Aboard the Democracy Train (9 page)

Quite tellingly, the killings had happened shortly before the two ethnic groups in Sindh – the Sindhis and Mohajirs – were scheduled to vote and make a choice between the MQM, led by its Mohajir chief, Altaf Hussain and the PPP, led by its Sindh-born leader, Benazir Bhutto.

The Islamic Democratic Alliance or IJI, which Pakistan’s generals subsequently admitted was created to stop Bhutto’s election, had not yet been formed. Instead, Gen. Zia’s sudden plane crash appeared to have pushed the intelligence agencies into a hurried plan of action that would foment lines of blood between Sindhis and Mohajirs and give the aspiring woman prime minister a split mandate in Sindh.

The September 30 massacre – or Black September, as it is called – had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy. It was dusk when the masked militants alighted from their vehicles in Hyderabad market place. They had prepared for the operation by shutting off the electricity throughout the market, so that it was dark when they were ready to shoot.

Then, as swarms of people – mainly Mohajirs – jostled unseeingly in the crowded bazaar, the shots rang out at random. Even as people writhed under the bullets, the terrorists kept firing. Apparently satisfied with the large-scale devastation they had caused, they calmly clambered back into their vehicles and melted back into the population.

As news of the terrorist killings came in from Hyderabad, I felt a premonition of the inevitable response that would come from Karachi. Personally, I wasn’t worried that the Urdu-speaking militants would retaliate against my family and relatives – among the relatively few Sindhi families left behind in Karachi after partition. But I knew that for other less privileged Sindhis, revenge was coming.

It was brutal and swift. The next day, I woke up to a Karachi where armed assailants had throughout the night ferreted and killed Sindhis in their homes and work places. At the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center (JPMC) in Karachi, corpses covered with white sheets lay on stretchers pasted to the floor. Harassed young resident doctors in white coats wheeled victims of gunshot wounds to operation rooms, even as life-saving equipment and blood fell into desperately short supply.

With some trepidation, I asked about the ethnicity of the dead and wounded. They were Sindhis from the low-income suburbs of Karachi. Among the victims sprayed with bullets were Sindhi Hindus who ran a confectionary store in the fashionable Tariq Road shopping area. They were targeted not on account of religion but ethnicity. As masked armed men burst into their store, the Hindu Sindhis tried to duck behind the counters. But seconds later, they lay helpless in pools of their own blood.

Later, I heard stories of how innocent Sindhis had been hunted down by their Urdu-speaking neighbors in homes marked the night before for revenge. Many more were gagged, bound and killed before being stuffed in gunnysacks. Despite the terrifying nature of the incident, they would get only one paragraph in the long list I compiled from the hospitals. There was no space for the human-interest stories; instead I was engaged in a sordid compilation of the dead.

The killings of so many innocent Sindhis touched a raw nerve. My family was Sindhi and my parents – as well as grandparents – had, for generations, lived peacefully in Karachi, alongside Sindhi Hindus. But in 1947, when the British divided India to create Pakistan, our Hindu Sindhi neighbors left Karachi in droves.

Indeed, as the flood of refugees arrived from India, they headed to the cities and towns of Sindh to occupy the evacuated property and jobs left by the fleeing Hindu Sindhis. Although educated Sindhis from small towns of the province would over time migrate to Karachi and Hyderabad, the millions of Muslim migrants from India who poured into these cities outnumbered them.

Still, since childhood my parents had taken every possible measure to help us assimilate in a Karachi where the Mohajirs became the dominant population. We were not even encouraged to speak our native Sindhi language and instead spoke Urdu – the language brought by the refugees from India. It helped me to camouflage my ethnicity.

On September 1, 1988, as I sped from hospital to hospital interviewing families of gunshot victims, no one could figure out whether I was a Sindhi or Mohajir. I was further removed from the fray from having been educated in the schools set up by the British in Karachi. That explained me, a young woman scribbling away in English, even as I interviewed the gunshot victims in Urdu.

On that evening of 1988, as I drove back to report the massacres, I was driven by an urge to let people know what was really going on. Departing from the newspaper’s rules against naming the ethnicity of victims, I let readers read between the lines that the massacre had mainly killed Sindhis. It was a bit of a wire act to do so in my conservative newspaper, but I wanted people to know the reality.

My city editor, Akhtar Payami – himself a Mohajir and usually sensitive to my news approach – asked me how I, as a Sindhi, felt about the attacks. I told him that personally, I was not worried that MQM militants would target us. We belonged to a privileged family and were integrated with other ethnic communities. Still, I saw the sense of insecurity among newspaper colleagues who were Sindhis and Balochis – who identify with Sindhis; after the attack, they had gathered in our Reporters Room with a new sense of camaraderie.

My senior Sindhi colleague, the late Ghulam Ali, no longer cracked his usual jokes. A crime reporter, he had taken to jesting
that the way to scandalize a rickshaw driver was to ask to be taken to Liaquatabad – the very inferno of Mohajir riots. He always had a collection of jokes at the ready to keep me laughing when times were bad. But that night, as I saw the drawn out faces of my senior colleagues, I wondered what the future would hold for us.

It was no coincidence that ethnic violence first broke out with the creation of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in 1985, shortly after Gen. Zia had held non-partisan elections as part of his plan to usher in controlled democracy.

That year, the Mohajirs, led by a former Karachi university student, Altaf Hussain contested as an independent party and won a landslide victory. Encouraged by Gen. Zia ul Haq to organize on non-political grounds, the refugees from India mobilized in Karachi on the basis of their separate ethnic identity and registered as a political party.

In April 1985, I was tipped off by our crime reporter that gunshot victims had begun to pile up at a hospital in the north of Karachi. Word was that a speeding Pashtun mini-van driver had killed a Mohajir college girl, Bushra Zaidi. The accident itself was not news. Indeed, not a day went by when the newspapers did not report traffic deaths. Terrified of the speeding vehicles, young women often held hands as they ran across this particular intersection. But that day, the young college girl that tried nervously to cross the road was struck down and died.

Bushra’s death became a cue for the unemployed Mohajir youth. They banded, in the newly armed MQM, to fan out throughout the city and destroy mini-vans dubbed “yellow devils.” They also burnt down rickshaws and taxis, owned and operated by Pashtuns. It was a direct assault on the livelihood of the migrants from the north of Pakistan who bought their vehicles on high interest loans and raced their callously-stuffed passengers at high speeds so that they could repay the loan
sharks. The Pashtuns reacted in the only way they knew; they shot back and killed the Mohajir assailants.

Government hospitals were caught unaware by the first major incident of ethnic violence under Gen. Zia. The Abbasi Shaheed Hospital overflowed with victims of gunshot wounds. Medicines and blood were in desperately short supply. Frenzied crowds gathered on the lawns to donate blood and medicines for the victims, rushed in every few minutes by makeshift ambulances that were more suited to carrying vegetables than people.

For the next few days, the riots between Mohajirs and Pashtuns left 65 people dead and 158 injured. It was a vision of things to come. Over the next two decades, tens of thousands of people would lose their lives as the MQM fought with the indigenous ethnic groups – Sindhis, Balochis, Pashtuns and Punjabis – and the military alternately used and killed Mohajir youths in an attempt to wrest back control.

It was an era of the Cold War when the US Republican administration, led by President Ronald Reagan, used Zia’s regime as a conduit to fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. No sooner did the arms, bound for Mujahideen fighters, land at the Karachi Port than they were smuggled out and sold in the black market. The alacrity with which gun licenses were issued to ethnic groups made it appear that Gen. Zia preferred that they fight each other than fight his military rule.

Gen. Zia’s patronage of the MQM unfolded before our eyes. His ministers would call on the MQM chief Altaf Hussein at his home in Azizabad – a lower-middle class Mohajir neighborhood in Karachi. High walls cordoned off the MQM’s head office – Nine Zero, Azizabad – also known as
Markaz
or the “Center.” At the Karachi Press Club, we talked about how Mohajirs had achieved the stuff of dreams: a lower-middle class party that kept key establishment figures waiting to meet their chief.

The MQM chief, Altaf Hussein’s personality lent an air of mystery to the party he had created. A dark-skinned man who wore dark glasses at all times, Altaf began the MQM as a movement for the rights of Muslim migrants from India who had arrived to create Pakistan. The MQM talked progressive politics, criticizing
the feudals who oppressed Sindhis. But the MQM chief operated in a distinctly feudal style. Altaf Hussain projected himself as “
Pir saheb
” (spiritual leader), whose infatuated followers saw his likeness on the leaves around them.

Years later, MQM stalwart and former Karachi Mayor, Farooq Sattar acknowledged to me in a recorded interview what I had long known – namely, that in 1984, the “intelligence agencies allowed the MQM to come up to counter the PPP.” The purpose, he said, in a tone that suggested that it was an open secret, was to prevent the Sindhis from gaining power.

The senior MQM leader referred to the 1983 Movement for Restoration of Democracy, through which tens of thousands of Sindhi villagers – who had protested against Gen. Zia’s execution of the elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – were strafed by helicopter gunships in their own settlements. At the same time, Sindhi intellectuals, writers and journalists who supported the MRD were imprisoned and tortured by the military.

Decades later, the former Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Mirza Aslam Baig too acknowledged on television that the MQM was created by his predecessor, Gen. Zia ul Haq as a political measure to counter the Sindhi insurgency that grew after the murder of PPP founder, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The death of the college girl, Bushra Zaidi led to weeks of rioting between the Mohajirs and Pashtuns, which left 65 people dead and 158 injured. The press was still controlled by the military government but statements poured into
Dawn
from readers that the government ought to nationalize private wagons and buses and confiscate the driving licenses of reckless drivers.

In the forefront were educated Urdu-speaking professionals, bewildered by the sudden upsurge of violence. Their women councilors – many of them newly elected in Gen. Zia’s government – appealed for a ban on guns and for dialogue. But such expressions of hand wringing had nothing to do with the insidious workings of the military, which secretly patronized the ethnic party for political purposes.

Moreover, whilst educated Mohajirs were shocked by the violence, the reprisals by Pashtuns convinced many of the need
to organize as a political party. Since Pakistan’s creation in 1947, many Mohajirs had come to dislike the fact that they did not fit into a native ethnic group – Sindhis, Baloch, Pashtuns and Punjabis. Their feud with the Pashtuns convinced many that the Indian refugees needed a party to guarantee their survival. It would provide a groundswell of support for the MQM.

Figure 3
MQM chief Altaf Hussain addresses election rally in Karachi (undated
Dawn
Photo).

After the first ethnic clash between the Mohajirs and Pashtuns, a storm quietly brewed between the two ethnic communities. The Pashtuns united under the Pashtunwali code of honor – a tribal law that calls for the defense of the closest kin. While it is normal practice for Pashtuns to bear arms, the Cold War gave them unprecedented access to the weapons that transited from Karachi to their native Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which borders Afghanistan.

It was a time when the former Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 had forced three million Afghans to cross the porous borders into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known as the North West Frontier Province. These were Pashtun Afghans who lived on both sides of the border and who followed their relatives in Karachi to look for work. In Karachi, the Afghan refugees had congregated in Sohrab Goth – a tented village erected by the United Nations along the remote dusty wastelands of the city’s Super Highway.