Pakistan: A Hard Country (54 page)

In previous centuries, these Baloch tribes of Sindh, like the Mazaris, could field hundreds or even thousands of armed men each. The fortlike appearance of Sindhi vil ages, with their thorn fences and blank exterior wal s with holes that do duty both for ventilation and as loopholes, attest to the traditional insecurity of Sindhi rural life, and the long lineage of Sindhi dacoity (banditry). In previous centuries, al the settled populations and traders were at risk from tribal raiders, but especial y at risk were the Hindu merchants, bankers and moneylenders who dominated Sindh’s commercial economy.

Under British rule, the Sindhi Hindu commercial classes profited greatly from increased law and order, an end to tribal raids, the development of a modern civil code governing commercial transactions, and the overcoming of Sindh’s traditional isolation through the construction of railways and the great port of Karachi – which, when the British arrived, had been a smal town of 14,000

people, dependent chiefly on fishing. Especial y in Karachi, the Hindus were joined by Muslim immigrants from Gujarat and elsewhere in India, chiefly from ethnic and religious groups with strong commercial traditions such as the Memons, Khojas and Bohras, as wel as Parsis.

By the later British period, these came to make up the bulk of the middle classes in Sindh. This movement was facilitated by the fact that until 1936 Sindh was not a separate province, but was part of the Bombay Presidency, ruled from the great commercial metropolis of that name. The father of Pakistani independence, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, came from a Khoja family of Gujarat, which settled in Karachi, and which contained Ismaili and orthodox (‘Twelver’) Shia branches.

As a result of this influx, Karachi emerged as a city which even before independence had a very different culture and ethnic character from that of the rest of Sindh, of which it (and not the Talpurs’

Hyderabad) became the capital. In 1947, a majority of Karachi’s inhabitants were Hindu. Karachi grew partly as a result of the enormously increased agricultural exports first of Punjab (from the 1890s) and then Sindh (from the 1930s) as a result of British irrigation projects.

Its greatest single boost under the Raj, however, came from the First World War, when it became one of the greatest points of transit for troops and supplies from British India to the British campaigns against the Ottoman empire in the Middle East. By independence Karachi had a population of some 350,000. By the census of 1961 this had risen to more than 2 mil ion, by 1981 to 5 mil ion, and today to some 18 mil ion.

INDEPENDENCE AND MOHAJIR – SINDHI

RELATIONS

The moment that conclusively wrenched Karachi into a separate path of development from ‘interior Sindh’ came with independence and partition. The very phrase ‘interior Sindh’ is suggestive, especial y in the mouths of Urdu-speaking Karachiites, when it takes on some of the overtones of mid-Victorian references to the interior of Africa. Mil ions of Urdu-speaking Muslim ‘Mohajirs’ (a Muslim term meaning refugees for the sake of religious belief, after those who fol owed the Prophet from Mecca to Medina) left India for Pakistan, and by far the greater number settled in Karachi, and to a lesser extent in Sindh’s second city of Hyderabad, both of which they came to dominate.

The resulting growth in Karachi’s population was explosive even by the standards of the developing world – and it often seems a miracle that this growth did not overwhelm it completely, and that it manages to function better than most cities in Africa and many in Asia and South America. As of 2010, Karachi generates around a quarter of Pakistan’s state revenues and GDP, and contains more than half of Pakistan’s banking assets and almost a third of Pakistan’s industry.

This economic dynamism was above al a result of the influx of non-Sindhis. As a result of this migration, in 1998, according to the census, Urdu-speakers made up 21 per cent of the population of Sindh, compared to 59 per cent Sindhi-speakers. In Karachi, they were 48

per cent, with around another 8 per cent made up of Gujarati, who also left India after 1947 and so come under the same heading of Mohajir.

The balance was made up mainly of other migrants to Karachi: almost 14 per cent Punjabis (including a number whose ancestors were settled in the countryside under British rule) and 11 per cent Pashtospeakers in Karachi in 1998 (certainly higher today). Only 7.22

per cent of the population of Karachi in 1998 was Sindhi-speaking.

The balance was largely made up of Muslim emigrants from Gujarat in India, who speak their own languages but as Mohajirs tend to identify with the Urdu-speakers and the MQM. In Sindh as a whole, although so many Sindhis are of Baloch origin, most speak the Sindhi language, meaning that Balochi-speakers account for only 2 per cent of the population.

The Sindhis helped the process by which Urdu-speakers came to dominate the main cities by their attacks on the Hindu minority, which, though not nearly as savage as in Punjab, nevertheless led to the flight of most of them by 1950, and of al their wealthy and influential elements. Sindhi Hindu refugees went to swel the commercial prosperity of Gujarat and Bombay, but also to increase anti-Muslim chauvinism in India. The leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Lal Krishna Advani, was born in Karachi in 1927.

Like Punjab, Muslim Sindh came round to supporting the partition of India very late, and might indeed easily have wrecked the entire idea.

The strongest support for the Muslim League in Sindh before independence came from ethnic non-Sindhis: the urban middle classes and dynamic Punjabi farmers who had settled in Sindh to exploit the new lands made fertile by British irrigation projects.

Opposition to the League came from the Sindh United Party, which, like the Unionist Party in Punjab, tried to bridge the gap between Muslims and Hindus and preserve a united India with increased provincial autonomy. The United Party’s Muslim membership was dominated by big ‘feudal’ landowners including Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, father of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and grandfather of Benazir Bhutto.

The Muslim League encouraged and exploited a wave of anti-Hindu feeling in the 1940s to defeat the United Party, but then itself split into two factions. The former President of the League in Sindh, G. M. Syed, clashed bitterly with Jinnah over Syed’s demands for Sindh to be ful y autonomous within a loose Pakistani confederation. He left the party to found a Sindhi nationalist party, which stil exists under the leadership of his son.

The nationalism of Syed and his fol owers 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 stil sometimes devastate parts of the Sindhi countryside. The Mohajirs hit back with paindu (‘vil ager’, 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 unskil ed labourers, with almost 40 per cent classified as clerical or sales workers, and 21 per cent as skil ed 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, al Mohajirs are considered middle class – even the slum-dwel ers 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 stil further by their residence in Karachi, which until 1958 was Pakistan’s capital and a separate federal y administered district. Mohajirs natural y 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 drastical y 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 had grown up thinking that Karachi was a Mohajir enclave or a world unto itself. In everyday speech, as in the press, the expression ‘Karachi and Sindh’ was in vogue [it stil is – AL] ... For many Mohajirs, the return of Karachi to Sindh was nothing less than surrendering a homeland for the second time.6

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 especial y 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 fal en 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 wil almost certainly show that the Mohajir proportion has dropped stil further. In addition, there is a wel -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 stil 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 especial y 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 stil 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.