KARACHI: ‘In conversation with Laurent Gayer’, an event organised by the Desi Writers’ Lounge in collaboration with T2F, saw the French writer and academic discuss and dissect the history of violence in Karachi with Sabin Agha, the documentary film-maker and journalist.

The majority of the discussion focused, of course, on Gayer’s most recent book, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City; the culmination of more than a decade of fieldwork and research by the academic.

While the moderator, Agha, could have brought a bit more nuance to the discussion, it was an interesting one nevertheless. The audience raptly listened as Gayer talked about everything and anything related to violence and Karachi: how violence has affected gender roles; the history of the formation of the MQM; how Taliban managed to get a foothold in the metropolis; and how political violence and alliances have reshaped the labour movement in the city.

One of the first things discussed during the talk was the history of the Mohajir nationalist movement. Gayer pointed out that even though most researchers argued that economic marginalization led to the creation of the movement in the 80s, he had not found any evidence to prove that. Instead, Gayer said, it were Urdu poets and intellectuals who “have been central to the cultural nationalism around Urdu” that began in the 70s.

Violence, he argued, was not limited to simply political and ethnic conflict. In fact it was a “form of democracy” and that “there is a system of conflict which works at the level of the city at large”, he said. In other words, he added, violence was not simply random but was used as a political tool.

One of the more interesting examples Gayer gave of this was how political and sectarian parties had reshaped the labour movement in the industrial zones of Karachi. Pointing out that “bhatta is one thing, but some industrialists hire the services of political parties [for other purposes also],” he said his research showed that many big industrialists had successfully colluded with political parties to crush the labour movement.

This, in turn, resulted in labourers turning to sectarian parties to resolve their labour issues, he added.

The capitalist-labour relationship isn’t the only status quo that has been upended by Karachi’s violence; so have gender roles. According to him, young Baloch residents of Lyari now feel safe outside their homes only with women by their side and that he has interviewed the men who feel safer with children. It is, as the writer put it a “strategy of survival in a terribly dangerous world”.

Violent upheaval, Gayer argued, also allowed women to play a more prominent role in the MQM: as male party members went underground in the wake of the 1992 operation against the political party, the vacuum was filled with female members. Women continued to be an integral part of the party’s machinery ever since then.

However, the French academic said, it was also this very violence that alienated women who had been extremely active in students political groups in universities until the 80s when campuses also started witnessing violence.

While most of the discussion was extremely interesting, one of the highlights of the talk was when Gayer discussed the intersection of political parties, violence and the Taliban.

The French academic argued that MQM may have correctly identified the threat of the Taliban — according to him there were “warnings of Talibanisation” in the party’s Urdu political publications in the early 2000s — the MQM made the strategic mistake of not allying itself with the Awami National Party on the issue. Instead it helped created a power vacuum as a result of its conflict with the ANP.

“By focusing on the ANP rather than the actual Taliban, they opened the space for the Taliban. In the early 2000s when the Taliban changed its strategy from [‘vacationing’ in Karachi] to territorial control, the ANP had no presence in the Pashtun-dominated areas of the city, and this was filled by the Taliban or sectarian groups.”

Gayer also argued that the Taliban, who were “outsiders in Karachi”, were able to control large areas of the city by creating an alliance with criminal gangs who knew “how to handle the police, control territory and make large amounts of money”. As the author succinctly put it: “The city changed jihadi militants more than the jihadi militants changed the city”.

All of the talk, however, was not doom and gloom. Karachiites can take small comfort from the fact that their city, as Gayer emphasised, is not as violent as its residents believe pointing out that its “murder rates… are closer to Chicago”, and that it doesn’t even make it into the 50 most violent cities in the world.

Published in Dawn March 3rd , 2015

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