Over the last couple of months I’ve had the distinct pleasure of exchanging a bunch of emails with Tahir Naqvi. Tahir teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, his research addresses questions of state power, urban space, and the production of political identities in South Asia and the Muslim world. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Movement through Difference: Nationalism, Migration and Urban Politics in Pakistan. He can be contacted at tnaqvi@trinity.edu.

The topics we covered were the MQM, its organization and structure as a political party, and its strategy to extend beyond urban Sindh. We also talked about Mohajir nationalism and ethnic politics, as well as the causes and consequences of violence in Karachi.

Without further ado…

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Ahsan: Hi Tahir,

Thanks so much for doing this. On a personal level, I must confess I’m really looking forward to this conversation. My sincere gratitude in you taking the time out to do this.

Let’s get started. Can you tell us a little bit about your work, and how you got interested in studying what you do?

TN: I am a cultural anthropologist by training. For the past number of years I’ve been working on questions related to urban politics, nationalism, and the postcolonial state. When I am in Pakistan these interests get shorthanded as research on the MQM (trans. the United Nationalist Movement, formerly known as the Migrant Nationalist Movement).

Like many anthropologists working on contemporary Pakistan, I gravitated towards a politically heated topic. Until the 1990s, what little anthropological scholarship there was on Pakistan was fairly traditional – rural/peasant studies, caste, agrarian transition. While this work is crucial in its own right, little was being done on questions of law, the state, nationalism, the city. In an attempt to make sense of the post-Zia era, cultural anthropologists are looking at phenomenon that were once the exclusive domain of political science.

As you no doubt recall, Karachi was hell throughout most of the nineties. Much of this owed to the MQM’s politics of ethnicity and criminal accumulation. While questions of violence and criminality figure in my work, I am not particularly interested in getting to the bottom of the movement’s crimes of commission. Of course, one must acknowledge the MQM’s history of violence and its plural forms: ethnic riots, local and extra-local militancy, extortion, proxy conflicts as well as the role of extra-judicial violence, and so on. However, what I am ultimately concerned with is the movement’s provisional relationship to the idea of nationhood. Another way of putting this is the following: given its origins in an exclusively ‘Muhajir’ (migrant) ethno-politics, how can we account for the MQM’s more recent attempts to fashion a more universal political narrative of nationhood? Does this constitute a ‘return’ to an existing narrative of Pakistaniyat, or does is reflect an attempt on the part of popular political actors to frame a new vision of the universal? These questions take me in a number of directions: from histories of post-Partition migration and resettlement to more theoretically informed reflections on Muslim nationalism, urban space, political affect and attachment, and the state of emergency as a postcolonial form.

Ahsan: That’s always the tension inherent to ethno-nationalist parties, is it not? All over the world? Any set of political actors which are defined by a certain identity as opposed to a certain ideology will always face this problem: “what now?” You’ve conquered Karachi and Hyderabad, but what now? You’ve defined yourself in exclusively ethnic terms for the vast majority of the party’s history, and that makes exporting your model of politics in a country as ethnically diverse as Pakistan hugely difficult.

Compare this to the PPP, to take but one example, which despite having a core of Sindhi nationalism and rural land-owning elites, has defined itself (however tenuously) as a pro-poor, anti-establishment party. You can export that everywhere, because there are poor people and establishment interests everywhere.

To that end, what sort of transformations, if any, has the MQM undergone as it has dealt with this challenge? And in your view, how reflective/intentional are these transformations? How explicitly strategic is the MQM in trying to expand its reach beyond urban Sindh?

TN: To respond to your second question, the MQM is quite deliberate and strategic in its attempt to expand beyond urban Sindh. It has a significant network of political support in the major cities of Punjab, particularly in Multan. In Karachi, there is a Provincial Coordinating Committee of the MQM whose job is to oversee unit activities outside Sindh in accordance with the wider framework set by the Rabita Committee, which is the next level of leadership below the MQM’s “founder and leader” Altaf Hussain.

Regarding your other point, I do not think that every ethno-nationalist movement operating in the electoral-political field confronts this tension. Many are clear on the cultural boundaries of ‘their’ nation, even if their electoral constituency has come to include ‘Others’. The BJP is a good example of this. Now, it is possible to argue that the inclusion of Muslims in the BJP (as voters and/or activists) has resulted in a redrawing of the concept of Hindutva itself. This might be happening implicitly on the ground in the arena of political society, but is there reflexivity around it, particularly, at the level of ideology? MQM activists, by contrast, now historicize Muhajirness as a ‘beginning’ and an early means of gaining ‘recognition’. Few ethno-nationalist movements would be able to speak in such terms about their identity. What makes the MQM’s departure from a particularist identity conceivable, has something do with the Muhajir community’s intimate association with the ideology of Pakistani nationalism The MQM is fascinating because it is the rare example of an ethno-nationalist movement that questions the dominant official nationalist discourse from the latter’s internal limits. In an interview I conducted with the late Imran Farooq he cited that Muhajirs had been ‘brainwashed’ since their days in India by notions of pan-Islamism. The lesson the MQM had arrived at, in his view, was that “there is no attachment (vabastaagi) without territory. Every nation needs an attachment to the land”. Note there is no substantial or essentialized conception of who a Muhajir is in this narrative beyond that of the subject who questions the operability of Pakistani nationalism. For native ethno-nationalist movements, like Jeay Sindh, this mode of questioning exists as well, but, it is preceded by the belief in an essential or ‘pre-political’ community. By contrast, MQM activists are clear that Muhajir nationhood emerged as a ‘necessary’ response to conditions of ethnic marginalization – full stop. There is no discourse of ‘love’ for the nation. When it existed in full force, Muhajir nationality signified a wholly antagonistic concept of the national self.

The problem for the MQM today is that while it genuinely seeks to move beyond ethnicity, it is not confident in its ability to do so. Part of this has to do with the unique and shifting demography of urban Sindh, whose densely concentrated Muhajir/Urdu-speaking majority allowed the movement at an early stage to make waves at the national political level. While the MQM continues to jealously guard its original ethnic constituency, its motivation for doing so points to the politics of numbers. The current struggle with the ANP exemplifies this in that votes and land, rather than the interests and sanctity of the Muhajir community, are what is at stake. Ironically, the only way the MQM can position itself to expand within and beyond urban Sindh is by appearing to fight against the onslaught of ethnic Pathans (I can say more about this). Still, the days of appealing to the identity and fears of the Urdu-speaking community are – as they say – in abeyance. In July 2010 I had the unique and slightly awkward experience of visiting an All-Pathan unit of the MQM in Lines Area (a lower income neighborhood in Central Karachi). The MQM organizes non-Muhajir units under the aegis of a “Muttahida Organizing Committee” (MOC). Its job is to promote the movement’s message among non-Urdu speaking youth, who are subsequently called on to engage as activists and mobilize voter support.

What is really quite interesting is how, under the banner of ‘United’ Nationhood (mutahidda quamiyat), ethnic distinctions between Pakistan’s native ethnic communities are reified in the name of celebrating a plural and territorial conception of Pakistani nationhood. In this sense, the MQM is trying to resuscitate the platform of the National Awami Party by seeking to build a national political organization around the right to provincial autonomy. Whether people are convinced is another matter altogether.

Ahsan: There is so much there to respond to, Tahir. Some truly fascinating insights. First, I want to go back to your second paragraph, to your discussion of what is and isn’t a constituent element of Mohajir identity. You say that there is no essentialized conception of “Mohajirness”, and that the very notion of Mohajir identity arose as a response to real, live stuff done in the name of Pakistani nationalism. But couldn’t you say that about any ethno-nationalist identity? An important element of the poli sci world believes that all ethnic cleavages are a response to particular institutional incentives. Certain markers of identity (religion as opposed to language, or race as opposed to region, or whatever) are emphasized or downplayed depending on the “rules” of the game.

So in this view, no one is surprised that Balochi nationalism is a bigger deal in a post-partition India than in a colonial India, because the boundaries of political conflict have changed in ways that make provincial, rather than communal, identity more salient.

If I understand you correctly, you say the self-identification of the Mohajir community arose out of “ethnic marginalization”. My question to you is: isn’t that true of any given ethnic movement? What, in particular, makes this sui generis? Is it that prior to the dominant narrative of Pakistani state-led nationalism taking hold, there literally was no such thing known as a “Mohajir”? Or is that the discourse of Mohajir nationalism seeks to subsume, rather than replace, Pakistani nationalism? Both? Neither?

TN: A point on method might be helpful here, since you bring it up. My concern is with how nations are imagined and constituted by those who speak in its name. I am not primarily concerned with providing a structural account of the causes of Muhajir nationalism and its apparent decline. So the question I ask is how can a nationalist movement imagine the nation in such provisional terms? What does it say about their reasons for turning to nationalism as a mode of political agency?

Certainly, all minority nationalisms at the end of the day are a response to real and perceived conditions of economic, political and cultural marginalization. These, in turn, reflect institutional and cultural cleavages in governance and economy. However, not all nationalisms acknowledge marginalization to be a founding condition of nationhood.

There was no conception of Muhajir identity before the onset of the Pakistani nation-state. More specifically, throughout the post-independence period, Indian immigrants were cast within official discourse as a kind of ‘unmarked universal’, whose language and regional Islamicate ethos provided the material for the state’s disciplines of national integration. Even today, the difference of the Muhajir community is understood in relation to a historical narrative that privileges them as ideological exemplars of the Muslim nationalist ideal. This often gets invoked through the concept of ‘sacrifice’ (the notion that Urdu-speakers made unparalleled sacrifices for the cause of Pakistan/Islam, culminating in the decision to ‘abandon’ one’s ancestral homes in India). The leadership of the MQM sees the lack of distinction between the Muhajir and the Pakistani as a kind of paradox. Unlike Pakistan’s native minorities, they contend that their conflation with the universal has played an instrumental role in their social and economic marginalization. Their response to this has been to provincialize the Urdu speaking community’s politics and commitments. And yet, by disavowing the extra-territorial ideal of Pakistaniyat, the discourse of Muhajir nationality amounts to refusal of one’s self in the name of one’s self. This is what distinguishes the MQM’s dialectic of alterity and universality from other ethno-nationalist formations in Pakistan and South Asia.

Ahsan: Thanks, that definitely clarifies things.

I want to move on to something a little bit unrelated now, that is, the organizational structure of the MQM. We’ve often heard things to the effect of “the MQM is the best organized party in Pakistan”. I also recently read Vali Nasr’s book on the Jamaat, and he said something about the MQM borrowing a lot of elements of the JI structure in terms of organization.

With these thoughts in mind, can you give us a basic understanding of what the MQM “looks” like, as an organization? For instance, what are the responsibilities of the (in)famous sector-in-charge? To what extent do the party cadres on the ground have autonomy? Who organizes the violence and vote stuffing? What are the rights and responsibilities of the party members at various levels, and what are the ways one can rise (or fall) in the hierarchy?

Basically I’m interested in whether the MQM looks more like Ford or Google. If you could map its organizational network, what would it look like?

TN: This is a vast and slippery subject. To grossly simplify, I’ll approach it in two ways: first, in terms of the movement’s concrete organizational structure and practices, and second, the ‘cult’ or ‘fetish’ of organization within the MQM.

The MQM draws a meaningful distinction between activism and governance functions. Furthermore, the movement’s performance of these functions has changed over the course of nearly thirty years. What ties all these strands together in many respects is the personage and power of Altaf Hussain. The cult of leadership surrounding Hussain is unparalleled in Pakistani politics. Many critics of the movement see it as a sign of the MQM’s hypocritical appropriation of the “feudal” style of charismatic absolutism. Others see Hussain as the vernacular expression of a certain kind of urban fascism (i.e, Altaf as a desi ‘Hitler’). The problem with the Hitler analogy is not that it is unjustified, but that it portrays Hussain as an ethnic chauvinist/absolutist. As a political form, fascism and its modes of absolutism emerge in response to some underlying conflict about ‘who’ a movement represents. This becomes apparent in mega-cities like Karachi and Mumbai, where movements like the MQM and Shiv Sena walk a thin line between their core support base among the lower and lower-middle class and the interests of the urban capitalist class. It is this tension or confusion over representation that generates the aesthetics of fascism. Like the ethnic or racial ‘other’ to be hated, the ‘cult of the leader’ provides a center of gravity for identifications and commitment in lieu of certainty about the nature of one’s constituency. In other words, the MQM’s fascism reflects a symbolic and material crisis of political representation. Still, whatever else we might say about Altaf Hussain’s eccentricities as a leader, he’s no Bal Thackery.

The MQM is in many respects the ‘best organized party’ in Pakistan. Paradoxically, this is one of the key consequences of its cult of leadership. There is no ‘pay to play’ system through which elites can ‘get’ an MQM seat to either the provincial or national assembly. You are chosen and trained to run as an MQM candidate; your campaign’s funding and platform are provided by the MQM. With the exception of a few stalwarts, such as Khalid Yunis, Wasim Akhtar and Farooq Sattar, leaders are cultivated and promoted through a process that is fairly bureaucratic on the one hand, yet on the other hand, ultimately relies on the support of Altaf Hussain. There is monitoring and assessment: how well are you liked within your unit? What is the depth of your understanding of the Qaid’s philosophy? What is the extent of your discipline (nazb-o-zabt)?

I conducted my research soon after 9/11, when the MQM was actively purging militants from its above-ground political organization. This is not to say that the MQM has been de-militarized, but, as they say, you’d be hard-pressed to find them today sitting in a unit office or the headquarters in Federal B area. In the eighties and nineties sector and unit in-charges were often chosen on the basis of their ability to organize and maintain control over the means of violence within their mohallas. This system developed in response to the Muhajir-Pathan riots but eventually congealed into more elaborate forms of parallel government and local control once the MQM won control of the local bodies in 1987. After the general elections of 1988 and 1990, the movement could operate with greater impunity due to its decisive role in successive national parliamentary coalitions.

Today, things are quite different. For instance, Karachi’s units and sectors now fall under the authority of the Karachi Tanzimi (Organizational) Committee (KTC). The KTC answers directly to the Rabita Committee. During campaigns, the KTC committee is responsible for delivering the MQM vote. Like most parties in Pakistan, MQM activists have been known to use the latent threat of violence during the campaign cycle. In the off season, things are a bit looser and many units take on the air of a social club. However, units are a key point of interface between the party and the state. Petitions for assistance originate at the unit level and are sent up to the sector office or MQM headquarters (“90”) where MQM provincial assembly members hold regular office hours. The MQM often intervenes in civil disputes, particularly in cases where neither secular nor religious law can be applied effectively.

Ahsan: That’s all really interesting, Tahir, and very, very useful information. The personalist cult surrounding Altaf Hussain has always fascinated me for a party that so heavily advertises its “non-feudal” and “meritocratic” nature. On a functional note, I’m eager (as an analyst) but very non-eager (as someone whose family lives in Karachi) to see what happens when the time for succession comes up. Organizationally, the party that the MQM is most often compared to is the Jamaat, but the crucial difference as I see it is that the Jamaat has a proper protocol for succession, and that is its office of General Secretary. Mian Tufayl occupied that office in the time of Maududi’s chairmanship before taking over, and Qazi Hussain likewise occupied that role in the time of Tufayl, before he took over. And Syed Munawar Hasan similarly took over from Qazi Hussain after occupying the General Secretary position. So there’s a predictability at play, which is always good for quelling dissension and intra-party struggles that could potentially lead to violence.

On the other hand, the MQM’s “right-hand man” role is not really one man but a small group, that is the Rabita Committee. This strikes me as inherently more dangerous because you could have different nodes which different party cadres attach themselves to, leading to possibly (violent) struggles for the party. In that sense, it reminds me of the old Soviet Politburo rather than the Jamaat. I remember reading a long time back about Stalin manipulting that body in Lenin’s time, and thus rising to the top even though very few considered him to be a worthy successor to Lenin. I wonder if something similar is happening within the MQM as we speak.

Anyway, let’s change direction now. I want to ask a very simple question that probably does not have a simple answer: what are the proximate causes of political violence in Karachi? Obviously structural factors such as demographic changes, immigration, the changing nature of the economy, ethnic identity and so on matter. But what are the immediate causes? Why do certain groups (of which the MQM is definitely one, though not the only one) use political violence at certain times but not others? Is it all about land? Is it about criminal networks using political activists for their own isolated games, and then it spilling over? Why does Karachi see these ebbs and flows, where nothing will happen for two months, and then in a period of three weeks a hundred people will die? What’s going on here?

TN: I think you are more or less on the mark. Like you, I don’t have any privileged information on the current spate of target killings in the city aside from media sources.

The problem, in my mind, is how closely and complexly political activism, territorialism, and economic accumulation are woven together at all levels of the hierarchy. One can only speculate about the degree of direction and/or autonomy various parties give to unit and sector in-charges regarding the use of violence in their localities.

What occurs at the level of the public imagination when a cluster of killings in a city of more than 13 million is seen to be driven by a larger, unified purpose? What might this purpose be? Since the colonial era, corpses have been a method for sending messages about the nature of difference and the distribution of power. We look for direction and meaning in the frequency and ‘quality’ of the targets. Lower frequency suggests localized conflicts, while clusters suggest organized contests over land, wealth, and electoral control. And yet, it is very difficult to say whether or not someone is actually thinking this stuff through as conscious strategy. Target killings seem to reflect anxieties about the changing ethnic complexion of the city, and yet, from the data available it seems that most of the politically motivated killing going in the city is still between members of MQM(A) and MQM(H). The recent return of MQM-H leader Aamir Khan to the fold of the MQM (A) may change all of this. At best, it will lead to a détente between longstanding factions of the MQM. A more troubling scenario would be one in which ex-Haqiqi activists served as warriors in the MQM’s territorial struggle with the Awami Nationalist Party. After twenty years in the wilderness, the ex-Haqiqi will have to prove their loyalty. It is only a question of how.

Ahsan: Alright, last question, because I know you’re super busy. You obviously spent some time in the field, as it were, investigating the MQM. The MQM, quite fairly, enjoys a reputation for violence and thuggery.

So with that in mind, do you have any stories to tell us that won’t get you into trouble? A particular time you were afraid? Or maybe a threatening phone call? Or a crazy story you’d like to share from the field? You don’t have to give any names, of course. Just a taste of what your experiences were like, and if any in particular would make into an episode of The Sopranos or The Wire or something like that. Come on, don’t disappoint! This is what our readers want!

TN: A freighted question! Before I offer my concluding vignette, which is more telling than titillating, I should say a bit more about the MQM and its relation to violence.

It is possible to think of the MQM’s politics and its violence. The MQM is constantly deploying the implicit threat of violence when it negotiates on behalf of its constituents. It is still involved in collection ‘chanda’. The thing is, that after 25 years, it no longer needs to wield violence in quite the same way. Like a state, it offers the citizen something between threat and guarantee. Structurally, the MQM’s violence reflects its unique position ‘between’ the urban commercial elite of the city and its plebian sector. This positioning is formative and confounding. The MQM is the only political organization that commands territory in the name of an organization. The role of the organization is crucial. It is one of the few things that separate what the MQM does from what the feudal does.

The MQM’s relation to violence provokes anxiety because it does not seem to be in the service of a well-defined conception of the community that is to be defended or determined by such violence. Liberal and pluralist, the MQM is also fascistic and deeply territorial in its approach to politics. We are disturbed by the MQM, in part, because their violence seems out of place. The usual response to uncertainty is a kind of moral critique. Such criticism (i.e., the MQM is just a bunch of crooks) is also profoundly apolitical. By contrast, both “good” and “bad” political actors think in terms of building connections and reconciling limits.

As for me, the MQM has never kicked my ass. They have given me unprecedented access to the political side of their operations. Admittedly, this has required careful positioning on my part. I have very little to say on how the MQM orchestrates target killings. I do not ask them who among their ranks is a member of land mafia. The specter of the organization’s finances remains just that. The sheer mystery of it all can lead one to totalize the underbelly and forget the heterogeneous social forces at play. The MQM does more than simply plot crimes and intimidate people. I’ve roamed the halls of “90”, entered offices without knocking, and what I have found more often than not are the banal workings of a political bureaucracy. Of course the approach to “90” is studded with armed checkpoints, but it’s all very polite and matter of fact.

Still, among the older activists, one often hears something to the effect of “before Altaf Bhai and the riots in 1985 Muhajirs were weak. Our parents (who migrated from India) were too busy being sharif (respectable) and afraid of the locals. We didn’t even know we were a nation”. The sense of achieving potential and identity through the act of self-defense is something that resonates with many activists. It is integral to their understanding of Muhajir nationality.

This tension between sharafat (respectability) and violence has always intrigued me. I remember interviewing a young activist in 2002. This is someone who is now a major figure in the party. He recounted his life story – his entry into student politics, the sacrifices he had to make. Much of it sounded like it came straight out of a Bollywood script. It was hot that day and I was wearing a shalwar-kameez. To this day, I have the very un-sharif habit of pulling the hem of my shalwar up to the bulge of my calf muscle when I’m sitting in the heat. Somewhere toward the middle of the interview he began to give an account of his rise to power on campus. “I pretty much ran the school. If someone was caught disrespecting a girl, I had to make sure he was taught a lesson. Why, I could even break a guy’s legs if he didn’t have the sense to cover them when he was in my company!”

Ahsan: Heh. Thank you so much for your time, Tahir, and all your wonderful answers.

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For those interested, I’ve had such email conversations before.

Click here for my conversation with senior Human Rights Watch researcher Ali Dayan Hasan.

Click here for my conversation with environmental activist, lawyer and writer Rafay Alam.

Click here for my conversation with two South Asia scholars in the American academy, Vipin Narang of Harvard/MIT and Paul Staniland of MIT/University of Chicago.

Click here for my conversation with Cricinfo Pakistan editor Osman Samiuddin.

Click here for my conversation with Dawn editorial writer and op-ed columnist Cyril Almeida.

Click here for the one with political economist and The News columnist Mosharraf Zaidi.

Click here for one with a Wall Streeter in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Click here for one with an Indian foreign affairs blogger after the Mumbai attacks of 2008.