The deputy convener of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, Farooq Sattar, knows the art of driving home his point with the steady poise of a seasoned law professor.
He is never loud as he knows how to leverage the sheer power of words to convey his message with all the politesse a Mohajir culture can conjure. His mastery over high-brow Urdu matches the MQM’s proverbial, albeit erstwhile, grip over Karachi. And so it was with this linguistic precision that Sattar declared on Tuesday that MQM Pakistan (which happens to be registered in his name), has decided to cut ties with its founder and supreme leader, Altaf Hussain.
This pronouncement has received varied interpretations in the media, but for the average MQM worker, Sattar’s audacity to utter such words signalled a departure from his 37 years of unquestioning loyalty to Altaf Bhai. Back in the MQM’s heyday, this very thought would have been tantamount to blasphemy, and would have been met with the ultimate possible sentence. It is a measure of the zeitgeist that the flurry of events have rendered Sattar’s declaration somewhat palatable even to the party’s die-hard workers.
The drama unfolded on Monday with Altaf Hussain launching forth into a vitriolic speech to party workers at a hunger strike camp, provoking them to attack the offices of television channels. Violence ensued, Sattar and other prominent party leaders were hauled off by the Rangers and Altaf Hussain was forced to make an apology. The army chief ordered a crackdown and the British police issued a statement saying they were also examining his speech for incitement.
What caused Altaf Hussain’s outburst? First of all, the fury was not sudden. Ever since Altaf Hussain was banned from appearing in the media in August last year, his regular speeches to party workers at MQM headquarters Nine Zero had sounded the same. The last one and a half years have been difficult ones. The party has been under immense pressure not just because of the cases against Altaf Hussain or the killings of its workers, but also because of the accusations it has accepted funds from India’s R&AW.
The party also felt as if it has been left out in the cold. Indeed, the MQM’s relationship with the Center has floundered. Since the 2013 general elections, the party has been struggling to be heard. When Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz took power, Karachi’s law and order conditions hit rock bottom with homicides, kidnappings for ransom, extortion and terrorism paralysing the city. The business community convinced the prime minister to clean it up. Party insiders often cite ISI chief Lt Gen. Rizwan Akhtar as the architect of the operation because prior to becoming the chief of the intelligence agency, he served as DG Rangers Sindh for three years. “He is one of those rare ISI chiefs who handled Karachi on a day-to-day basis for such a long time,” said a mid-level MQM worker.
With a nod from the Center, the Rangers, police and intelligence agencies began an operation that continues to this day, with publicly acknowledged results. But in the process the MQM was forced to contend with a slew of leaked interrogation reports and confessional videos that put it on the backfoot. Take for instance, the video statement of death-sentence convict Saulat Mirza in which he accused the MQM’s leader of instigating Mohajir youth to take up arms against the state. For the first time, the media, emboldened by a trend started by the PPP’s Zulfiqar Mirza and solidified by ex-MQM Mustafa Kamal, began to openly criticise the party.
This was certainly new, for the MQM is not used to taking criticism. The party’s pyramid vests all power in one man and he was above reproach. Of course, this disconnect is partly the outcome of geographical distance. The leadership on the ground was taking stock of the situation but those sitting in London were “divorced from ground realities in Pakistan,” according to Nasir Jamal, a senior leader and former deputy convener. It has taken the Pakistan-based leadership of the MQM more than three years to admit in public what it felt was wrong with its leader.
One can forgive the men sitting in London for not understanding how the party’s turf has changed in Karachi. After all, the results of the much-delayed December 2015 local government elections persuadeded that when it came to the numbers, the votebank was intact. They worried the MQM’s political space had been shrinking in Karachi since the operation started in 2013. Despite allegations of treason, including its association with Indian intelligence agency RA&W and militant activities such as target killings and extortion, the MQM won by a landslide. Out of 308 councils, 151 are needed for a simple majority. The MQM bagged 214. Ask any MQM worker and they will boast: “Yaar, Rangers wale polling booth ke ander the, ab konsi dandhli huyi hai?”(Oh please, the Rangers wallahs were inside the polling booth, now what rigging can you talk about?)
But it had been more than six months since the party won the polls and it had begun to think that the powers that be in Sindh were delaying the formation of the councils. In fact, the man the party chose to be mayor, Waseem Akhtar, has been in custody for more than a month. On Wednesday, he was brought in an armored vehicle to the old KMC Building to cast his vote. His lawyer Mahfooz Yaar Khan said that when elected, Waseem would work from prison via “video-link.” “Until then, he will run his office from jail, making a world record.”
The electoral success is tempered by a mayor in jail. The party is also frustrated that while it does not have the numbers to form a provincial government. Such helplessness, especially when the PPP-led Sindh government is reluctant to devolve power to allow the MQM to run its constituencies, makes it even more difficult for the party to stay its political course. All this helplessness prompted the party to take the hunger strike route, which it embarked on on August 17.
But then the hunger strike was not getting the attention the party felt it deserved. It had been more than five days and the federal government had not responded. The temperature at the camp was rising. The new chief minister had just met MQM leaders on Monday morning but things were not moving at the pace it wanted.
And then an interesting development took place, inspiring hope and confidence in Altaf Hussain. Several mid-level activists, and at least one senior leader of Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP) had approached the MQM with unreserved apologies. They were eager to re-join, as the Mustafa Kamal-led faction, which announced its split on March 23, 2016 in a massively covered press conference, was not making the progress they wanted. Since the arrest of the PSP’s Anis Kaimkhani, himself also ex-MQM, the campaign to win over ground-level MQM workers hit a snag. For all practical purposes, Altaf must have felt that the most damaging ploy against his party–since, perhaps, the creation of MQM-Haqiqi–had failed. This time his MQM has prevailed.
But perhaps he miscalculated. Monday’s speech was met with swift reaction from the Rangers. The next day Farooq Sattar, who had been detained, declared that from now on all of MQM’s decisions would be taken from Karachi.
For whatever it is worth, this was perhaps the only avenue open to the party. It certainly will be out of sync with the established culture within the party, which took root over the years after Altaf Hussain left for London. The members of Rabita Committee in Karachi are often scorned by regular workers, as many have visibly become affluent since acquiring the coveted positions. For the die-hard workers, Rabita members are mostly opportunists, who thrived on crumbs thrown at them by Altaf Hussain. One of the timeless accusations against the committee is the idea that they have turned a tehrik (ideological movement) into a political party, which the MQM was never meant to be.
In one of the memorable meetings, on May 20, 2013, at Nine Zero, Altaf Hussain told workers to beat up the top brass of the Karachi leadership and they happily complied. This makes it hard to believe that party workers will accept Farooq Sattar as the party head or the Rabita Committee in Pakistan to control the whole party. Even if Karachi’s Coordination Committee sincerely pursues this objective of sidelining Altaf Hussain, it is a practical impossibility. Either the London leadership is on board with Sattar’s pronouncement on Tuesday or there truly is a split in the party. And that could very well signal the end of the MQM as we know it.
Ammar Shahbazi is based in Karachi and tweets at @ammarshahbazi
Update: An earlier version of this story mentioned that Waseem Akhtar was not allowed to speak to the media when brought to the KMC Building. Akhtar later did speak to the media after we went to press. This version of the story updates to correct that.
He is never loud as he knows how to leverage the sheer power of words to convey his message with all the politesse a Mohajir culture can conjure. His mastery over high-brow Urdu matches the MQM’s proverbial, albeit erstwhile, grip over Karachi. And so it was with this linguistic precision that Sattar declared on Tuesday that MQM Pakistan (which happens to be registered in his name), has decided to cut ties with its founder and supreme leader, Altaf Hussain.
This pronouncement has received varied interpretations in the media, but for the average MQM worker, Sattar’s audacity to utter such words signalled a departure from his 37 years of unquestioning loyalty to Altaf Bhai. Back in the MQM’s heyday, this very thought would have been tantamount to blasphemy, and would have been met with the ultimate possible sentence. It is a measure of the zeitgeist that the flurry of events have rendered Sattar’s declaration somewhat palatable even to the party’s die-hard workers.
The drama unfolded on Monday with Altaf Hussain launching forth into a vitriolic speech to party workers at a hunger strike camp, provoking them to attack the offices of television channels. Violence ensued, Sattar and other prominent party leaders were hauled off by the Rangers and Altaf Hussain was forced to make an apology. The army chief ordered a crackdown and the British police issued a statement saying they were also examining his speech for incitement.
What caused Altaf Hussain’s outburst? First of all, the fury was not sudden. Ever since Altaf Hussain was banned from appearing in the media in August last year, his regular speeches to party workers at MQM headquarters Nine Zero had sounded the same. The last one and a half years have been difficult ones. The party has been under immense pressure not just because of the cases against Altaf Hussain or the killings of its workers, but also because of the accusations it has accepted funds from India’s R&AW.
The party also felt as if it has been left out in the cold. Indeed, the MQM’s relationship with the Center has floundered. Since the 2013 general elections, the party has been struggling to be heard. When Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz took power, Karachi’s law and order conditions hit rock bottom with homicides, kidnappings for ransom, extortion and terrorism paralysing the city. The business community convinced the prime minister to clean it up. Party insiders often cite ISI chief Lt Gen. Rizwan Akhtar as the architect of the operation because prior to becoming the chief of the intelligence agency, he served as DG Rangers Sindh for three years. “He is one of those rare ISI chiefs who handled Karachi on a day-to-day basis for such a long time,” said a mid-level MQM worker.
With a nod from the Center, the Rangers, police and intelligence agencies began an operation that continues to this day, with publicly acknowledged results. But in the process the MQM was forced to contend with a slew of leaked interrogation reports and confessional videos that put it on the backfoot. Take for instance, the video statement of death-sentence convict Saulat Mirza in which he accused the MQM’s leader of instigating Mohajir youth to take up arms against the state. For the first time, the media, emboldened by a trend started by the PPP’s Zulfiqar Mirza and solidified by ex-MQM Mustafa Kamal, began to openly criticise the party.
This was certainly new, for the MQM is not used to taking criticism. The party’s pyramid vests all power in one man and he was above reproach. Of course, this disconnect is partly the outcome of geographical distance. The leadership on the ground was taking stock of the situation but those sitting in London were “divorced from ground realities in Pakistan,” according to Nasir Jamal, a senior leader and former deputy convener. It has taken the Pakistan-based leadership of the MQM more than three years to admit in public what it felt was wrong with its leader.
One can forgive the men sitting in London for not understanding how the party’s turf has changed in Karachi. After all, the results of the much-delayed December 2015 local government elections persuadeded that when it came to the numbers, the votebank was intact. They worried the MQM’s political space had been shrinking in Karachi since the operation started in 2013. Despite allegations of treason, including its association with Indian intelligence agency RA&W and militant activities such as target killings and extortion, the MQM won by a landslide. Out of 308 councils, 151 are needed for a simple majority. The MQM bagged 214. Ask any MQM worker and they will boast: “Yaar, Rangers wale polling booth ke ander the, ab konsi dandhli huyi hai?”(Oh please, the Rangers wallahs were inside the polling booth, now what rigging can you talk about?)
But it had been more than six months since the party won the polls and it had begun to think that the powers that be in Sindh were delaying the formation of the councils. In fact, the man the party chose to be mayor, Waseem Akhtar, has been in custody for more than a month. On Wednesday, he was brought in an armored vehicle to the old KMC Building to cast his vote. His lawyer Mahfooz Yaar Khan said that when elected, Waseem would work from prison via “video-link.” “Until then, he will run his office from jail, making a world record.”
The electoral success is tempered by a mayor in jail. The party is also frustrated that while it does not have the numbers to form a provincial government. Such helplessness, especially when the PPP-led Sindh government is reluctant to devolve power to allow the MQM to run its constituencies, makes it even more difficult for the party to stay its political course. All this helplessness prompted the party to take the hunger strike route, which it embarked on on August 17.
But then the hunger strike was not getting the attention the party felt it deserved. It had been more than five days and the federal government had not responded. The temperature at the camp was rising. The new chief minister had just met MQM leaders on Monday morning but things were not moving at the pace it wanted.
And then an interesting development took place, inspiring hope and confidence in Altaf Hussain. Several mid-level activists, and at least one senior leader of Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP) had approached the MQM with unreserved apologies. They were eager to re-join, as the Mustafa Kamal-led faction, which announced its split on March 23, 2016 in a massively covered press conference, was not making the progress they wanted. Since the arrest of the PSP’s Anis Kaimkhani, himself also ex-MQM, the campaign to win over ground-level MQM workers hit a snag. For all practical purposes, Altaf must have felt that the most damaging ploy against his party–since, perhaps, the creation of MQM-Haqiqi–had failed. This time his MQM has prevailed.
But perhaps he miscalculated. Monday’s speech was met with swift reaction from the Rangers. The next day Farooq Sattar, who had been detained, declared that from now on all of MQM’s decisions would be taken from Karachi.
For whatever it is worth, this was perhaps the only avenue open to the party. It certainly will be out of sync with the established culture within the party, which took root over the years after Altaf Hussain left for London. The members of Rabita Committee in Karachi are often scorned by regular workers, as many have visibly become affluent since acquiring the coveted positions. For the die-hard workers, Rabita members are mostly opportunists, who thrived on crumbs thrown at them by Altaf Hussain. One of the timeless accusations against the committee is the idea that they have turned a tehrik (ideological movement) into a political party, which the MQM was never meant to be.
In one of the memorable meetings, on May 20, 2013, at Nine Zero, Altaf Hussain told workers to beat up the top brass of the Karachi leadership and they happily complied. This makes it hard to believe that party workers will accept Farooq Sattar as the party head or the Rabita Committee in Pakistan to control the whole party. Even if Karachi’s Coordination Committee sincerely pursues this objective of sidelining Altaf Hussain, it is a practical impossibility. Either the London leadership is on board with Sattar’s pronouncement on Tuesday or there truly is a split in the party. And that could very well signal the end of the MQM as we know it.
Ammar Shahbazi is based in Karachi and tweets at @ammarshahbazi
Update: An earlier version of this story mentioned that Waseem Akhtar was not allowed to speak to the media when brought to the KMC Building. Akhtar later did speak to the media after we went to press. This version of the story updates to correct that.