Jiyay Mohajir?
Much soul-searching is required by the Urdu-speaking people to determine the losses they have incurred by opting for a Mohajir identity.
The Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), later re-branded as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, was formed in the middle of the 1980s, mainly to represent and safeguard the interests of the Urdu-speaking community living in urban Sindh, mainly in Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur.
In the political scene prevailing at that time, the term ‘Mohajir’, or migrant, was an innovative but ironic expression which succinctly represented the lot of those people who had migrated from India to Pakistan during the Partition in 1947. The word ‘Mohajir’ by itself was a euphemism for ‘panah gir’ or refugee, a term commonly used by local populations to refer to the Urdu-speaking people, the self-styled Baneeyan-e-Pakistan, who were landing in droves in the Promised Land to resettle themselves to start a new life from scratch.
Since the grass is always greener on the other side, they soon found their dreams shattered and found themselves having stepped into a land that was predominantly ruled by a tribal mindset, marked with ethnic favouritism, racial segregation and lingual differences. For the Urdu-speaking migrants, Jinnah’s Pakistan appeared to be wholly different from that of their fancied world, which was ceaselessly portrayed and eternally promised by the All-India Muslim League leadership to some 92 million Muslims of British India.
Nevertheless, the elation of being in a newly-independent Muslim country of their own, which was created out of their decades-long struggle and sacrifice, overwhelmed the sense of alienation of the Urdu-speaking migrants, who were welcomed with many derogatory terms. Among these, the name tags of ‘Urdu speaking’ and ‘Mohajir’ were the least demoralizing. The last-mentioned was later adopted as a distinctive identity to project their political fantasies through the MQM’s.
Since 1947, a litany of events has kept shaking and shaping the Mohajir mindset fraught with an entrenching sense of insecurity, injustice, racial prejudice and lingual discrimination. The assassination of the country’s first prime minister Khan Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951, the Ayub Khan era from 1958 to 1969, the shifting of the national capital from Karachi to Islamabad in 1960, the breaking away of East Pakistan in 1971 and the imposition of the infamous quota system in Sindh during the prime ministership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who played a greater role in cementing the rural-urban divide in the province, were the most eventful periods for the Urdu-speaking community.
Orchestrated by the civil-military establishment, a consistent, well-planned slew of social engineering machinations in the ensuing decades kept disturbing the demographic balance of a Mohajir-dominated Karachi, the financial capital of the country. The metropolis was termed as a ‘Mini Pakistan’. Contrary to the nationwide perception, however, Karachi saw itself being downgraded to a ‘Mini Hindustan,’ where Hindu-Muslim riots were replaced by Muslim-Muslim scuffles and religious prejudice supplanted by ethnic intolerance. Stoking the flames of hatred to the point of open aggression, the death of Bushra Zaidi, a 20-years old college student who died in a road accident when a speeding bus ran over her in April 1985, was the starting point. Subsequently, ethnic riots erupted after the Qasba-Aligarh Colony massacre in December 1986.
These events further stoked the setting up of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), that claimed to be a representative party of the Urdu-speaking community in Karachi and other urban centres in Sindh, as neither the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) nor the Jamaat-e-Islamic, despite having enjoyed electoral support of the city, tried to address the discrimination the Urdu-speaking population had been facing, purely on ethnic grounds.
Led by Altaf Hussain, a graduate of Karachi University, the overnight rise of the MQM was an exception in several ways. It was the only political party of the country that was founded, financed, run and supported by the middle and lower-class, with no feudal landlords pulling its strings or capitalists calling the shots. The ideology of the MQM sold like hotcakes among the deprived Mohajirs, in spite of the fact that some sane, far-sighted people from the Urdu-speaking community outrightly disapproved the formation of the MQM along ethnic lines. They said the party could only broaden the existing racial divide in an increasingly intolerant atmosphere and would lead the educated, cultured and progressive Urdu-speaking community to confront the powers that be, thus opening up a Pandora’s Box of new challenges never experienced by the Mohajir community before.
The ideology of the MQM was also resisted on the grounds that it clearly defied the principled stance that led some 8 million Indian Muslims to opt for Pakistan as a Muslim State, an idea that steered the largest mass migration in human history, marked with bloodshed, rape and loss of millions of lives across the India-Pakistan border. As it happened, Indian Muslims did not move to Pakistan in large numbers to be later confined to ethnic ghettoes, to behave like a subjugated minority and to be recognised in the end as mere Mohajirs, a popular but literally fabricated identity with no geographic locale or racial backdrop.
Ask any MQM diehard supporter the reason behind his or her unrelenting love of Altaf Hussain, the founder of the MQM. The answer is always the same: Altaf Hussain gave us recognition, a distinctive political identity amidst the rest of the identities marked with ethnical and racial lines. However, Urdu-speaking people have never had an identity crisis as they were recognised across the country for positive attributes, such as exquisite mannerism, polished etiquette, higher education, enriched literary and cultural backgrounds, sound business acumen and so on. The overnight rise of the MQM can be well-understood by the fact that even some intellectuals like Professor Hasnain Kazmi could not resist the charm of defending the logic of adopting the Mohajir identity.
Ethnic riots erupted after the Qasba-Aligarh Colony massacre in December 1986.
However, the MQM on its own turned its back on the identity that had carried it through the spectacular popularity among Urdu-speaking voters. The time came when the party decided to broaden its political scope beyond the Mohajir identity to reach out to all the people in the country. The party re-branded itself as the ‘Muttahida Qaumi Movement,’ to acquire the façade of being a truly national party. Interestingly, the shift from ‘Mohajir’ to ‘Muttahida’ did not have any impact on the party’s voter base, which was still satisfied with the notion of being led by people from its own community.
The prevailing conditions in the 80s pushed the neglected medium and lower middle classes of Karachi and other cities of Sindh to form a distinct ethnic grouping which would give them their due rights that had been blatantly usurped as a result of the 40/60 quota-share basis and by the consistently differential treatment meted out to them in comparison with the sons of the soil.
In urban Sindh, the decades of the 80s, 90s and 2000s solely belonged to the MQM. It boiled down to catchphrases like “MQM is Karachi and Karachi is MQM.” Beyond the rise and the uncontested three-decade rule of the MQM, however, there were many an entrenched fault-lines running in the party from its very beginnings that had raised a red flag about the misplaced direction of the party.
From the beginning, the party had started building itself along fascist lines. In the beginning, the MQM was mainly focused on the demand for abolishment of the quota system and of the repatriation of stranded Pakistanis from Bangladesh. As time progressed, MQM started being operated along mafia lines. Though projecting the victimhood of the Mohajirs, the party was also actively involved in adding to the miseries of the Mohajirs.
Carrying an oft-trumpeted Mohajir identity, the emergence of ‘the Bhai log’ culture and that too at the start of the party’s political journey, reversed almost every positive attribute the Urdu-speaking community was known for. Chants of ‘jiyay mohajir’ subdued the peaceful calmness of enlightened reasoning and even people with civilised values were carried away by the illusion of marching en masse towards happy hunting grounds by fair means or foul.
Thanks to the cartel of criminals nurtured under state patronage in the guise of political activists, those who were once best-known for their exquisite etiquette and sophistication were seen conforming to the fascist line of action that exchanged extortionists for educationists, replaced persuasion with coercion, substituted inherited mannerisms with state-granted militancy and swapped fanaticism with tolerance.
The rule of the blind bullet belittled the phenomenon of blind injustice and the resolute support offered to the mafia in every election tainted the fine points of a peace-loving people who once stood for a person like Fatima Jinnah and produced a unique class of the intelligentsia, comprising scholars, intellectuals, writers, poets, polemicists, educators, architects, painters, artists and so on. The after-effects of treading the path of violence became more visible when people like Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, Maulvi Abdul Haq, Dr. Mahmood Husain, Dr. Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, Dr. I. H. Usmani, Josh Malihabadi, Kaif Banarsi and Tabish Dehlvi were replaced with Asif Darinda, Nasir Chingari, Tahir Lamba, Arshad Kankatta, Fahim Commando, Aslam Topi, Rehan Kana, Ubaid K2 and so on.
The MQM era is marked with stories of torture, bloodshed, militancy, target-killing, extrajudicial murder, kidnapping of political opponents and throwing away their bullet-riddled bodies stashed in gunny bags.
More’s the pity, the MQM era is marked with stories of torture, bloodshed, militancy, target-killing, extrajudicial murder, kidnapping of political opponents and throwing away their bullet-riddled bodies stashed in gunny bags, shutter-down strikes called almost on a weekly basis, robberies, snatching at gunpoint, kidnapping for ransom, extortion, land grabbing in the name of China-cutting, holding the entire city, including the media houses at ransom, and the rest of the heinous crimes the party leadership had pioneered for decades for its vested interests. The assassination of Hakeem Mohammad Saeed in October 1998, the carnage of May 12, 2007, and the burning of over 260 workers in a garment factory in Baldia Town in September 2012 are some of the many examples that typify the peculiar character the MQM had developed.
Most importantly, the party turned out to be a Frankenstein for the Urdu-speaking people and a significant number of them, including the business community, artists, poets and the elite, left the city lock, stock, and barrel, mainly to escape the wrath of unrestrained violence inflicted by their own people. Leaving the Promised Land earned by sacrificing hundreds and thousands of lives, the Mohajir Diaspora is still an on-going phenomenon even after 72 years of creation of Pakistan, raising many questions about the wrong direction the community has been following for the last 40 years or so.
Knowing the fact that the beneficiaries of the downfall of Karachi will always be immune to any accountability, it is high time that the Urdu-speaking people look back to determine the irreversible damage inflicted on them by erroneously clinging to the Mohajir identity for decades. Unfortunately, the socio-economic deprivation that pushed the Urdu-speaking populace to succumb to confrontational politics is still unaddressed, the abolishment of the quota system is yet a far-off dream, the repatriation of stranded Biharis from Bangladesh is just another flight of fantasy and the city of skyscrapers has been reduced to mounds of waste and a shattered infrastructure.
Four decades down the lane, the people of Karachi seem to have lost more than gaining from their flawed political choice that has relegated them from a well-settled community to a hoard of gypsies wandering around to find a resting place. Now it seems practically impossible to remove the entrenched fault lines rooted in a multi-lingual, ethnically diverse society. It would better for the Urdu-speaking community to get out of their mohajir cloak, put an end to their migratory status forever and revert to their real identity of an enlightened, well-educated, peace-loving and progressive people. This time, in place of being led by a rabble-rouser they must look for a reformer like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to help them get back to their glory days.
![]() he writer is a member of the staff. He can be reached at faizan@southasia.com.pk |
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