Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Students at the Karachi University in 1973.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
A group of students at the Karachi University in 1975.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Urdu news being delivered from Pakistan Television’s Karachi Studios (1974).
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Crowd at a cricket Test match being played at Karachi’s National Stadium in 1976.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Karachi’s congested Merewether Tower area in 1976. A badly managed economy (through haphazard nationalisation), and the reluctance of the private sector to invest in the city’s once thriving businesses strengthened the unregulated aspects of a growing informal economy that began to serve the needs of the city’s population. The flip side of this informal economic enterprise was the creeping corruption in the police and other government institutions that began to extort money from these unfettered and informal businesses.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Protesters go on a rampage during the anti-Bhutto movement in Karachi’s Nazimabad area (April 1977). In 1977 the city finally imploded. After a 9-party alliance, the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) – that was led by the country’s three leading religious parties – refused to accept the results of the 1977 election; Karachi became the epicentre of the anti-Bhutto protest movement.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
A policeman beats up a protesting shopkeeper in the city’s Saddar area during the PNA movement ( 1977). The protests were often violent and the government called in the army. The protests were squarely centred in areas largely populated by the Mohajir middle and lower middle classes. Apart from attacking police stations, mobs of angry/unemployed Mohajir youth also attacked cinemas, bars and nightclubs; as if the government’s economic policies had been the doing of Waheed Murad films and belly dancers! The bars and clubs were closed down in April 1977.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Future MQM chief Altaf Hussain on a Karachi University bus (1977): As the PNA protests led to the toppling of the Bhutto regime (through a reactionary military coup by General Ziaul Haq in July 1977), within a year a group of young Mohajirs were already exhibiting their disillusionment with the ‘PNA revolution.’ In 1978 two students at the Karachi University – Altaf Hussain and Azim Ahmed Tariq - formed the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organization (APMSO). They accused the religious parties of using the Mohajirs as ladders to enter the corridors of power while doing nothing to address the economic plight of the community.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
The American contingent parade past spectators at the 1980 ‘Karachi Olympics’: Zia’s dictatorship managed to strengthen itself soon after the Soviet forces invaded neighbouring Afghanistan in December 1979. Once the US resolved to oppose the Soviet invasion, it (along with Saudi Arabia), began pumping in an unprecedented amount of financial and military aid into Pakistan.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Foreigners enjoy a cruise on the waters of Karachi’s Kemari area in 1982.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Future US President Barak Obama visited Karachi as a visiting university student and stayed with a roommate of his in Karachi (1981).
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
The Taj Mahal Hotel 1982: A number of newly-built hotels sprang up in Karachi during the economic boom of the early 1980s. However, many critics were of the view that most of them were built with ‘black money.’
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Poverty and drug addiction saw an alarming increase in Karachi in the 1980s.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
1985: School and college students chant slogans against the government and Karachi’s ‘transport mafia’ the day after a Mohajir student, Bushra Zaidi was run-over by a bus. The accident sparked a series of deadly riots between the Mohajirs and the Pakhtuns of Karachi.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Front-page news reports about the deadly 1986 Mohajir-Pakhtun riots in Urdu daily, Jang. As the armed student groups fought each other to near-extinction on the city’s campuses, the violence, now heightened by sophisticated weapons, became the domain of criminal gangs in the city’s Baloch and Pakhtun dominated areas. Most of these gangs had been operating as hoodlums peddling hashish, smuggled goods and running illegal prostitution dens in the 1970s. After the sale of alcohol (to Muslims) was banned in April 1977, they added the business of making and selling cheap whisky to their enterprise before they discovered the profitable wonders of selling guns and heroin. They were sometimes also used by political parties, as well as intelligence agencies for various political reasons.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Military personnel arrest a rioter in Karachi’s Orangi Town area in 1986. Working-class and lower-middle-class areas like Lyari and Orangi were the first two sections of the city to be hit by gang violence and heroin addiction in the 1980s.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
The suddenly rich: Huge bungalows came up in the city’s ‘posh localities’ in the 1980s. A booming economy based on the continuous flow of financial aid arriving from the US and Saudi Arabia and generated by a somewhat anarchic form of capitalism paralleled urban prosperity with growing class disparities. It encouraged a free-for-all rush towards grabbing the chaotic political and economic fruits of such an economy.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Team of PTV’s social satire show, ‘Fifty-Fifty’ often parodied the rise of greed and corruption and the social idiosyncrasies of the ‘nonveau-riche’ that emerged from the 1980’s anarchic brand of capitalism.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief, Altaf Hussain, speaking at a large party rally in Karachi in 1987. The mohajirs claimed that Karachi’s transport and real estate businesses had been taken over by gangs of Afghan gun and drug mafias and that the Mohajirs were being forcibly ousted from various areas of the city by refugees arriving in Karachi from Afghanistan. MQM decided to organise the Mohajir community into a cohesive ethnic whole.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
A wall in Lyari plastered with PPP posters in 1988. Lyari remained to be the party’s main support base in Karachi. It also saw a number of anti-Zia protests throughout the 1980s.
