MQM: Has the machine begun to creak?
Ever since the late 1980s, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) has aptly been described as ‘a well-oiled electoral machine’.
In Karachi – the country’s largest city and an MQM stronghold – the party’s electoral dynamics have evolved in such a manner that during national and provincial elections, most of what is required to run a successful campaign and contest an election begins to almost automatically fall into place.
Same is the case now with the protest aspect of the party’s politics. The city of Karachi begins to shut down even before (or any) call for a shutdown or a strike is given by the party, and when Karachiites believe that an event has occurred that might ruffle the party’s feathers.
In both circumstances, the MQM operates like a machine that automatically gets switched on to do the needful during an election or a protest. Much of the city of Karachi falls in line, as if instinctively.
Unlike the populist Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), that has always had an overriding degree of spontaneity and an impulse in its ranks and support, the MQM is quite the opposite.
The MQM is a highly structured and well-organised unit that, ironically, is a counterpoint to the chaotic nature of the sprawling metropolis it draws a bulk of its support from.
The party’s edifice and inner-workings reflect the psychological and emotional disposition of the man who formed it – first in 1978 as a student organisation and then in 1984 as a mainstream political party: Altaf Hussain.
For long most of the people who worked closely with Altaf Hussain have considered him to be a ‘control freak;’ a man who is obsessed with maintaining discipline and order in the party – two things that for more than three decades now have eluded the city in which his party is a major political force.