THE ripples from the raid last week on Nine Zero, the MQM’s headquarter in Karachi, continue to course through the city and wider afield.

Considering it is the fourth largest political party in Pakistan and one that has reigned virtually unchallenged in the country’s financial jugular — some would say had a chokehold on the city of 20 million — this is scarcely surprising.

Let alone the citizens of Karachi, the party itself appears to have been caught completely off guard by the no-holds-barred, Rangers-led raid on its formidable redoubt.

The party’s response to the offensive, perhaps the harshest action against it since the army-backed operations of the 1990s, has ranged from plaintive claims of victimisation to belligerent denials of culpability.

Know more: Rangers file case against MQM Chief Altaf Hussain

On Monday, party supremo Altaf Hussain refuted allegations of a militant wing within the party, maintaining that any misdeeds committed by its activists comprise “personal conduct” of individuals rather than actions sanctioned on an organisational level. That would, at the very least, mean that the MQM is shockingly poor at screening its cadres.

The MQM is an anomaly, a party that has survived in the rough and tumble of Pakistani politics despite a central leadership remotely controlling it from thousands of miles away.

Usually, fear has been the not-so-secret weapon it has wielded to that end, both when it wanted to bring Karachi to a standstill at a moment’s notice — thereby demonstrating its relevance in the national political landscape — and also when it wanted to chastise its own leaders for perceived crimes of omission or commission.

Those who could have comprised the second tier of the MQM leadership and taken politically sound decisions are instead perpetually engaged in a struggle to keep their heads above water.

Some of them have mysteriously either met a nasty fate or voluntarily removed themselves from the political arena. As a result, there is a crisis of leadership in the party, with a yawning vacuum below the man in London.

After the recent turn of events, there is only one possible way ahead for Mr Hussain. And that is to purge the MQM of the militant elements within — whether they have taken “shelter” within it, or been actively cultivated by it.

For a party that has been sending its representatives to the assemblies since 1984, electoral politics is not a strange country. It is high time this is the only kind of politics it engages in.

Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2015

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