THE politicians can’t figure out Karachi, the generals can’t figure out relations with the US — sometimes it really does feel like if this place is ever to be saved, it will be despite us, not because of us.

The City of Lights by the sea has gone dark but for the flames of violence dancing across the city. Zulfiqar Mirza’s astonishing, ugly outburst has been denounced as madness. But was it?

Some think it was more diabolical than mad. Here’s why.

The election cycle is about to kick off soon and for months now the various parties have been jockeying for position, preparing for an uncertain electoral contest.

Karachi is a prize, of course, and the MQM, ANP and PPP have been tussling over it ever since the 2008 elections. But lucrative as Karachi may be, it isn’t the main goal of the PPP, interior Sindh is. By throwing down the gauntlet to the MQM in Karachi, Zulfi Mirza was hoping to pick up the Sindh card with voters in interior Sindh.

Confused? Mirza isn’t; he thinks he has a plan.

Going into the next election the PPP will have to work with two handicaps. One, its record in office hasn’t exactly been stellar, to put it mildly, and historically the jiyala has stayed at home when he’s been disgruntled and unhappy.

Two, to gain power in Islamabad, the PPP cut a deal with the MQM, a betrayal in the minds of the Sindhi voter who is a nationalist and views the MQM with acute suspicion.

How do you overcome those two handicaps?

Zulfi Mirza wouldn’t know about governance if it came and smacked him in the head. But he does know about fear and the psychological levers that can be used to manipulate an electorate. The three years in bed with the MQM can’t be erased in the mind of the Sindhi voter, but they can be atoned for — at least that’s what Mirza’s plan is.

Sindh will be divided over my dead body — when Mirza said that he was at once stoking the fears and suspicions of Sindhi nationalists and trying to position the PPP as the true defender of the Sindhi nation, as opposed to the other Sindhi nationalists who the PPP will have to fight in the next election.

But it doesn’t stop at rhetoric.

Zulfi Mirza has led the PPP’s Sindh chapter into an alliance with the thuggish ANP forces of Karachi to push back against and break the stranglehold of the MQM over Karachi, particularly through re-demarcation.

It’s a bizarre sight for long-term observers of Karachi/Sindh politics and a grim indicator of just how cutthroat politics has become: Sindhi nationalists have historically been critical of the influx of settlers from the country but now the PPP is courting those very Sindhi nationalists by making common cause with the Pakhtun settler against the Urdu-speaking one.

If that wasn’t enough fire for Mirza to play with, his overtures to Afaq Ahmad are even more incendiary. Afaq Ahmad is loathed by the MQM and with Mirza calling him the true leader of the Mohajir community, the MQM’s worst fears are being realised: that the MQM-Haqiqi is being revived to try and smash the MQM as it once was in the mid-1990s.

It’s about as ugly as politics can get. Mirza’s ANP and Haqiqi gambits to try and wrest Karachi away from the MQM are rooted in the PPP’s desperation to prove its Sindhi nationalist credentials to the Sindhi voter.

Of course, there’s the small matter of Karachi sliding towards chaos and anarchy and its population cowering in fear. But of such stuff are elections and politics made, at least in Zulfi Mirza’s world.

The irony is the PPP and ANP, had they been led in Sindh by less cynical and ruthless figures, had genuine reason to complain about the MQM’s dominance of Karachi.

The great untold story of the Musharraf era is what happened in Karachi on his watch.

From Musharraf’s perspective, what strengthened the MQM strengthened him because of his fear of the Sindh/PPP card. So the party was given free rein of the city, going from fierce, scrappy competitor to overlord — an ominous shift in the balance of power in a volatile city like Karachi where an uneasy truce had held between the big two populations, the Mohajirs and the Pakhtuns, for many years.

The Pakhtuns got a particularly rough deal in the 2000s. Threatened by the influx of Pakhtuns migrants to the city during the decade and concerned that the traditionally divided Pakhtuns of Karachi would gravitate towards the brash, upstart Shahi Syed — the provincial ANP leader who aspires to carving out his own little fiefdoms in the city — the MQM tried hard to squeeze the settlers from the north.

The Pakhtuns and Mohajirs aren’t direct competitors in Karachi, though. One is middle-class and educated; the other is largely poor, unskilled labour. That was partially what allowed the rickety truce between the two communities to hold for many years.

But if the MQM has been unfair to Pakhtuns, from amidst the Pakhtuns in the city have risen elements that want a share of all the rackets Karachi has to offer — land, transport, drugs, smuggling, etc — and are fighting for it under the guise of party and ethnic politics. And now you have people like Mirza trying to put the MQM to the sword and re-demarcate Karachi in a way that appeals to the Sindhi vote bank.

Karachi should brace itself for more upheaval in the weeks and months ahead. n

The writer is a member of staff

cyril.a@gmail.com