Karachi’s Ethnic Violence: How a Political Weapon Became an Extortion Economy

Ethnic and regional identity politics have played a significant role in Pakistan’s crime landscape, with various small movements in different provinces pushing hard to establish their own political standing. None of these movements ever commanded especially large followings on their own. What they shared was a tendency toward growing militancy after repeated setbacks – a pattern nowhere more consequential than in Karachi.

A Peaceful City, and a Political Weapon

Karachi is Pakistan’s industrial and commercial center, and before General Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law, it was a genuinely peaceful city. The party in power there was the PPP, locked in open hostility with Zia’s government. Karachi mattered enough to Zia that he looked for a way to fracture it from within – and found his lever in the city’s large Mohajir population, the Urdu-speaking migrants who had settled there after Partition. The instrument took shape first as a student body: on 11 June 1978, Karachi University students led by Altaf Hussain founded the All Pakistan Muhajir Students Organization, framed at the time as a movement against what its founders called the “mullah-feudal nexus” dominating campus and provincial politics. By 1984, that organization had grown into a full political party, the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, with Altaf Hussain at its head – and, turned into a genuine political instrument, the Mohajir community became the base of a nationalist movement that received modern weapons, funding, and sustained backing to build it into a real political force.

The strategy worked in the narrow sense that it fractured PPP’s dominance in the city. It also produced consequences well beyond what any political calculation could contain. The movement’s reach soon extended to Hyderabad, Sindh’s other major city, and within Karachi itself it moved past ordinary political organizing into outright militancy. Neighborhoods set up their own checkpoints, and armed factions began collecting extortion money – bhatta – from wealthy residents and industrialists. Anyone who refused to pay risked having a relative, often a daughter-in-law or daughter, kidnapped in response.

When the Creator Turned on Its Creation

By the early 1990s, the same military establishment that had helped build the movement up moved to cut it back down. Operation Clean-up, also called Operation Blue Fox, ran from June 1992 to August 1994 and was justified at the time by allegations that the party was working toward carving out a separate Mohajir state inside Sindh under a plan the army dubbed “Jinnahpur” – an accusation serious enough to be used as the operation’s central justification, though the army officers who had led the operation later admitted the Jinnahpur plot had been fabricated. Rather than simply suppressing the movement directly, the establishment also nurtured a rival faction from within it: in 1993, two of the party’s own former organizers, Aafaq Ahmed and Amir Khan, broke away to form MQM-Haqiqi with the military’s backing, giving Karachi’s ethnic politics a second armed faction to fight the first – a split that did not calm the city so much as give its violence a second front, deepening the very cycle the operation had ostensibly been launched to end.

What the City’s Crime Rate Actually Looked Like

The human cost showed up directly in Karachi’s crime statistics for the period: a murder roughly every four hours, a violent robbery roughly every hour, a dacoity and five armed robberies every single day – on top of the ongoing extortion collection running alongside all of it.

It’s a pattern with a specific origin and a specific mechanism, and it illustrates something larger about how political engineering can outlast the political goal it was built for. A movement created as a tool to weaken a rival party ended up outgrowing the purpose it was built to serve, becoming a violent force in its own right, with a body count and an extortion economy that persisted long after the original political calculation that created it had been forgotten by most of the city living with the consequences – and even the state’s own later attempt to rein that force back in ended up multiplying it rather than removing it. The party itself eventually tried to shed this history by redefinition rather than reform: in July 1997, it dropped “Muhajir” from its name altogether, rebranding as the Muttahida – United – Qaumi Movement, the same initials repurposed to suggest a party that had left its ethnic militancy behind, even as the structures and personnel built during the years described above remained largely intact underneath the new name.