MQM: the past catching up

Islamabad diary
The mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small…” It’s been a long time in coming but the past is finally catching up with the party which for the last 30-35 years has had such a stranglehold on the life of Pakistan’s largest city, its money centre and its commercial and industrial capital. What a phenomenon this has been: the MQM’s style and methods – a unique blend of populism and violence – with no parallels in the country’s history. But bad days – buray din – are upon it now.
The party is not over – this being no time for premature obituaries – but as old ghosts emerge from the shadows and skeletons come tumbling out of long-locked cupboards, who can deny that the MQM’s coastal fortress, indeed more kingdom than fortress, is under serious threat?
Even the MQM’s tone sounds different. Could anyone imagine that Altaf Hussain would end up saying what he did on the morning of the Rangers’ raid on his party headquarters, Nine Zero? Addressing party workers he said that if there were wanted men, why did they have to hide in Nine Zero, thus putting the entire party in trouble? They could have gone elsewhere. Amazingly, he gave his own example, that he was living in London. In days gone by, the MQM caudillo would have been all fire and brimstone. This was a different pitch. What would the rank and file make of it?
From the MQM’s point of view the larger picture is more disturbing. In recent months there have been several Soviet-style purges in the Rabita Committee, with several key party office-bearers having to leave the country altogether and new faces taking over in their place. Dr Imran Farooq’s murder probe by the Scotland Yard has still to run its course. The money-laundering inquiry also hangs over the leadership’s head. On top of all this comes the raid on party headquarters and the arrests from there of wanted criminals, including Faisal Mota sentenced to death by an anti-terrorist court for his leading role in the murder of the Geo reporter, Wali Khan Babar.
And Saulat Mirza, an MQM activist, is all set to hang for murders carried out years ago. Mafias thrive on ensuring protection and immunity for their members. No gangland figure gets involved in a heist or anything else if he fears being caught. Saulat Mirza’s hanging and Faisal Mota’s arrest will thus send a bad signal as far as Karachi’s political underworld is concerned. (Not to be forgotten is the Baldia Town factory fire concerning which serious allegations, yet to be proven, have been levelled against party office-bearers.)
Amir Khan, a central party figure, who was present at Nine Zero when the Rangers came was also taken away for ‘questioning’…to explain his presence in the company of wanted and sentenced men. Amir Khan cuts an interesting figure. Back in the early 1990s when the MQM had first emerged on the Karachi scene in such a big way, he and Afaq Ahmed, who now heads the breakaway Haqiqi faction, were the two principal leaders of the militant wing of the party. When the party had to flex its muscles, Amir and Afaq would be in front, leading the charge.
Those were the days. The army, the ‘agencies’, the Presidency under Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the Punjab government headed by Nawaz Sharif, and the combined opposition in the military-brokered Islami Jamhoori Ittehad were all ganged up against Benazir Bhutto’s government. The MQM had street power, it had muscle power, and it also enjoyed the support of the establishment. Its word thus was law and no one in Karachi dared go against it. There were no TV channels at the time but there were newspapers and all of them, without exception, had to toe the party’s line, obliged to carry the party’s daily statements, without a comma being changed, on their front pages.
This was the nearest thing to absolute power anyone had seen in Karachi and as happens with absolute power it went to the party’s head and it didn’t know where to stop. This was the time when a major of the ‘agencies’ (Major Kalim) was picked up, taken to a secret location, and questioned roughly. For the ‘agencies’, who not so long ago were mentoring the party, this was a step too far.
By 1995 there were ‘no-go’ areas in Karachi where the police did not venture, thanas in those areas closing their gates at sunset. Bodies discovered in gunny bags with marks of torture on them were not an unusual occurrence in those days. A pall of fear hung over the city.
Gen Naseerullah Babar, the interior minister at the time, spearheaded an operation to take back the city. The Intelligence Bureau was strengthened and the police in Karachi given a free hand. Several staged ‘encounters’ took place – in which such feared figures as Farooq Dada and Naeem Sherry were eliminated. The party was on the run.
But reprieve came with the dismissal of the Benazir Bhutto government at the hands of its own president, Farooq Leghari. As a hedge against the future, the ‘agencies’ propped up the Haqiqi faction led by the two erstwhile militant wing leaders, Afaq Ahmed and Amir Khan. Korangi and Landhi became Haqiqi strongholds, a situation which lasted until Gen Musharraf’s coup.
Musharraf was in any case sympathetic to the MQM, army chief Gen Waheed Kakar calling him ‘my MQM general’. When he seized power he reached out to the MQM. The MQM demanded its pound of flesh: end of Haqiqi dominance in Landhi and Korangi. The ‘agencies’ delivered the prize and the Haqiqis were moved out of their strongholds.
The games the ‘agencies’ play, and now once more, the wheel having come full circle, the ‘agencies’ are clearing the mess they helped create in the first place. This is the story of ‘jihad’ all over again, but in a different setting. First stoke the fires of ‘jihad’ and then ring the alarm bells and go about dousing the same fires. The guardians of our ideological frontiers, the high priests of that compound which no one has yet been able to adequately define, the ideology of Pakistan, have much to answer for. All the demons which now haunt our dreams were first manufactured in their laboratories.
Religion-inspired ‘jihad’ promoted along the Afghan frontier. ‘Secular jihad’ promoted in Karachi. Training camps set up for the liberation of Kashmir. And along the way, just as a sideshow, Balochistan screwed up. What need was there to go after Nawab Bugti and make a liberation icon out of him? Lal Masjid in Islamabad is too much for the forces and the ‘agencies’ to handle but Balochistan had to be turned into another battlefield.
The army is over-stretched and civilian institutions are collapsing, and we are being persuaded that the army has learned its lessons and changed its spots, even as the Reverend Hafiz Saeed runs his own foreign policy from the hallowed confines of Chauburji, Lahore.
Tailpiece: And their lordships of the Islamabad High Court opine that the charge of terrorism is not applicable to Mumtaz Qadri, the soldier of the faith who emptied his Kalashnikov magazine into Salmaan Taseer, because his act did not spread panic amongst the public. Not just ordinary people but political leaders are scared to discuss the anti-blasphemy law, scared to say a word in defence of Aasia Bibi, the poverty-stricken woman sentenced to death for blasphemy, and yet their lordships hold that panic was not created. Should Qadri have used a bazooka for their lordships to take a different view of the matter?
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com