Category: Pakistan Politics

It’s done it again. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s recent victory in Karachi’s NA-246 constituency, its seventh in a row, has dealt a blow to its critics, who claimed the party’s grip was loosening in a city yearning for political change.

Far from weakening the party, the Rangers’ raid on MQM’s headquarters on March 11 and subsequent events seem to have revitalized the link between the party and its constituents. The by-election on April 23 reaffirmed its capacity to bounce back in challenging times. Its core constituency (the Urdu-speaking middle- and lower-middle classes of Karachi’s District Central) sent packing the self-styled ‘liberators’ who promised voters “freedom from fear.” Opponents have had to face the fact that the “living dead,” as Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf described MQM voters, are alive and kicking.

On closer inspection, however, the ‘landslide’ victory of the MQM is not as blatant as it seems. And while this victory is certainly a shot in the arm for an embattled party, it provides only temporary respite.

Rarely has a by-election captured as much attention at the national level as the one in NA-246. On one hand, everyone was eager to see how the MQM was going to get out of the awkward corner where the military establishment, with the support of the federal government, had pushed it in the preceding weeks. The involvement of all the contenders’ central leadership only contributed to raise the stakes even further.

Once again, PTI chief Imran Khan and his entourage demonstrated their unfamiliarity with Karachi’s ground realities by convincing themselves that their rhetoric of salvation would be enough to ravish the MQM’s home constituency, where it has remained undefeated since 1988. By equating Mohajirs at large, in a constituency where they account for more than 80 percent of registered voters, with passive victims waiting to be liberated from the yoke of crime and authoritarianism, the PTI alienated potential voters and probably even drove a significant number of its past voters back toward the MQM.

Instead, the PTI should have realized that the MQM’s grip over Azizabad and other Urdu-speaking localities of NA-246 is less the outcome of its coercive tactics than of its patronage politics. The MQM has delivered, providing its constituents with public jobs, helping them overcome bureaucratic and legal hurdles, facilitating their access to water and electricity (however imperfect these services remain). Khan and the PTI also ignored the fact that the largely uncontested authority of the MQM over this part of the city has preserved a semblance of peace in the area. Every MQM voter may not sympathize with the party’s muscular style of politics, but most residents of these localities will admit that at least some order reigns in this part of town.

Kunwar Naveed Jamil, the MQM candidate, received 95,644 votes or a bit more than 73 percent of the total cast. This is similar to what Nabil Gabol, whose resignation from the National Assembly required this by-election, secured in the 2013 election as an MQM candidate. As such, Jamil’s score puts paid to allegations, including from Gabol, that the MQM owed its recent victories to wholesale rigging. Conducted under the close watch of the Rangers, no one can claim that the MQM’s comfortable win was the outcome of electoral malpractices. The party has demonstrated that it has retained a large vote-bank in its home constituency.

At the same time, despite its relatively poor showing, the PTI has seen its vote share (percentage of votes polled minus invalid ones) increase from 17 percent to 19 percent. This should already be a source of concern for the MQM. Clearly, the PTI has made a dent into the MQM’s vote bank and it seems here to stay. But this is not the only matter of concern. Electoral assessments in terms of vote share always present a strong bias as they fail to account for invalid votes and, more importantly, for the abstention rate. This bias is particularly blatant in the case of NA-246, a constituency known for its erratic level of participation since 1990.

After 1988, when the constituency registered a record rate of participation (53 percent), this rate declined to 28 percent in 1990 and further to 9 percent in 1993 (when the MQM boycotted the polls). During the following elections this rate increased steadily: 17 percent in 1997, 37 percent in 2002, and 63 percent in 2008. In 2013, however, the turnover fell to 52 percent, only to decline further during this by-election, where it fell to its 2002 level, at 37 percent. This corresponds to the average rate of participation registered since 1988 but the significant reduction of votes polled (131,418 in 2015 against 189,405 in 2013) raises several questions nonetheless. How much does this decline owe to delays in the voting process (which, according to the MQM, were instigated by law and order agencies), greater scrutiny over this particular election (which made electoral malpractices nearly impossible), and more simply to the electoral fatigue of local residents?

The fact remains that only 27 percent of registered voters of NA-246 gave their votes to the MQM, against 38 percent in 2013 and 60 percent in 2008. One might argue that large-scale rigging biased the results of the 2008 and 2013 elections. Indeed, a recent review of the constituency’s electoral history suggests that the MQM’s average bag in NA-246 (except for 1988) is around 19 percent. In this sense, the results of this by-election are indeed a significant success for the MQM, as they point toward an increase of its actual vote share. And yet, what has emerged from this election is a downsized political party which will have to come to terms with a harsh reality: even in its home constituency, where its political journey begun in the late 1980s, it can no longer claim to enjoy the unconditional support of the masses.

For all its claims that NA-246 ‘belonged’ to the party (a claim resonating with larger claims of ‘ownership’ over Karachi), the MQM leadership will have to cope with the fact that voters’ behavior can no longer be taken for granted, be it in the party’s strongholds or, a fortiori, in more contested constituencies. Gone are the days of the MQM’s uncontested authority over Karachi and, in this sense, this by-election could prove to be an important milestone in Karachi’s political history, confirming its transition toward a post-hegemonic political order—a configuration where the MQM, for now, remains the predominant political force but where it has to cope with unprecedented competition from electoral rivals and, thus, has to resort to more active campaigning to win the day.

So where do the MQM and Karachi politics go from here?

In the short term, Karachi’s predominant party has won a certain breathing space but is not yet over the hill. Those who had started questioning MQM chief Altaf Hussain’s authority within the party, however surreptitiously, have been silenced for now even as his succession remains an open question. As investigations into Imran Farooq’s murder and pending money-laundering cases follow their course, Hussain’s future in the U.K. remains uncertain. In any case, and however inconceivable this may still be for MQM workers and sympathizers, Hussain will not always be there to steer the party in the face of adversity. Sooner or later, it will have to generate a new leadership, a process which will be fraught with tensions and for which, considering the absence of a strong and consensual second-tier leadership within the party, the MQM seems largely unprepared. The transition of the party to a post-charismatic politics, what Max Weber called the “routinization of charisma,” will be its greatest challenge and this time there is no guarantee that the party will emerge victorious, or survive at all.

The reaction of the military establishment to this electoral victory also remains uncertain. Targeted operations against the party’s alleged “militant wing” will probably continue, while judicial pressure on party leaders and activists may increase in the coming months, both in Pakistan and in the U.K. This pressure will severely constrain the margin of maneuver of the party and might contribute to its normalization. But one cannot entirely exclude a return to its militant posturing and disruptive tactics, especially in the case of Hussain’s forced retirement.

The by-election results suggest that the PTI’s time has not yet come. But for all its shortcomings, the PTI has confirmed that it could become a serious challenger to the MQM’s supremacy, provided it draws lessons from its relatively poor showing on April 23. If the PTI is to consolidate its position in Karachi politics, it will have to consider joining forces with the Jamaat-e-Islami to avoid excessive scattering of votes expressing a desire for political change. At the same time, however, such an alliance might compromise the growing support for the PTI among the Shia. At a more structural level, the PTI will have to strengthen its local apparatus in order to embed itself firmly in the everyday life of Karachi’s low-income residents, who hold the key to electoral success. For this, the PTI leadership will have to relinquish its histrionics and start addressing the more pressing concerns of local voters, while engaging more serenely with its main rival, which, during this by-election, proved unequivocally that it is not ‘occupying’ Karachi by force.

The uncertainties surrounding the current reconfiguration of Karachi’s political landscape also have to do with the future of ethnic and sectarian politics in the city. This by-election signaled a return of the MQM to its earlier ethnic posturing, which compromised its attempts to expand its constituency beyond Mohajirs. Not that this really matters electorally. For all its attempts to tone down its ethnic rhetoric and field non-Mohajir candidates in recent elections, the MQM has always failed to draw a significant number of voters from non-Mohajir backgrounds. The MQM’s capacity to retain the support of Shia voters, both among Ismaili and Twelver Shia communities, will likely be more significant for its future. In NA-246, the Shia vote seems to have scattered and, following the alliance of the Majlis-e-Wahdat-e-Muslimeen with the PTI, a large number of Shia voters appear to have opted for the latter.

The capacity of the PTI to woo Shia voters is proof of its capacity to overcome the ethnic and sectarian fault lines that have come to characterize Karachi politics and social life. Here lies the major challenge to the MQM’s predominant position: in the PTI’s potential to emerge as a truly pan-ethnic and/or pan-Islamic party. While this potential remains largely unrealized, the PTI has an obvious advantage over its rival: it is less bounded to a specific linguistic group. In a city whose demography is fast changing and where Mohajirs are no longer the majority, this could prove to be a major strategic advantage, provided the emerging challenger starts to understand this city in all its complexity, rather than through the simplistic dyad of occupation and liberation.

Gayer is a research fellow at the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales, Paris, and author of Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City (Hurst, 2014), available in Pakistan through HarperCollins India.

LONDON, April 14 — Hours before he was scheduled to be executed last month, the Pakistani hit man made an incendiary accusation.

Speaking into a video camera at a remote desert jail, Saulat Mirza, a death-row convict from the port city of Karachi, said his orders to kill had come from Altaf Hussain, the city’s most powerful and, until recently, untouchable political leader.

“Altaf Hussain directly gave us the murder instructions,” Mr. Mirza said in footage that was broadcast on several television news channels later that evening in March.

It was enough to earn Mr. Mirza a last-minute reprieve, as the authorities investigated his claims. Mr. Hussain, for his part, called it a conspiracy to damage his image.

But in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most volatile city, the accusations were seen as further evidence that the political winds were violently shifting against Mr. Hussain after decades of iron-fisted dominance.

On March 11, Rangers in balaclavas raided Nine Zero, the fortified headquarters of Mr. Hussain’s party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, confiscating weapons and files. One political worker was killed by gunfire during the raid, and several others were taken into custody, some on murder charges.

On the political front, Mr. Hussain has come under attack from the opposition leader Imran Khan, who has started an aggressive foray into his electoral heartland. On Friday, in a symbolic challenge, Mr. Khan held a small event just a few hundred yards from Mr. Hussain’s party headquarters.

In London, the British police are continuing to press criminal investigations of Mr. Hussain and his inner circle. On April 1, a senior aide, Muhammad Anwar, was arrested on suspicion of money laundering.

Mr. Hussain, who was arrested in connection with the same case in June, underwent further questioning at a London police station on Tuesday. His bail has been extended until July.

Not long ago, any of those shocks would have caused an immediate shutdown of Karachi, a city of 20 million people where Mr. Hussain’s ability to empty the streets at an hour’s notice has long been a sign of his immense influence.

But this past month, life has largely continued as normal. Muttahida’s militant wing — organized groups of armed supporters who carry out extortion and intimidation, and are seen as the enforcers of Mr. Hussain’s authority — has melted off the streets.

The news media, which previously treated the party with caution, has aired criticism of the party. (Among those arrested was a Muttahida supporter charged with the murder of Wali Khan Babar, a prominent television journalist who was shot dead in his car in 2011.) And in the city’s political back rooms, senior Muttahida officials have begun to quietly consider the possibility of a new leader — an unthinkable idea until recently.

“The fear factor is gone,” said a senior party official who, like several others, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.

But the upheaval has also brought worries of new instability in a city that is awash with armed groups. Noting that Karachi is in a “state of flux,” the newspaper Dawn warned in an editorial this month that “when the chips fall, they may not do so without considerable violence.”

The moves against Muttahida are part of a broader effort to stem a cycle of political and criminal violence that has left Karachi prone to Taliban infiltration in recent years. Militants disrupted election campaigning in 2013, leading to a crackdown that has broken several Taliban cells, according to police officials and ethnic Pashtun community leaders.

Now the authorities have turned their attention to the armed wings of the city’s political parties, of which Muttahida is by far the largest.

But few are writing off Mr. Hussain, a wily political player with a long record of survival, just yet.

For much of the 1990s, Mr. Hussain’s supporters waged a street war against the security forces in Karachi, only to ultimately re-emerge stronger than ever.

Since then, he has enjoyed unquestioned support from the city’s Mohajir population — mostly Urdu-speaking families that migrated from India in 1947 — by playing on their sense of grievance at the hands of local ethnic groups, creating a magnetic cult of personality in the process.

This time, however, the challenges also come from within. Mr. Hussain’s stewardship of the party has become increasingly erratic recently, several officials said.

The opposition leader Imran Khan during an anti-government demonstration in Islamabad, Pakistan, last year. Credit Aamir Qureshi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In addresses to party rallies in Karachi, delivered over the phone from London (his usual mode of communication with the party faithful), he frequently appears to be under the influence of alcohol, they said.

During one lengthy tirade on March 30, Mr. Hussain publicly resigned his leadership and urged his followers to take up charity work, only to reappoint himself hours later.

“We never know if it’s going to be happy hour or sad hour,” said one senior official who privately advocated a change in leadership and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

To many, it seems clear that the Pakistani military, which has a long history of meddling in politics, is trying to engineer a change in leadership. Journalists say the videotaped accusations from Mr. Mirza, the death-row convict, bore the hallmarks of a military intelligence operation.

In political circles, the army has started to take informal soundings about a possible successor to Mr. Hussain, the same party official said.

“They want to keep the M.Q.M., but without Altaf or anyone directly associated with violence,” he said.

But experts warn that such a strategy is fraught with danger. “If the M.Q.M. implodes, what will happen to Karachi?” said Laurent Gayer, author of “Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City,” a recent book on Karachi. “It seems that few people are thinking about the consequences of a militarized, fragmented party.”

In any event, Mr. Gayer said, Mr. Hussain is unlikely to be unseated through conventional politics, and therefore much hinges on the outcome of the long-running police investigation in London.

Mr. Hussain looked unsteady as he pushed through reporters at the entrance to the London police station on Tuesday. He has said a large sum of money found at his house — about $650,000, party officials say — came from legitimate political donations.

But his circle faces potentially greater peril from a related police investigation into the murder of Imran Farooq, a former ally who was stabbed to death outside his London home in 2010. On Monday, the Pakistan Interior Ministry announced that a suspect in the case had been arrested.

Still, the British police seem mainly interested in two other suspects, both Muttahida supporters, who fled to Pakistan from London just after the killing in 2010.

The police have not brought charges in either case. But just the possibility of a prosecution has visibly destabilized Mr. Hussain’s party and has weakened his grip on Karachi.

For now, though, the most immediate threat is political. The opposition leader Mr. Khan, whose party is close to the military, and Muttahida are running in an important by-election in Karachi on April 23. Mr. Khan has declared his intention to “liberate” Karachi from Mr. Hussain.

“It is time for M.Q.M. and Altaf Hussain to decide whether they want to be a democratic party or want to do politics through a militant wing,” Mr. Khan told reporters last week.

Few believe the choice is that simple. But even among Muttahida officials, there is a gnawing worry about what will happen if Mr. Hussain, who long commanded the respect of figures like Mr. Mirza, suddenly loses control.

“The militants are confused and worried,” another senior party official said. “They don’t want to follow instructions from a man who says one thing in the morning, and another in the afternoon. That’s a worry for us all.”