The largest port on the Arabian Sea, Karachi today has a population over 20 million, on a par with Mumbai, and ranks as the world’s eighth biggest city. Commanding the north-east quadrant of the ocean, with a hinterland stretching up the Indus Valley to Afghanistan, it has been the principal entry-point for us arms and supplies in the ‘war on terror’, while refugees—and heroin—have flowed in the opposite direction. From the bloodstained birth of Pakistan with the Partition of British India, the city’s explosive growth has more often been fuelled by the ‘push’ of geopolitical, agrarian and ecological crises than by the ‘pull’ of economic development. Life in its sprawling katchi abadis, or ‘unpaved settlements’, has much in common with that of other giant undercities, such as Mumbai’s, with the exception that violence plays a significantly greater role here. The vast majority of Karachiites are not only entangled in competition with each other, in a desperate struggle for survival, but must also contend with a brutal climate of aggression fuelled by gangsterized political groupings, the most influential of which also control the armed force of the state. In what conditions do its inhabitants live and what could drive increasing numbers of newcomers to try to survive here?
On the eve of Independence in 1947, the seaport of Karachi had fewer than half a million inhabitants, mostly Hindus, living within the old city walls or in fishing villages along the coast. The British had built up the docks and warehouse districts, constructed a military cantonment and laid out tree-lined streets for themselves to the south of the ‘native’ city, areas still known as Clifton and Defence. Partition led to an exodus of some of the city’s Hindus to India, and the arrival from that country of a much larger number of Muslims: around half a million Urdu-speaking Mohajirs (refugees), who abandoned property and possessions south of the new border to flee to what was now the capital of Pakistan. Initially the Mohajirs were settled in temporary shelters, in parks and on open state land. With the conservative modernization policies that began in the early 1950s, and intensified under the military regime of General Ayub Khan from 1958–68, new satellite townships were built around the city and heavy industry developed, with the aid of foreign loans. The different sectors of Karachi’s fast-growing working class had distinct ethnic bases: dock workers were drawn from the Makrani-Baluch labourers of old Karachi; Mohajirs predominated in heavy industry and multinational firms; villagers from the North-West Frontier, Hazara and southern Punjab were recruited by jobbers for the textile districts, where numerous small factories operated in intolerable conditions.
These upcountry migrants congregated with their fellow Sindhi, Seraiki, Pashtun, Swat, Hazara or Punjabi speakers, on vacant land close to the industrial areas. If their precarious status made them ready prey for particularist political manipulation, there were nevertheless tentative moves towards horizontal solidarity across ethnic lines in the late-60s labour protests in Karachi, which coalesced with the student agitation that overthrew Ayub in 1968. Militancy reached a peak in the years that followed.footnote1 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party campaigned on the slogan of roti, kapra aur makan—bread, clothing, shelter—and declared war on the ‘twenty-two families’ said to control Pakistan’s capitalist manufacturing (though not on the few dozen families that owned most of the country’s land). But once in office, after the 1971 break-up of Pakistan—the western wing’s leaders having refused to accept the eastern Awami League’s majority—Bhutto changed tack: while some workers were enrolled in pro-ppp unions and awarded benefits and wage rises, elsewhere strike-breaking and union-busting were the norm. Bhutto’s 1973 Constitution introduced a federal system with four provincial-level governments. Agitation broke out in Sindh Province—now run from the Governor’s mansion in Karachi by Mumtaz Bhutto, a cousin of the Prime Minister and one of the country’s large landowners—for the use of the Sindhi language in schools, alongside Urdu; counter-mobilizations were organized by Mohajirs. A quota system was introduced, with public-sector workers hired on a regional and ethnic basis, entrenching divisions and creating vertical, ethnically denominated links, in place of the fragile class solidarity that had emerged in the course of the 1968–72 labour militancy. Under the 1977–88 dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, Karachi’s Mohajirs were organized by the increasingly powerful Mohajir Qaumi Movement led by Altaf Hussain, the son of Urdu-speaking refugees from India, who had emerged in the 1980s as a Mohajir student leader, opposing quotas for Sindhis.
Karachi has become a microcosm of all the ethnic fault-lines running through town and country in Pakistan. The separate communities populate districts which they consider to be their own domain, fenced off from intrusion by outsiders. Each has its separate identity, a specific way of life bolstered by culture and language, a claim to a particular niche in the labour market and a specific, clientelist form of political representation. Migrants from the countryside of Sindh are mainly supporters of the ppp, led by Bhutto’s daughter Benazir after Bhutto himself was framed and hanged by Zia. Benazir, too, was killed—shot while campaigning for the 2008 election. Her husband Asif Ali Zardari is now in charge, having manoeuvred himself into the job of the country’s President on the basis of the grief for his assassinated wife. During the 1990s, both ppp and Muslim League governments in Islamabad—the new capital, built hundreds of miles to the north-east in the early 60s—made attempts to cut the gangsterized mqm down to size.footnote2 Altaf Hussain fled to London in 1992; convicted in absentia of killing mqm dissidents, he continued to run the organization from afar. With its substantial Mohajir vote bank, the mqm bloc in the National Assembly has regularly played the role of king-maker in ppp or ml-led governments. In Sindh it holds around a quarter of the seats in the Provincial Assembly, on a par with the ppp.
In Karachi, the mqm and ppp now rule the roost and, under the adage of winners take all, have been able to short-change all other contenders. Newcomers have to use force of arms to gain access to the closed political arena. An illustration of this is the huge police operation that took place in May 2012, aimed at wiping out gangsterism in Lyari, one of the older settlements, north-east of the old city. Lyari’s inhabitants, predominantly of Sindhi and Baloch stock, are packed into congested neighbourhoods lining the banks of the Lyari river, a maze of small streets and alleys. The population of the district is estimated at 1.7 million, though reliable figures are difficult to come by in Pakistan. Tiny two-room dwellings house husband, wife, children and a few close relatives. Domestic overcrowding is one reason why the men prefer to be outside in the street rather than stay at home; every neighbourhood has a market which is the central meeting point. Most households have to get by on around 10,000 rupees or $100 a month, with women and children contributing to the family budget through a wide variety of chores. It is an income of less than $1 per capita per day and keeps the breadwinners, together with their dependents, strangled in poverty. The supply of labour is much higher than the fluctuating demand for it. Youngsters, even with a couple of years of secondary schooling, find it next to impossible to qualify for a regular job. They hang around in the local market, waiting for somebody to hire their labour power.
In these conditions, a large-scale criminal economy has arisen. At the lowest level, those engaged in it operate on their own account as thief, snatcher, trickster, pickpocket, fence of stolen goods, porno artist, counterfeiter; or as an intermediary in all sorts of shady deals. There are conglomerates of smaller and larger gangs in every neighbourhood, specializing in gambling dens, vice rackets, trafficking in arms, drugs or hard drink. More profitable but also more risky than this illicit trade is extorting protection money from big stores and other enterprises, or renting out gang members as bodyguards to vips. The provision of security is required to keep extortion within bounds, an activity that may belong to the core business of the same gang. Kidnapping of well-to-do people for ransom also fits this pattern of robbing the have-mores. The youngsters recruited for this industry start their career as part-time members on the fringes of the gang and have to work their way up before being entrusted with the serious work. Once in, it is next to impossible to back out. The scale of the criminal economy allows the gang leaders to live in great style and their nicknames are spoken with awe. But they cannot move around freely because of the rivals surrounding their territory, and are constantly embroiled in fights to defend or expand their reach. Arms are abundantly available; in Karachi it is not only the police and paramilitary patrols who drive around in armoured cars with rifles and stenguns poking out. Wedding feasts, religious festivals and party rallies will be celebrated with wild firing into the air—not just high spirits but also a show of power, meant to impress on bystanders that these men are not to be taken lightly. After 1989 a number of jihadi mercenaries, recruited and armed by the us and Saudi Arabia against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, went into private business on their return to Pakistan. Since 2001 they have been doing well from the large-scale shipments of arms and other goods that arrive in Karachi, to be sent on overland to the nato–isaf forces in Afghanistan. On a conservative estimate, no less than a quarter of these provisions disappear into the underground economy; in Quetta, an open black market is known as Nato Bazaar. The leakage is a result of teamwork between mafia and police, a pilfering aided and abetted by the Navy and Customs who control the docklands. In the city, arms are part of daily life.
The police action on Lyari was carefully planned. The aim was to storm the headquarters from which the gangs operate, seize their weapons and take the leaders into custody—or eliminate them, if that was more feasible. On the first day of the raid the district was cordoned off: no fresh food supplies were allowed to reach the markets; water, electricity and gas were cut off, as well as internet and mobile phones. Loudspeakers instructed the inhabitants to remain indoors, or risk being dealt with as combatants. The people had to suffer the summer heat—temperatures of 40ºc or more—cooped up in their unventilated dwellings. An invasion force of 2,000 police and paramilitary troops moved in, on foot and in armoured vehicles. The enemy showed itself more than equal, attacking police posts and exchanging gunfire in the streets. The gangs had stocked up on heavy weaponry, including machine-guns, long-range sniper rifles, tear gas, grenades and even rocket launchers, which scored some hits on the armoured vehicles. The battle lasted for eight days and killed many dozens, though very few gangsters. Most of the wounded were bystanders, who remained deprived of medical care; the ambulance service was not allowed to ferry them to the city’s hospitals. More embarrassing for the city’s rulers than the failure of the police operation was that the people of Lyari sided with the gangs and turned openly against the state. In neighbourhoods where the fighting was fiercest, local inhabitants came out to demonstrate and shout slogans against the troops. Confronted with popular resistance, the police opened fire on the protesters, a response that fuelled the anger in the neighbourhoods against the agents of law and order.