Daily Times Editorial Jan 5, 2014

Altaf’s mischief again MQM chief Altaf Hussain is in the habit of staging ‘dramas’ and provocations at the drop of a hat if he or his party’s wishes are not conceded by all and sundry. Of late, the MQM supremo is suffering from a great deal of heartburn over the overturning of the gerrymandered delimitations in Sindh that helped the MQM dominate the province during Musharraf’s tenure. No wonder Altaf has felt compelled to rise to Musharraf’s defence in his treason trial, accusing the powers that be of persecuting him and him alone because he is a Mohajir (Urdu-speaking immigrant when Pakistan came into being). The PPP Sindh government carried out fresh delimitations for the purpose of holding local bodies elections, which did not sit well with MQM for the reason stated above. Although the local bodies act and delimitations have been struck down by the Sindh High Court, the provincial government has announced its intention to go in appeal against the decision to the Supreme Court. Altaf’s latest pronouncement of his followers ‘announcing’ a separate province carved out of Sindh or even a separate country must be seen as the latest provocation in this context. The tone and tenor of Altaf’s remarks amount to a thinly veiled threat to the province and indeed to the country. Such ‘threats’ from Altaf are neither new nor unexpected. Again, as expected, they have aroused a firestorm of protest from Sindhis, the PPP, nationalists and even the PTI. Maulana Fazlur Rehman in a press conference in Peshawar on Saturday underlined what he said was the real agenda of the MQM as reflected in Altaf’s latest diatribe. As seems to have become the pattern after Altaf Hussain’s pronouncements from the safety of London, it is left to the local MQM leadership, i.e. Dr Farooq Sattar, to ‘explain’ what the supremo ‘actually’ meant. Damage limitation may be the MQM’s need after every such speech of Altaf Hussain, but the damage has been done once again and cannot be denied. Awami Tehreek’s Ayaz Latif Palijo demanded an apology from Altaf Hussain otherwise the nationalist party will call for a shutter down strike and come out in the streets of Sindh on Monday, January 6. Since Pakistan came into being and a flood of refugees, mostly Urdu-speaking, arrived on our soil, the demographic balance of Sindh was highly disturbed since the vast majority of the refugees filtered down to Karachi, then the federal capital, and secondarily into the cities of Sindh. The province had lost most of its middle class, many of whom were Hindus, to India at partition. That vacuum was filled by the educated Urdu-speaking immigrants, creating a ‘privilegentsia’. When that status was challenged by the PPP in the 1970s, the loss of privilege gave birth to a militant MQM, with some help from Ziaul Haq. By now, the MQM claims exclusive sway over urban Sindh, going so far as to claim they are in a majority in the province but prepared to settle for a 50-50 share in everything in the province. Settler colonialism is a well established phenomenon in many parts of the third world, but Sindh’s demographic and political change is a unique case of the immigrants being initially welcomed but later resented on the basis of the inequality of opportunities that soon followed. The current Sindhi-Mohajir divide owes a great deal to the exclusivist politics of the MQM, disrupting in the process the friendly relations between the two communities in earlier days. PPP Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah asked a very pertinent question when he wanted to know what had happened to the MQM’s claims of being ‘sons of the soil’ of Sindh now that they were no longer in government. Unfortunately, stripped of its niceties, the MQM’s politics revolves around intimidation, threats, even violence if its whims and wishes to dominate urban Sindh and thereby the levers of power in the province are not met without demur. Had Altaf Hussain been on Pakistani soil, there would have been a case for trying him for a statement that could at the very least stoke the fires of ethnic conflict in the province and at worst amounts to a violation of the constitution by advocating separation.