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. Turned into a political instrument, that community became the base of a new Mohajir nationalist movement, organized as the MQM, which 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.
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.
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