The cross and the crossroads

Karachi is in unchartered territory. The man who ruled the city for nearly 30 years – most of the time remotely from London – has been cast aside, at least for the moment. Its new mayor will also be running the city remotely – from a prison cell, via video link. Somehow, all this chaos seems apt for a city as haphazard and unpredictable as Karachi. There are two interconnected strands that need to be explored in the coming days and months: the future of governance in Karachi and the future of the MQM if Altaf Hussain has been truly jettisoned. Incarceration aside, Waseem Akhtar will find himself less powerful than previous mayors since the provincial PPP government, while it was delaying local government elections, passed a series of amendments to the local government bill giving powers previously reserved for the mayor and other local representatives to the local bodies minister by allowing him to control local councils through the Regional Directorate of Local Government. The amendments also took away the responsibility for waste disposal and management from the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation and gave it to the provincial government. As a result both parties may find it even harder to work together since responsibilities, encompassing everything from waste management to roads and construction, are not as clearly delimitated as before and we can expect to see turf battles and a lot of shifting of blame for poor governance in Karachi between the two parties. Waseem Akhtar during his talk to the media on Thursday continually said he was willing to work with the chief minister and stressed the spirit of unity, vowing that he would rule Karachi not as an MQM leader but as a leader of the entire city. But he, and Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, will have to follow through with that. Should they fail to do so, it is not just the city’s politics that will come to a standstill. Given the nature of political affiliation in Karachi, such tussles have a way of morphing into ethnic tensions and violence.

The question of Altaf Hussain will linger over the city like a stormy cloud for the indefinite future. The MQM chief has pledged to step aside and hand over power to the Rabita Committee. He has often made this promise in the past before backtracking soon after but this time the circumstances appear radically different, both because of the pressure the ‘MQM-Pakistan’ has come under and the fact that he was denounced – with no less than his mental state being questioned – by the senior-most leaders of the party. The main tussle now may be between the Rabita Committee and the diehard Altaf cadres that are, rather lazily by some, thought to exist. Akhtar conspicuously avoided even mentioning Altaf’s name in his first address as mayor. Right now, Altaf’s pledge that he will allow the Rabita committee to run matters has possibly avoided any significant splintering of the MQM. But the situation is volatile and we may see the Rabita Committee being ‘encouraged’ to follow an anti-Altaf approach with the incarceration of the mayor and other MQM leaders and activists and with Altaf descending further down the abyss of madness. For something approaching sanity to be restored to the city’s politics, it is essential that the MQM be given some breathing room and be allowed to try and show that it is moving beyond its distasteful past. Akhtar dared the government to put Pervez Musharraf on trial for his role in the May 12 violence. While nothing that the MQM does and say can ever blind us to the truth that it carried out those murders and other countless and unspeakably brutal crimes, this was a reminder to everyone that whatever the MQM may have done, it always had larger powers behind it egging it on. Contrary to the ‘current’ wishes of those in the media and elsewhere who, as these crimes were being committed, would not tire of kissing the MQM for being ‘secular and liberal’ and who now want to see a treacherous gang of traitors wiped out of existence, today’s objective reality is that it still remains intact as a social force and breaking it up through the use of state might is not the course that should be taken for reasons that are much more important than the temptations of political and non-political expediency. The mayoral elections are also a reminder that the problems of Karachi must be solved politically. The press conference by Farooq Sattar showed that both the MQM and Karachi are in a situation they have never experienced before. The MQM, now that it is isolated in a rather splendid way, has to pick up the pieces and start afresh. Let us see where all this goes, or is made to go.