Life amid violence

Laurent Gayer’s well-researched book on Karachi shows the locals as  trying to live on with the ever-present threats of ethnic, political & criminal violence, writes Sudha Ramachandran.

Karachi’s demographic composition has undergone dramatic changes over the past 70 years. From a predominantly Sindhi-speaking city, it has became a largely Urdu-speaking one, with Mohajirs from India pouring in at the time of Partition.

Since the 1980s, waves of Pashtuns fleeing the Afghan war or the military operations in Pakistan’s border areas have made Karachi their home. The changing demography has led to bloody contests for control over the city.

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City by Laurent Gayer explores the violence in Karachi through the lens of the city’s changing ethnicity, its politics, crime and sectarian battles. Especially since the mid-1990s, so routine are targeted killings, massacres of civilians and torture and mutilation that Karachiites do not consider violence as anything extraordinary any longer. They are tired of the violence but cannot imagine a future without it.

Fear has become a way of life for Karachiites. They often claim they have learned to cope with chronic violence and have become immune to it, but Gayer is not convinced. “They have simply adjusted their everyday life, as best as they could, to the virtual or actual threat of political, ethnic and criminal violence,” he observes. They draw on their experiences of past violent incidents to interpret and navigate through their city, but this has become less useful given the growing unpredictability of ethnic, criminal and other violence.

Despite the chronic violence, Karachi is Pakistan’s main commercial hub, its ‘jewel in the crown’. It accounts for 25 per cent of Pakistan’s GDP and handles 95 per cent of its international trade. This indicates that Karachi’s chronic disorder has “attained some degree of sustainability”, the author says.

Disagreeing with media descriptions of Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is “order of a kind”. Whether this state of ‘ordered disorder’ will remain sustainable in the long term is unclear “but for now Karachi works despite and sometimes through violence” (emphasis in original).

The ability of the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), Karachi’s predominant political party, to order disorder — both in terms of directing violence and controlling it — has played a “decisive” role in sustaining violent conflict in Karachi and also containing it “within certain bounds, at least until recently”, Gayer says.

While most analysts trace the MQM’s origin to the political and economic marginalisation of Mohajirs from the 1970s onwards, the author argues that its roots lie in the agitational politics of the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organisation (APMSO). The APMSO’s street-fighting strategy left a deep impact on the MQM and contributed to shaping its approach to politics as “a state of permanent warfare”. By the end of the 1980s, the MQM’s weapons procurement and its setting up of an elite corps of well-trained fighters made it a “force to reckon with”.

Gayer draws parallels between the MQM and the Shiv Sena and attributes their rise to their capacity to work within state institutions and outside. An armed group that used violence against the state and society freely, the MQM settled down to govern once it acquired political power. It is this “ability to fuse militancy and governance, disruption and political convention” that sets the MQM apart from other contenders for power in Karachi, the author says.

Its dominance has come under challenge in recent decades from Balochi groups and radical Islamist groups such as the Pakistan Taliban that have taken root in Karachi’s Pashtun neighbourhoods. Besides, power configurations in Karachi have changed. In the past, it was political parties that called the shots. In recent years, however, the power differential between the parties and different violent entrepreneurs such as criminal  gangs and jihad outfits has decreased. The latter no longer depend on political parties who are increasingly constrained by the actions of the criminal gangs. This has weakened parties like the MQM.

The MQM’s adversaries have argued that its relative weakening is likely to bring durable peace to Karachi. Gayer disagrees and points out that the MQM’s rise brought “some order” to the city. Its marginalisation “will probably bring greater instability and uncertainty as well as a continuous rise in the level of violence”, he says.

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City is a thoroughly researched book. The author has clearly spent many months in the city and drawn on a variety of sources. The book is sprinkled with quotes from various Urdu texts and conversations he had with Karachi’s residents, making this book an enjoyable and useful read.