered in roughly built shanty towns, vehicle parks or impoverished-looking markets. This, Jamal said, was evidence of the way in which the Pathans were ‘encroaching’ on municipal and state land in the city. His words were a litany of standard MQM and Mohajir complaints about the Pathans:
Those ANP flags on that kachi abadi [shanty town] are to show that Pathans have seized the land and will never let it go. The ANP seek to support every Pathan, even Taleban, demand in order to claim a share in the government of the city ... You see those trucks and buses over there, half blocking the road? When our government tried to get them to move to a proper vehicle park that we had built, they refused, because then they would be registered and would have to pay taxes ... As it is, they use drugs gangs and other criminals to take over more and more property by force, then use the ANP to demand that the municipal government give them services for their new colonies, but pay no taxes. We are not against Pathans, but we have to be against these illegal occupations because they are a threat to everybody ... You see those fine new housing complexes over there? They were built for Urdu-speakers but now they are empty because our people were threatened by the Pathans and had to leave ... And there are more and more Pathans all the time. Pathans are barely educated, and none of their women can read or write at all. So their birth-rate is very high compared to our educated women.8
I suggested that since the MQM and ANP were coalition partners and allies against the Taleban, and since after all the Pathans were a large reality in Karachi which could not be removed, a compromise really should be possible: a deal whereby the MQM would agree to allocate the ANP certain municipal lands and apartment buildings for the Pathans, and a guaranteed share of political influence, through a certain number of seats in the provincial and national assemblies. Jamal replied in words that had become depressingly familiar to me from interviews with much more senior MQM figures over the previous weeks:
No, that is completely unacceptable. It would mean Mohajirs paying taxes to build houses for them, who pay no taxes at all. Not because they can’t but because they won’t. We are ready for compromise, but it has to be on the basis of accepted principles, not just