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Karachi

Mohajir Paradox

The Mohajir community must reckon with the damage caused by its trajectory of isolation and separateness, and its well-being lies in adopting Sindh as its home, claiming all its political and economic dividends and problems, assimilating and coexisting peacefully with the larger community, and responding in unison to the call of our chosen land

By Ambassador M. Alam Brohi | November 2026

The province of Sindh represents one of the world’s oldest civilisations. The archaeological discovery of an ancient city whispers to every visitor of the splendour of the Indus civilisation, which once flourished on the banks of the Sindhu, marked by high standards of living, civility, hygiene, cleanliness, art, and culture. Modern Sindh has been a multi-religious, multi-linguistic and multi-ethnic nation for centuries. This unique feature has made it the chosen destination of travellers, wanderers, migrants, poets, scholars, mystics, traders, and explorers. Sindh embraced them as its sons.

The Talpur rulers lost Sindh’s independence to superior British forces because of the treachery of Seth Neomal Hotchand, who provided strategic intelligence, financial backing, and logistics to General Napier before the consequential battle of 1843. The British knew the resilience of the Sindhis and attached Sindh to the Bombay Presidency. They demonstrated a hostile and discriminatory policy towards Sindh. Sindhis launched a well-sustained movement for its separation from Bombay. This was realised in 1936.

Pakistan emerged as an independent state on 14 August 1947. It faced two immediate challenges: consolidation of the Federation, and the settlement of refugees. Bengal and Sindh were in the vanguard of the Pakistan Movement. Punjab opted to join Pakistan at the last moment. Former NWFP consented to join the Federation in a disputed referendum. Balochistan was declared an independent country in June 1947 as a result of the standstill agreement signed on 5 June 1947. Later, it was annexed into Pakistan by force in April 1948.

The challenge of refugees was also daunting for the new country. There were millions of displaced persons pouring into Punjab and Sindh. The government of Sindh handed over its offices, secretariat, buildings and vehicles to the central government with logistical and financial backing. The influx of refugees was mounting, putting exhausting pressure on the administrative machinery caught between a dual command.

Karachi in 1947 was a city of slightly over 400,000 citizens. It had no infrastructural capacity to sustain an enormous influx of population. The provincial government wanted to spread refugees all over Sindh. The central government wanted concentration of refugees in Karachi despite a shortage of resources. Some historians are of the view that Liaquat Ali Khan was planning to create an electoral constituency for himself in the metropolis.
The local administration was listening more to the central authorities than to the provincial chief executive, ignoring the violent protests of the refugees vandalising the properties of Hindus. This compelled the Chief Minister, Muhammad Ayub Khuhro, to visit the affected areas personally to assuage the fear of the Hindus, assuring them of protection. His government was later dismissed.

The dismissal of Khuhro’s administration deepened the sense of fear and vulnerability of the Hindu population. They resorted to a panicky exodus from Sindh, depriving it of an educated, trading and teaching class of population, and a large number of public servants. The population of the city increased to over 1.2 million within a few years. The settlement of the refugees in other towns was smoother, causing no serious administrative problem.

Liaquat Ali Khan was appointed as the Prime Minister after the decline of Raja Sahib of Mahmudabad to head the central government. Liaquat Ali Khan was overly concerned with the political, economic, and social advantages of the refugees. His obsession with the refugees at the cost of the indigenous population resulted in unpleasant consequences, including the concentration of refugees in Karachi, unbalancing the population of the city, unlawful occupation of the properties of Hindus, en masse recruitment of refugees in the public service, fixing separate quotas of government jobs for Karachi and refugees, conversion of Sindhi schools into Urdu schools, and the takeover and renaming of the Sindh University as Karachi University.


He also established the Evacuee Property system without a proper process of accountability. It plunged into serious malpractices in the allotment of properties, stimulating the natural human acquisitive instincts among the refugees, and a sense of apprehension and displeasure among the local population. The system was stained with corruption, malpractice, and fraud, as elaborated by President Ayub Khan in his biography. It was abolished in the early 1970s.

These unfair and excessive acts of patronage created a sense of separateness and exclusiveness among the refugees, and hampered the natural development of a sense of belonging to the land of Sindh, and almost stopped the process of assimilation based on shared political and economic interests, in contrast with Punjab. The process of assimilation has been a feature of every multilingual, multi-religious and multi-cultural society. The sense of separateness and exclusiveness developed by the new settlers in Karachi was a unique phenomenon.

Soon after the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan in October 1951, the Mohajir political and bureaucratic leadership established an axis with the dominant Punjabi establishment with the support of Ghulam Muhammad and Chaudhry Muhammad Ali. This axis became more pronounced during the One-Unit. The political leadership of Sindh had vehemently opposed One-Unit. The Mohajir leaders, with the exception of Chaudhry Khaliquzamman Siddiqui, had publicly or tacitly supported the scheme. This axis benefited the Mohajir bureaucracy, further fuelling the latter’s sense of separateness.

The senior positions of Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner and Senior Superintendents of Police were overwhelmingly held by Punjabis and Mohajirs. The break-up of these officers posted in Sindh from 1954–1970 is 88 Punjabis, 147 Mohajirs, 90 Sindhis and 9 Pathans. The Sindhis were mostly Superintendents of Police, with a few posted as Deputy Commissioners. There was also gross discrimination against East Pakistan in the allocation of CSP cadres.

The smaller provinces lost their control over domicile, jobs, resources, lands and properties. Thousands of Punjabis obtained domiciles of Sindh, Balochistan and NWFP and were recruited in local administrations against all ranks. The oil and gas extracted from Balochistan and Sindh was put more to the use of other places than these units. The people of small units looked helplessly to Punjab-dominated WAPDA, PIDC and ADB for dole-outs for water, agricultural and industrial development.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the command areas of Guddu and Ghulam Muhammad (Kotri) Barrages were allotted to outsiders rather than the locals. The local Sindhis were allotted 309,800 acres, while the remaining 423,500 acres were handed over to Punjabi farmers, bureaucrats, military officers, army personnel, award winners and title holders, affectees of Tarbela and Mangla dams, and Islamabad. The Mohajir leadership remained aloof from these problems of Sindh, and from their movement against One-Unit or the unfair usurpation of Sindh’s lands. This was an unwelcome situation.

The launch of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in 1968, the rising popularity of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Sindh and Punjab, and the announcement of general elections in 1970 caused a political tumult in the country. Student politics also received a fillip, becoming noisy and violent. Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba was well organised all over Sindh, and was supported by Mohajir and Sindhi students alike. Jeay Sindh Muttahida Mahaz, Muslim League and Awami Tehrik also had their student wings. The People’s Student Federation was in the embryonic organisational process in Sindh and Punjab.

Two Mohajir students – Osman Kennedy and Abid Zuhairi – were manhandled by a group of students within the premises of the Sindh University. The case of Osman attracted the attention of the Mohajir leadership and the Urdu press. This created an unpleasant situation between the Sindhi and Mohajir students in Hyderabad. Soon after, the city also witnessed the launch of the Sindh Mohajir, Punjabi and Pathan Muttahida Mahaz by Nawab Muzafar Khan. He was a local politician and used to make very provocative speeches. His Mahaz further deepened the rift between the two communities.

The right-wing religious parties, including Jamaat-e-Islami, emerged as electoral opponents of the PPP. Sindhi nationalists, including G. M. Syed with his Jeay Sindh Muttahida Mahaz, were also opposing Bhutto. The Mohajir community, barring a few pockets, was supporting the right-wing religious parties, at whose behest over 100 Moulanas issued an edict that, by raising the slogan of socialism, Bhutto had become a heretic and was liable for physical elimination.

The electoral outcome was stunning. Bhutto’s PPP secured an overwhelming majority in the Western wing, taking 82 of 138 seats, while Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League took 160 of 162 in the Eastern wing. Power was not transferred to the Awami League by the military junta, resulting in violent protests, civil war, and a military debacle that caused the dismemberment of Pakistan.

After the secession of East Pakistan and unrest in military cantonments, power was handed over to Bhutto. Bhutto’s ascension to power persuaded the Mohajir leadership that their privileged position and power-wielding era was over. This realisation added to their fears and siege mentality – as evidenced by the innocuous Sindhi Language Bill passed by the Provincial Assembly in July 1972, restoring the status of Sindhi as one of the languages of offices and courts.

The Mohajir leadership violently protested in Karachi and Hyderabad. Bhutto diffused the situation by replacing Mumtaz Ali Bhutto with the moderate Ghulam Jatoi as the Chief Minister of Sindh, and accepting many demands of the Mohajir leaders. However, the trust deficit between the two communities remained unbridged. Now, the Mohajirs had to compete within the larger community for senior positions. A quota of Central Superior Services for rural and urban was fixed initially for ten years. Later, General Zia-ul-Haq extended it for twenty years.

General Zia, taking advantage of the gulf dividing the two communities, helped create the MQM in the early 1980s. Based on narrow ethnic politics, the MQM witnessed a tumultuous cycle of rise and fall. It played a cat-and-mouse game with the PPP in Sindh, becoming its partner in power and then switching to other contestants. For almost four decades, the MQM inflicted more political, economic, and infrastructural damage on Karachi and the Mohajir community than any other entity. How will the community flourish if books in the hands of its youth are replaced with weapons? The Mohajir community’s academic decline has been saddening.

The Mohajir community has to reckon with the damage caused to it by its trajectory of isolation and separateness. Their well-being lies in adopting Sindh as their home, claiming all its political and economic dividends and problems, assimilating and coexisting peacefully with the larger community, and responding in unison to the call of our chosen land.

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