The Ghosts Of The Past

Thirty-four persons--the majority of them reportedly workers ofMrs.Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party Parliamentarians (PPPP)--werekilled and over 100 others were injured in different parts of Karachi onMay 12, 2007, when the abortive attempt of Justice Iftikhar Ahmed Chaudhury, thesuspended Chief Justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court, to enter the city fromthe airport to address a pro-democracy meeting was violently resisted by thepro-Musharraf Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), the dominant partner in the rulingcoalition of Sindh.

The suspended Chief Justice--badly advised by his political supporters--decided to disregard the warnings of the MQM not to visit the city and address ameeting. His arrival in Karachi by air from Islamabad triggered off violentclashes initiated by the MQM cadres with the support of the government and thePolice. He could not leave the airport and ultimately flew back to Islamabad inthe evening after giving up his idea of addressing a meeting in Karachi.

The political supporters of the suspended Chief Justice overlooked the factthat Karachi is not Lahore and that it would not be possible to repeat inKarachi the triumphant visit of Justice Chaudhry to Lahore on May 6, 2007.President General Pervez Musharraf and his Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)would be happy over what happened in Karachi on May 12, 2007, and over thefailure of the suspended Chief Justice and his followers to hold a pro-democracymeeting in the city. However, it would be over-simplistic to see the eruption ofviolence in Karachi as solely the outcome of instigation by the Musharraf government.

The events of May 12, 2007, have brought into the surface once again thesubterranean demons of violence in Karachi, which had remained submerged since Mr.Nawaz Sharif came back to power in 1996. These demons of violence wereborn out of historic animosities, which have always been the definingcharacteristics of Karachi. These animosities related to the Mohajirs vs theSindhis; the Barelvis vs the Deobandis/Wahabis; the MQM vs the PPPP; the MQM vsthe Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI).

The Mohajirs are the Muslim migrants from India--mostly from Uttar Pradesh,Bihar and the Delhi region. The vast majority of them belong to the moretolerant Barelvi Sunni sect. They are strongly opposed to the Deobandis and theWahabis. Osma bin Laden and Al Qaeda have very little support among the Mohajirs.

In the Sindh province, the Mohajirs are in a majority in Karachi. They arepresent in large numbers in the cities of Hyderabad and Sukkur. Wherever theBarelvi Mohajirs are present in large numbers, they have successfuly driven outthe JEI, which they see as an organisation of the Deobandis and the Wahabis.

The Sindhis are in a majority in the rural areas of Sindh. The Mohajirs seethe PPPP as essentially a party of the Sindhis. It has very little following inthe Mohajir community. The Mohajirs look upon the PPPP as an anti-Mohajir partyand Benazir as an anti-Mohajir leader, who represents the interests of only theSindhis. They accuse her and her then Interior Minister, Maj.Gen.NaserullahBabbar, of carrying out large-scale massacres of Mohajirs when she was the PrimeMinister of Pakistan between 1988 and 1990 and again between 1993 and 1996. Theyhave not forgotten that it was she, who ordered the closure of the IndianConsulate-General in Karachi in 1994, thereby creating difficulties for millionsof Mohajirs in visiting their relatives in India for the last 13 years.

The Deobandis/Wahabis from Punjab and the North-West frontier Province (NWFP)and the JEI have been trying to stage a come-back in Karachi since the beginningof last year. The massacre of all the Barelvi leaders of the Sunni Tehreek by anunidentified suicide bomber during a meeting at the Nishtar Park in Karachi inApril last year was viewed by the MQM as the beginning of an attempt by the JEIto stage a come-back in Karachi.

The MQM has been greatly concerned over the attempts of Benazir to stage apolitical come-back as possibly the Prime Minister for a third tenure through adeal with Musharraf. It has been concerned over the manner in which the PPPP,the JEI and the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) of Mr.Nawaz Sharif have, in itsperception, been exploiting the public anger over Musharraf's arbitrary removalof the Chief Justice for their own partisan political purposes. It supports theChief Justice in his campaign for the restoration of his honour. It has beencritical of Musharraf's arbitrary action against the Chief Justice. At the sametime, it is not prepared to allow the PPPP and the JEI to exploit the publicanger for their own political purposes in Karachi.

The Mohajirs of Sindh constitute an almost monolithic community. The majorityof them are descendants of converts from Hinduism. They nurse nostalgic memoriesof India. They painstakingly maintain their links with their relatives and hometowns in India. They dislike Pakistani fundamentalist organisations such as thetwo factions of the JEI led by Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Maulana Samiul Haq and theJamiat-ul-Ulema Islam (JUI) Pakistan led by Maulana Fazlur Rahman, which largelyrepresent the descendants of the Muslims, who had migrated to the sub-continentfrom Centra Asia, Afghanistan and West Asia. They feel that these organisationsand their Wahabi leaders look down upon the descendants of the converts fromHinduism as inferior species of Muslims.

Musharraf is a Mohajir. His family had migrated to Pakistan from Delhi. Onedoes not know whether he too is a descendant of converts from Hinduism.Possibly, he is. The Mohajirs are proud that he is the President of Pakistan andthe Chief of the Army Staff (COAS). They are grateful to him for politicallyrehabilitating them. Since assuming power in October,1999, he has concededpractically all the political demands of the MQM excepting those relating to thewithdrawal of the criminal cases against Mr.Altaf Hussain, its leader who livesin exile in the UK. The withdrawal of the cases is a sensitive issue since oneof them allegedly relates to the murder of an army officer by some MQM cadres.

The MQM and its Mohajir followers will not like any attempt by the politicalforces, which have jumped into the bandwagon of Justice Chaudhry, to exploit thepublic anger to weaken Musharraf politically and to stage a come-back inKarachi, which they look upon as their homeland.

Will the demons of the old animosities, which have been woken up, go back tosleep or will they keep Karachi burning as it was between 1988 and 1996, therebydamaging the economic stability of Pakistan? The MQM would not want a repeat ofwhat happened then since it could weaken and discredit Musharraf. But then, whendemons are let loose, it is difficult to bring them back under control.

B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai.