The London arrest of one of Pakistan’s most controversial politicians should not come as a suprise. This is Altaf Hussain's story:
After playing a key role in Pakistani politics for three decades, Altaf Hussain has been completely sidelined.
MQM drove support from among Urdu-speaking people who had migrated to Pakistan from India at the time of partition in 1947. Many of them had come with little more than the clothes on their backs. A majority settled in Karachi, the capital of southern Sindh province. MQM has had a near-monopoly over Karachi’s politics, its streets and many of its institutions for three decades.
MQM drove support from the middle-class Mohajir community, the descendants of migrants who had come from India. Many doubt MQM will be able to keep its hold over the city’s politics without him calling the shots. “One, two, three … by the time he said three, I swear I have witnessed pin-drop silence in a crowd of tens of thousands,” Ahmed recalls.
The headstrong Pashtuns dominated the transport business. Competition among bus drivers often led to reckless races to pick up the maximum number of passengers. Mohajirs were urban and educated and they were at the forefront of the independence movement during the British colonial rule of India, says Siddiqi.
Around the same time Sindhi was introduced as a second language in schools in Karachi, sparking riots. Similarly, other issues such as the dilapidated condition of buses or water scarcity concerned everyone in the city and not just Mohajir-majority areas, says Siddiqi, himself an Urdu speaker. Born in September 1953, to migrants from India, Altaf Hussain grew up in a three-bedroom house in Azizabad, where neighbours intimately knew each other and people often slept on wicker beds in narrow alleys to beat the heat.
He was taunted for belonging to a community that drinks a lot of tea against the more healthy yogurt-based drink popular among Punjabis, who dominate the army. After MQM’s arrival on the political scene, Karachi saw strikes and clashes between its activists and the police. In 1987, while speaking at a rally in Liaquatabad, the area where Baig’s grandmother was injured, Hussain made perhaps his most infamous statement, “Mohajirs will have no good use for their VCRs, color televisions and other luxuries, because these things cannot defend us. They will have to arrange for their own security.”
In 1995, more than 1,700 people were killed in Karachi in drive-by shootings or after they were abducted. In December of that year, MQM militants killed the younger brother of Sindh’s Chief Minister Syed Abdullah Shah. A few days later, police arrested Hussain’s elder brother and his nephew. Their lifeless bodies were found along a road a few days later.
In poor Urdu-speaking neighbourhoods, where people lacked access to government officers to help them in their everyday struggles such as getting a water connection, MQM activists moved in to fill the gap. MQM’s fortunes shifted after it joined the government of retired general Pervez Musharraf, who took over after a coup in 1999.
That’s also the time MQM activists began encroaching on state and private land such as parks and community halls. Farooq was MQM’s senior leader and had been a founding member of MQM along with Hussain. They had been together since their university days, when they formed a study union that morphed into the political party.
“The implication of the investigation was that Altaf Hussain was no longer untouchable," Sharif says, adding that Hussain feared arrest since "that protection of being able to do anything from far away was taken away. He was under a constant fear that his house and offices could be raided.” The elections in 2013 turned out to be a watershed moment for MQM as it lost tens of thousands of voters in Karachi to former cricket star Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party.
“That’s when some of the leaders, including Mustafa Kamal, decided to abandon Altaf Hussain,” says a senior journalist.
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