ALAIWAH!

By JONATHAN FORD

LONDON, 13 July 1995 (The Independent) – A terrorist and
mass-murderer is at large in the north London suburb of Mill Hill,
according to Pakistan’s PM, Benazir Bhutto. She refers to him publicly as a “cowardly rat”, and her government has asked Interpol to issue warrants for his arrest and return to Pakistan, where he faces more than 100 criminal charges, ranging from arson to murder and torture.

But Altaf Hussain, the leader of MQM, is unlikely to be going anywhere in the near future. Since 1992, when he fled Pakistan, he has directed the day-to-day decision-making of his party from London, secure in the knowledge that as there is no extradition
treaty between Britain and Pakistan, he is unlikely to be deported to
face his critics back home. He was not deported from UK to Pakistan
and the UK citizenship wasgranted to him.

Most commentators say that the MQM, the party he founded 11 years ago to champion the interests of Pakistan’s Mohajirs – Urdu-speaking migrants from India – has brought parts of southern Pakistan close to civil war, threatening the disintegration of the Muslim homeland carved so bloodily out of British-India in 1947.

Hussain set up the MQM to protest against the discrimination suffered by the 20 million Mohajirs who represent 50 percent of the population of the southern province of Sind. The party demanded better housing, more access to education and greater representation in local and federal government. Many MQM activists say it still stands for these things, but what started out as a civil rights campaign has turned into a bloody tribal war between Mohajirs and the largely Sindhi government security forces.

In Karachi, the main battlefield, more than 1,000 people have died so far in 1995 – more than 400 of them in the past six weeks of intense fighting. The MQM is now talking about a separate province for Karachi, and some say that Hussain favours a separate state for the Mohajirs. Alluding to the traumatic dismemberment of the country in 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh from the then East Pakistan, he recently warned Ms. Bhutto: “Don’t push the Mohajirs to the wall. Or 1971 will be repeated.”

This is not an idle threat. For despite years of futile fighting (the
violence in Karachi has been going on, sporadically, since 1988) and
all the accusations of torture, murder and racketeering levelled
against him, Hussain remains fanatically popular among Pakistan’s
Mohajirs. “His hold over these people is extraordinary,” says one
journalist. “If he ordered them to jump off a cliff, they would
probably do it.”

A quiet street of Thirties semi-detached houses seems an unlikely
location for the headquarters of a protagonist in this high-stakes
poker game, but this is where Hussain lives. Hussain’s home is
slightly tattier than his neighbours’, with peeling window frames and
black plastic sheeting over the ground-floor windows. According to one of the volunteers who helps to run the office, this is not a security
measure, but has been done to allow the drawing room to be used as a makeshift film studio. “So many people are coming to film Mr. Altaf
Hussain at the moment”, he sighs happily.

Inside the house there is strong evidence of a personality cult.
Posters showing Hussain’s grinning face abound and party workers talk about him in hushed tones. “To us, Mr. Altaf Hussain is like the new Gandhi,” whispered one, as I waited for my audience with the leader.

Altaf Hussain is in fact a plump, bespectacled man, neatly dressed in
a blue blazer and flannel trousers. When I ask if he models himself on
the great independence leader, he laughs: “I don’t really have a model
of anyone in mind. But I share his belief in non-violence. I think
that as we approach the 21st century, it should be possible for people
to achieve rights peacefully.” He pauses, removes his spectacles, and
fixes me with a portentous look: “When my people come to me and say, ‘Altaf bhai, shall we take up weapons?’ I always say that
non-violence is the best weapon.”

Hussain was born in Karachi in 1953, the son of an Indian-Muslim who had been the station master in Agra under the Raj, and who fled to Pakistan at the time of partition. He grew up in a comfortable middle-class household, something he now downplays, preferring to describe himself as Pakistan’s first lower-middle-class politician. It is part of his political appeal that he is not a member of the aristocratic
feudal elite that dominates Pakistani politics. “What is this fascist
Benazir Bhutto who claims to speak for the Pakistani people?” he asks
rhetorically at one point. “She is a feudal landlord who treats the
peasants on her family estate like slaves, and yet she claims to be a
modern democrat. Only I speak for the downtrodden masses of Pakistan.”

According to Hussain, it was in the Seventies that he became aware of
the grievances of the Mohajir people, or nation, as he calls them. It
was under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government between 1971 and 1977 that these became open and acrimonious. Bhutto’s PPP government depended on its power base in Sind province, where the native Sindhis had long resented the presence of Mohajirs, who, being well educated and industrious, had come to dominate the economic
life of Sind’s two main cities, Karachi and Hyderabad. Hussain says
Bhutto, a Sindhi himself, blatantly discriminated against Mohajirs.
Urdu was banned as an official language and quotas were imposed
restricting Mohajirs’ access to education and government jobs.

Hussain became a victim of this discrimination when he was denied
entry to Karachi University to read pharmacy, despite having the
necessary qualifications. “When I found other Mohajirs who had been
refused places, I asked them: ‘Are you ready to struggle for your
rights?’” This led to the creation in 1978 of the All-Pakistan Mohajir
Students’ Organisation [APMSO], forerunner of the MQM. By all
accounts, the APMSO attracted little support from Mohajir students and was banned in 1981 after violent clashes with other student
organisations. Hussain went away to lick his wounds and rebuild his
political movement. Out of this emerged the MQM in 1984.

If the APMSO was a failure, the MQM has been, electorally at least, a
spectacular success. Ever since it first contested local elections in
1987 on Hussain’s 18-point programme to redress Mohajir grievances, it has dominated politics in Hyderabad and Karachi, where Hussain is the acknowledged “uncrowned king.”

MQM rule in Karachi has been something of a mixed blessing, however. While it ended some of the more blatant examples of discrimination against Mohajirs, such as the restrictive quotas in education and government employment, one businessman – a Mohajir – says: “The years of MQM rule from 1987-1992 did this city no favours. You can’t say Karachi was well governed: public services continued to decay. There was a massive increase in violence, with the ruling party engaging in street gun battles with its political opponents.”

Since 1992, when the army moved in to quell the street violence,
Karachi has been directly ruled from Islamabad. The restoration of
locally elected municipal government is one of the party’s main
demands.

Hussain rolls his eyes when I mention alleged MQM violence and
extortion and gives what is obviously a standard rebuttal: “This talk
of violence is all government propaganda. I give you my guarantee that no violent act has ever been carried out by MQM people under my orders.” As to extortion: “It is not the policy of the MQM.”

One of the striking things about Hussain is his intemperate language,
which sits ill with his claims to be a moderate political leader.
Although he claims to preach restraint, he harps with lurid relish on
the atrocities committed against the Mohajirs. But he sees no link
between his fiery oratory and the violence. When I ask if he doesn’t
feel he should tone down his apocalyptic talk given the combustible
atmosphere in Karachi, he shrugs: “If there is war, it will be the
government’s responsibility.”

That the government bears some responsibility for the current crisis
is not in doubt. Since Benazir Bhutto returned to power in 1993, the
historic enmity between the PPP and the Mohajirs has given it a
sharper edge, and the security forces have murdered, tortured and
intimidated at least as much as their Mohajir opponents. During this
period Ms. Bhutto has ostentatiously refused to have any contact with the MQM on the grounds that it is a “terrorist party”.

Now, in a sudden volte face, the government is offering negotiations,
scheduled to take place in the capital, Islamabad. One might expect
this to be the occasion for celebration in the MQM camp, but in Mill
Hill, Hussain remains as obdurate in his hostility to Ms. Bhutto as
ever. “We are not going to Islamabad to negotiate”, he says. “Only if
the government will concede our demands, which are reasonable and
within the constitution, is there a way forward.”

There has been a long-running debate in Pakistan about whether Altaf
Hussain represents the coming of age of truly democratic Pakistani
politics, in which the feudal elite has no place, or whether he is a
throwback to the old-style unprincipled and demagogic South Asian
leader, a sort of Nehru de nos jours. I left Mill Hill inclining
towards the latter interpretation, and with the feeling that his self-
imposed exile in London has hardened Hussain’s naturally authoritarian temperament. He enjoys playing the distant god, issuing instructions by telephone and fax to his acolytes. Given his largely unprintable views about Benazir Bhutto, he seems
likely to remain the uncrowned king of Karachi for some time to come.