Re: Britishers please report Altaf hussain to the MET Police , details below
Karachi and the politics of Muttahida Quami Movement - The Times of India
In an address to a large crowd gathered to listen to their leader by audio telecast, women sit in orderly rows, some holding large, framed portraits of Altaf Hussain in their laps. Their leader slams the supposed revolution that Imran Khan was to bring, his voice pausing for effect with each sentence. His breathless supporters applause after each pause: this is the hypnotized world of the Muttahida Quami Movement or MQM, a raj that had run amuck through the streets and chambers of Karachi for many a decade.
You would think he was a real estate broker discussing a screwed up deal over a plot of land, the way he threatened to cut off Karachi from the rest of Pakistan. What’s the instigation?
Karachiites have been questioning the role lowerlevel cadres played in taking polling stations hostage and stuffing fake ballot papers into polling boxes. In response - as every seasoned politician should - Hussain, who has not visited Pakistan since 1992 when he fled in self-imposed exile - and his entire coterie are openly threatening violence and bloodshed.
The party’s track record of street violence, intimidation and rule by fear is enough evidence to know that Hussain is, in fact, a bit of a mafia boss, the real-life Don Corleone of Karachi.
This fact doesn’t elude the agitators but they’re not willing to sit back down as the middle- and upper-middle classes of Karachi have normally done. Unlike the MQM, they are not armed with guns, but evidence in the form of photos and videos taken across polling stations that identify the culprits and their actions. These complaints have not just come from the elite neighbourhoods of Karachi but from all across this spread out desert city, demanding a response from the Election Commission, and acquiescence if not silence from the London residence that is identified as Altaf Hussain’s.
In the UK, where the question of Hussain’s citizenship should has been taken up long ago, the only true ambassador of this issue is the much-lampooned Geroge Galloway, who has spoken against Hussain on repeated occasions. “Why is Altaf Hussain being allowed from a sofa in Edgware to conduct a programme of terrorism and of extortion of businesses and citizens in Sindh. And why was he given British citizenship?”, he asked the British parliament five years ago. Today, again, he has this question, though it is likely to fall on deaf ears. We know, of course, that the cause of human rights is political in the free world. They, too, shall remain silent.
Quite apart from the fact of realpolitik, it’s instructive to look at the story of Karachi, a city whose Mohajir, or refugee, community has long been looked at with sympathy in India, as has Hussain’s cause. Is the godfather who has saved the community set aside in refugee camps and left to rot in the post-1947 Pakistan? You would have to have grown up in Hussain’s version of a safe Karachi to think differently, you would have to have experienced the brutality of the MQM version of democracy to understand.
One other instructive point that helps explain how a man who has not visited Karachi in 21 years can demand its separation.
Karachi has been in turmoil ever since this small fishing village city turned into a refugee camp in 1947. Many families, including mine, arrived here with suitcases , or absolutely nothing, in hand. The administration, left to deal with a growing number of migrants, couldn’t manage. Bereft of housing, infrastructure and disposable income, the migrants preferred to live in sprawling, unhygienic katchi abadis so they could be close to their places of work.
The Greek city planner, Constantinos Doxiadis, who created the city of Islamabad, never accomplished General Ayub Khan’s vision for low-income housing on the outskirts of Karachi in the late 1950s; people preferred to grab land and settle wherever they could.
When Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto built his popular base, he did it shrewdly, absorbing local powerbrokers into his mix. One such man was Nawaz Khan, an Afghan immigrant who took government land, built properties on it and then sold it to thousands of people without ever owning the land. Yet, he was one of the most powerful leaders of his area. That, as Steve Inskeep tells us in his ‘Karachi: Instant City’, is the reality of Karachi politics. Hussain, too, has taken instruction from this history. In today’s Karachi, he’d be better off enrolling for ‘anger management’ therapy.
