Issue 40 Vol II, May 31, 2007

A N A L Y S I S

The MQM phenomenon
Ishtiaq Ahmed

MAY 12, 2007 saw blood spilled on the streets of Karachi as the pro-Musharraf MQM and the supporters of the non-functional Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, clashed. In the next two days more people died in gun battles and the total came to 46 and more than 150 injured. Both sides have accused the other of recourse to violence first, but the figures suggested that casualties suffered by the pro-Chaudhry elements were far greater than the MQM.

I have spent a lifetime studying collective violence and know for sure that without backing and connivance of state functionaries open gun battles and firing sprees cannot take place. There must have been a compromised administration, 15,000 security forces men as was reported, on the streets of Karachi on May 12 that let the situation get out of control. Alternatively one can say that the functionaries had been instructed not to intervene, notwithstanding whatever they felt or believed themselves, and therefore the responsibility lies even higher up somewhere.

The Tehrik-i-Insaaf leader, Imran Khan, has expressed the view that British Premier Tony Blair should be charged in a court of law for permitting the MQM Supremo, Altaf Hussain, to 'abuse' his sanctuary in the UK when there are several serious cases pending against him in Pakistan. Critics of the MQM have questioned how someone with such a record acquired British citizenship. Unfortunately the US-British war on terror is about terror that strikes their interests and not terrorism as such.

South Asia has produced quite a few ethno-nationalist leaders in the last few decades. Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale of the Khalistan movement, Prabhakkar of the Tamil Tigers and Altaf Hussain of MQM have certain things in common. All of them made their way into politics when their ethnic group felt threatened by competitors and challengers from other groups. They resorted to questionable methods to crush perceived threats and thus gained a reputation of being men of steel. In the process a cult of adulation grew around them and they began to be surrounded by fanatical devotees but themselves became victims of megalomania.

In March 1990 I was in Karachi to research the ongoing ethnic conflict in Sindh. It was part of my comparative study of ethnic conflicts all over South Asia and was published under the title 'State, Nation and Ethnicity in Contemporary South Asia' in 1996 and again in 1998. The MQM at that time was labelled 'a neo-fascist ethnic party' by its detractors who accused it of running its own jails and practising all kinds of unsavoury tactics. It was also alleged by its critics of enjoying the backing of the ISI which had allegedly floated it as a counterweight to the PPP.

I approached the MQM for an interview and was invited to their Azizabad headquarters in Karachi, but instead of being granted an interview by Altaf Hussain it was Azim Ahmed Tariq, the formal president of the MQM, who spoke to me. I found him to be a very worried man. He kept looking at the bag I had with me as if I might pull out a gun and kill him. I sensed that and opened it so that he could see that it contained nothing but my recording equipment and notebook.

Afterwards he relaxed and gave me his litany of Mohajir grievances. He asserted that their elders abandoned their hearth and home in northern India not because they were threatened as Muslims were in East Punjab. Jawaharlal Nehru pleaded with them not to leave but the love of Pakistan, an independent Muslim country, was too great and so they came.

They established schools and colleges and worked hard to succeed whereas the Sindhi landlords, the waderas, opposed the building of schools and their peasants and other poor Sindhis going to school. Consequently the Urdu-speakers had done well in Pakistan by dint of hard work and merit and not by unfair means. The Sindhis and Punjabis were now oppressing the Mohajirs and that was highly unfair, he argued.

I made him realise, however, that the Sindhis opened their arms and welcomed them in 1947 and that is how they found a home in that province. To that Azim Ahmed Tariq agreed. Later in 1993 he was assassinated.

The fortunes of the MQM dwindled when they clashed with the military and one officer was allegedly kidnapped by them. At that point the army chief Gen. Asif Nawaz and the Corps Commander of Karachi Lt. Gen. Naseer Akhtar ordered raids on the MQM strongholds. The media reported discovery of torture cells and other incriminating evidence. By that time Altaf Hussain had fled to Britain.

In the subsequent years the MQM had increasingly acquiring the appearance of a secular, parliamentary party. It enjoyed strong electoral support and was represented in both the Sindh legislature and the Pakistan National Assembly. Therefore when in December last year I was in Karachi to deliver a keynote speech at the Karachi International Book Fair I was very surprised that it continued to be feared as a ruthless organisation. Many people I spoke to said that what they were telling me in private what they would never dare to say in their office or before their staff or strangers.

This type of culture of fear did not affect only Sindhis or Punjabis or Memons and so on, but cultured and civilised, law-abiding Urdu-speaking Mohajirs also lived in constant fear of the party. Who can forget the murder of Hakim Muhammad Said of the Hamdard Foundation? One day he was mercilessly gunned down. MQM activists were arrested and found guilty of that heinous crime.

When a democratically elected government committed to the rule of law is in power in Pakistan it may well demand from Britain that Altaf Hussain be extradited to face charges for his alleged crimes. Britain is opposed to extraditing people to countries where capital punishment is practised. This is worth keeping in mind.

On the other hand, there should be absolutely no move now or in the future to victimise the Mohajirs. They should be treated as sons of the soil as any other Pakistani. But in return they should desist from associating with organisations that employ force and terror.

[The writer is professor of political science at the University of Stockholm, Sweden.
ishtiaq.ahmed@statsvet.su.se
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=57629]

BACK

The  Real Face of Politicians
Vinod Anand

HOW do politicians look like and how do they behave in a democratic polity like India. Gone are the days when we did have some statesmen, who were entirely different from the so-called politicians of today. They had a broad vision about the country and its people, and they focused on the next generation rather than on the next election. The present day politicians or the political entrepreneurs just talk of their voting power and focus only on the next election, and nothing else.

In a democratic set-up, politicians, legislatures and non-legislatures constitute an important segment of the system of government. The other two segments are the bureaucrats and the electors, the voters. These three taken together constitute what we call the “State”. Their roles are inter-linked.

There is a relationship between voters and legislators on the one hand, and between legislators and bureaucrats on the other. Although these inter-links have different origins and formulations, yet they are based on two common assumptions: (a) conflicting interests and (b) perfect information. The standard economic theory of private economy is devoid of both of these assumptions and it is for this reason that it fails to answer various questions related with the behavior of the “State”, and its impact on the economic functioning of the system. As a result, much of the analysis on the theory of the “State” is restricted to qualitative treatment. The genesis of the New Political Economy lies in old ‘ interest-group’ or ‘elite theory of politics’, which emphasizes the role of group action (especially through differential power, including both differential registration and differential participation of voters) in influencing voter behaviour, in winning over legislators, and in modifying the administration of public policy. Particular attention is also paid to the class interest view of the “State” as analysed in the Marxist literature. In its updated-version, the New Political Economy centers around the idea that all political developments result from competition and rivalry among political entrepreneurs who seek to maximize their electoral support and political gain, and, thereby, their incomes also. They are experts in political survival, and quite often, they strike a trade-off between their survival and national interests, giving priority to the former. It is also maintained that the “State” exists basically for the politicians and bureaucrats. Whatever the “State” does is linked directly or indirectly with the vested interests of the politicians, who always strive to raise their electoral support and maintain, and even enhance, their political power. The bureaucrats are in full league with them, and create situations, which, on the one hand, help the politicians to achieve their political motives, and give a dominant position to them (bureaucrats) to exercise massive administrative power, on the other. The two, therefore, strive to exist for each other, and through this process the ideology of public intervention also gets distorted. There is no dearth of examples in the context of India to support this contention.

With ‘endogeneity’, therefore, the domains of Economics include a variety of new economic agents other than the conventional ones. Besides having consumers, producers, buyers, sellers, and other conventional agents, we now have agents like political entrepreneurs (both ruling and non-ruling), government officials and bureaucrats, and voters, as important subsets of the macro economic system. It is the sum total of the activities of all these agents that determines the functioning of the economic system. We know that the conventional economic agents are subject to the assumption of rationality: they exhibit maximizing bevaviour, and in that process also add to the overall economic activity of the economic system. We also know that the non-conventional agents (like, political entrepreneurs) also work rationally but essentially for their own vested interests, and in this process they somehow work against the system. Their activities are in fact anti-growth. They also shrink growth and corrode the economy in various ways. This will be clearly understood if we look at the two fall-outs of the role of the “State” as linked with the positive side of the New Political Economy. These are briefly described below:

1. Rent-seeking Activities: All those re-distributive activities (amounting to transfer), which take up real resources, and do not, in any way, add to growth are termed as rent-seeking activities. The connotation of the word ‘rent’ is the same as used by the classical economists to indicate the ‘unearned income’ accruing to monopolist landlords, but the concept of rent-seeking goes beyond monopoly rent, and covers all kinds of legal and illegal extortion by individuals with or without the support of government and also directly by government itself and its officials in the name of government intervention. Rent seeking, thus, maligns and denigrates all government intervention.

There are three ways in which rent seeking exhibits increasing returns:

i) It is self-generating and ‘infectious’ in the sense that it passes from one person to another. This is so because, in the absence of any protection from the government, one has to protect oneself on his own against the ill effects of rent seeking activities.

ii) It depends largely on numbers. ‘The more the merrier’ describes the success of rent seeking activities. Larger is the number of people getting involved in such activities, higher become their returns.

iii) A time–consuming, inefficient legal system, which denies and delays justice, also helps in encouraging rent seeking activities.

A distinction is also drawn between private and public rent seeking. Private rent seeking amounts to transfers between individuals or private parties. Public rent seeking amounts to transfers either from individuals to the State, or from individuals to the political parties and from individuals to government officials. As already said, rent seeking, in general, adversely affects economic growth, but private rent seeking works more against production, and public rent seeking more against innovation.

2. Directly Unproductive Profit Seeking Activities:  These are similar to rent seeking activities except for the fact that their direct (immediate) impact is unproductive. Apart from this difference, both lead to ‘unearned’ income without adding to output. Both use real resources to generate profit  without producing an output. In other words, they lead to predation and not to production, and, as such, they do not enter the conventional utility and production functions.

[The author is professor at the National University of Lesotho in Southern Africa.]

BACK