I remember when I was visiting Karachi once in the mid-2000s with family. We were visiting our khala. The window in their drawing room, where everyone had gathered for a chat, was adjacent to the street. The voices in the room could easily carry into the street. As we talked, the conversation soon turned towards the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) of Pakistan, now known as Muttahida Qaumi Movement, but it was abruptly halted out of fear that someone might overhear. Even now, when I think back to that moment, I realize that MQM’s influence was so strong that people were afraid to speak about it, even in the slightest negative way.
The foundations of what would later become the MQM were laid on the campuses of the University of Karachi in the late 1970s. A student organization by the name of All Pakistan Muttahidda Students Organization (APMSO) was launched at the university in June of 1978. The APMSO centered its discourse on the issue of Muhajir rights or, more specifically, “to address what was perceived by Muhajir students as state-backed otherization of Muhajir ethnicity,” as stated by Saad Nawaz in an article for NOA publications. This issue of “otherization” remained central to much of the politics of APMSO and MQM. Not only would it be regarded as an ‘issue,’ but it would also be reflected in the philosophical underpinnings of the party. But more on that later.
In its initial days, the APMSO struggled as an organization. Much of the political space on the campus was occupied by the IJT. The IJT enjoyed immense political capital but wasn’t a purely hegemonic dominance. Much of the power that the IJT had was because of an organized militant element within the organization – it had a monopoly on violence within the campus. The APMSO, on the other hand, did not have an organized militant body in those days, and they suffered at the hands of the IJT. The violence increased to a significant degree. Laurent Gayer, in his book Karachi Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, writes of those days: “By 1981, the challenges encountered by the APMSO had become so daring that its leader, Altaf Hussain, seems to have considered putting his political career on hold.”
The tradition of Muhajir nationalism that the APMSO belonged to was based on a certain notion of Muhajir identity. In the years following the partition, as the stereotypes attached to the Muhajir community were getting increasingly negative, more stress was being put on the issue of identity by the Muhajir community. This led to the formation of a Muhajir identity that was both self-affirming and, at times, dismissive of other communities, an understandable reaction to the discrimination Muhajirs faced. Perhaps this sense of alienation shaped APMSO’s, and later MQM’s, increasingly binary and oppositional political stance.
It was after a decade of riots, disorder, and violence that the MQM was launched by the APMSO in the year 1984. It was born from a struggle for recognition, rights, and nationhood. Often, the MQM is merely reduced to a violent cult whose example must never be repeated. While that may be true, such a simplistic analysis is reductive and could do more harm than good. Our analysis must always be critical enough to embrace a certain social phenomenon’s complexities to produce something useful. Thus, we must analyze MQM with a similar analytic lens.
One of the central issues of the MQM was the internal contradictions within the party that it failed to reconcile. These contradictions eventually became unresolvable, leading to extremely militant yet increasingly regressive politics. For example, the party claimed to spearhead a nationalist movement, and for many, it did, yet it failed to reproduce its ideological goals in praxis. One reason for the contradictory pitfall was the almost cultish reverence for the “leader.”
Laurent Gayer writes of this “blind faith” in the leader as one of the tenets of MQM’s politics. Gayer traces the ideological roots of this blind faith to an essay by the party’s former General Secretary, Dr. Imran Farooq. In “Nazm-o-Zabt ke Taqaze,” Farooq categorizes social movements as either “natural” or “organized.” For Farooq, revolutionary movements such as the MQM are in a state of permanent warfare, and because they are ‘organized,’ they must follow certain rules to keep the movement intact. One of these rules is putting blind faith in the leader who can steer his people out of moments of chaos amid this life of permanent warfare. Yet, I think this leads to one unresolvable contradiction: When the movement becomes a mere tool of a “leader,” it is no longer nationalist or even communal but rather deeply individualistic.
Another contradiction is the political economy of the party. The party relied heavily on bhata culture. i.e., financial extortion from different sources for the party’s fund collection. This clashed directly with the claims of party leaders of having come from humble roots. The party leadership from their student days often critiqued Muhajir ‘capitalists’ and even ‘elders’ as they would “donate money to mainstream political parties rather than to a committed student organization from their community.”
Yet, bhata culture was a form of exploitation, an appropriation of labor. The Mohajir Qaumi Movement in Pakistan forcibly extorted funds, much like capitalists extract profits, though with far more violent tactics. The idea of coming from humble beginnings and rising to the top is often one of the hegemonic discourses of capitalism. Yet, in truth, capitalism only rewards exploitation, for that is the very basis of profit. This contradiction is exactly what the practice of bhata culture reflected.
In conclusion, the Mohajir or “Muhajir” Qaumi Movement Pakistan was a movement that began from student politics on the campus of KU. The students who formed the movement did so amid struggles for national recognition. Their demands were legitimate, yet the movement deteriorated into mindless violence and a struggle for power. There were several reasons for that, many of which were analyzed in detail in the aforementioned book by Laurent Gayer. Yet, one reason was the unresolvable contradictions at the heart of the party that spearheaded the movement. Ultimately, MQM was a symptom of a much larger issue: the inherent contradictions within the Pakistani state and the exploitative nature of capitalism.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Shahalam Tariq is based in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. His writings on history, theory and literature have appeared in The Friday Times and Bazm e Dana. His poems have appeared in The Writers Sanctuary, Borderless Journal and Gentle Visitations.
