Hussain, Mohajirs, and an India-Pakistan story
MQM could once bring Pakistan’s financial and business hub to a halt with just one dog whistle from London, it is now only fighting to stay relevant.
It was May 7, 2007. On a summer day in Karachi, violent street battles between the Muttahida Qaumi Movement on one side, and lawyers and workers of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Awami National Party (ANP) on the other, had left 40 people dead, a majority of them from the ANP. The MQM had blockaded the roads to prevent the ousted chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry, from entering the city. Plumes of smoke rose from Sharah-e-Faisal, Karachi’s main road, as battles raged through the day with lawyers and political workers trying unsuccessfully to remove the huge containers that the MQM had strewn across every road in the city. Meanwhile, Chaudhry and the police were locked in a stand-off at the airport. That day, when the MQM sealed its long alliance with military ruler General Pervez Musharraf in blood, was a turning point from which neither the party nor its leader Altaf Hussain managed to recover.
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