The PPP and MQM are once again inching towards the negotiating table. This would be good news if only both sides were sincere. But they’re not. So the prospects don’t look too bright.
Going by General Naseerullah Babar’s thunderous pronouncements, the government seems to be in a belligerent, unforgiving mood. Islamabad believes that it has seriously dented the terrorist network and that it is only a matter of time before the MQM will keel over in exhaustion. Meanwhile, the PPP wants to give the impression that it is prepared for a negotiated “settlement” with the MQM as long as it does not undermine the “state” of Pakistan. There can therefore be nothing better than talking to the MQM from a “position of strength”.
The MQM, in turn, now appears anxious to erase the impression that it is an “anti-Pakistan” party set upon achieving its ends by foreign-inspired armed struggle. That is why the strategy of “talk, talk, fight, fight” suits it best. Its hope is that prolonged urban guerilla warfare will chip away at the PPP government’s credibility, alienate it from public opinion in the rest of the country and create the necessary conditions for its ouster some time in the near future. In the meantime, an occasional call or two for a comprehensive strike in Karachi should demonstrate who calls the shots in the city and undermine General Babar’s tall claims that “all will be well shortly”.
This is a no-win situation for both parties. The real tragedy is that the people of Karachi in particular, and the people of Pakistan in general, are being held hostage to a senseless clash between the irresistible force of the MQM and the immovable object of the PPP. Public perceptions of the conflict in Karachi are, however, taking a turn for the worse. For the MQM and the mohajirs of Karachi who support it, the following points deserve serious consideration.
1. More and more people, especially in the rest of the provinces, are increasingly beginning to think of the MQM “as an anti-Pakistan, pro-India separatist party which is irrationally supported by those people in Karachi and urban Sindh who still call themselves mohajirs after having settled in Pakistan nearly fifty years ago”. Also, since the solidification of provincial sub-nationalisms in the 1970s, few people outside Karachi are prepared to consider the argument for a fifth “nationality” in Pakistan. Mr Altaf Hussain’s denouncement of the two-nation theory “as a big joke” has also weakened support for the MQM in important establishment circles. Even those who see a solution to the Karachi crisis in the creation of a dozen or so mini-provinces in the country are at a loss to answer one question satisfactorily: “If Karachi is handed over to the MQM, who will guarantee that Altaf Hussain will not wreak havoc on the city as he did from 1990-92 and hold the rest of the country to ransom?” This creeping anti-MQM, anti-Mohajir mood in the country is a sure-fire recipe for fresh disasters in the making.
2. The incipient transformation of the MQM’s struggle for representative power in urban Sindh into an ethnic cleansing of Karachi is bound to fuel the growing anti-Mohajir sentiment in the country. The irresponsible actions of a section of the Karachi press highlighting presumed or imagined injuries to mohajir sensibilities, coupled with body bags containing Sindhis or Pashtoons, is likely to rebound on the mohajir community with a vengeance.
The PPP and its supporters, especially in Sindh, also need to recognise the direction in which the civil war in Karachi is taking the country. The following points, in particular, bear recognition.
1. Increasingly, Pakistanis are beginning to come round to the view that the PPP is part of the problem rather than the solution to the crisis in Karachi. According to this view, no Sindhi dominated political party or provincial government can ever accommodate MQM demands, however reasonable some of these may be, because of the fear of a backlash from nationalist Sindhi opinion. The fact that the PPP’s provincial base is both rural and semi-feudal, instead of urban and middle class, makes matters worse. The overlapping of ethnic, class and demographic factors has hardened positions on both sides and made the problem unmanageable in the hands of the PPP.
2. The last elections demonstrated that Mian Nawaz Sharif’s PML is slowly but surely making inroads into the urban and rural Sindh votebank of the MQM and PPP respectively. More ominously for both the parties, the longer it takes them to resolve the conflict the greater the chances that the people of Karachi and Sindh will begin to wonder whether their best bet lies not in voting for either of them but for Mr Sharif’s PML when the next elections roll round. Certainly, that would be one way for the mohajirs of Karachi to re-integrate with mainstream Pakistan and give up the politics of ethnicity and regionalism.
If the PPP and the MQM don’t read the writing on the wall, both are headed for a crash landing.