pakistan’s

key transport links—both within Karachi and along the route between Karachi and Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa—has bolstered their economic clout. 42
The MQM, representing Karachi’s middle-class Muhajir community, is well known for its use
of violence to discourage expanding Pashtun migration into the city (while, at the same time,
pushing settled Pashtuns to live in ethnic ghettos as a means of consolidating and restricting their
votes). These tactics have spurred tit-for-tat attacks. But for more than a decade before 2013 both
the Muhajir’s MQM and the Pashtun’s ANP played a key role in Islamabad’s governing coalitions.
This made it much harder for the state’s security personnel (e.g., army rangers) to crack down on
their party-based vigilantes.
In any event, control over urban land is a central feature of Karachi’s party politics. In fact, as
in many other cities, mutually beneficial links have developed between party-based politicians and
criminal mafias—both motivated by an interest in seizing plots of land to construct additional
housing and shops for their supporters. 43 Even as land mafias are involved in providing an
informal solution to Karachi’s persistent housing and infrastructure shortages, however, they are
also involved in providing a healthy income to party-based collaborators (supplying an informal
income to the petty parliamentarians who intervene to provide these mafias with various forms of
political protection). The distribution of social services and the distribution of political impunity
are not incompatible; rather, bringing these elements together is increasingly the name of
Pakistan’s political game.
As Huma Yusuf notes, referring both to the influx of Pashtun migrants and to Karachi’s very
long history of informal settlements (beginning with the influx of Muhajirs from India ater 1947),
“broader socioeconomic factors and land use trends are the true drivers of Karachi’s violence.” 44
Political parties have ceased to offer policy-oriented political “representation”; instead, they
provide “an essential form of protection” under the guise of “ad hoc service delivery.” In fact, the
benefits run at least three ways at once—to politicians, their constituents, and the mafia—with
“land grabbers…us[ing] political connections to regularize squatter settlements…[or] secure
permits to develop [plots for housing]…purchased for a fraction of their market value ater threats
or acts of violence.” 45
Urban mafias are a crucial part of party politics in Karachi. Yet having said this, those mafias
are also keen to maintain a certain amount of operational autonomy. One of the best examples of
this independence moves beyond the city’s well-known Muhajir-Pashtun (MQM-ANP) rivalry to
an area known as Lyari, which is dominated by migrant Baluch. Historically, Yusuf notes, Lyari
has been “a hub of drug smuggling, weapons trafficking, extortion, [and] kidnapping” with close
ties to the PPP. 46 But by 2008 its warring gangs had been brought under the control of a notorious
gangster named Rehman Dakait, who formed a People’s Amn or “Peace” Committee (PAC) to
sustain a ceasefire. Later that year, however, his death created a succession crisis pitting Uzair
42 The route between Karachi and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is also used to supply NATO forces in Afghanistan. Some argue that Pashtun
ties to Pakistan’s national transport infrastructure have helped to stitch the Pashtun community more fully into Pakistan’s national
fabric—effectively pulling them away from the pursuit of a new “Pashtunistan” combining elements of Afghanistan, Balochistan, and
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
43 See Liza Weinstein, “Mumbai’s Development Mafias: Globalization, Organized Crime, and Land Development,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 1 (2008): 22–39.
44 Huma Yusuf, “Conflict Dynamics in Karachi,” United States Institute of Peace, 20, http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/
PW82.pdf.
45 Ibid., 14.
46 Ibid., 12.
INFORMAL AGENCIES OF INFLUENCE IN PAKISTAN u NELSON
73