Laurent Gayer > Quotes

“Predictable but Contingent: The First ‘Political’ Killing at Karachi University On 25 February 1981, a group of left-wing students from the NSF and PSF was gathered at the Arts Faculty lobby of KU for a demonstration in downtown Karachi when they heard that a military jeep was parked in front of the Administration building. An army major had come to help his daughter get admitted to the university and though he was there for personal reasons, the students were enraged—this was Zia’s Pakistan, a country under military rule, where the left was living its twilight but remained a force to be reckoned with on the campuses, particularly in Karachi. As the organiser of the demonstration, Akram Qaim Khani, recalls, ‘it was a surprise. It was a challenge to us. I was a student leader and the army was in my university…’. At Khani’s instigation, the fifty-odd crowd set off for the Administration building, collected petrol from parked cars, filled a Coca-Cola bottle with it and tried to set fire to the jeep. Khani claims that he saved the driver (‘he ran away, anyway…’), so no one was hurt in the incident, but while the students—unsuccessfully—tried to set the jeep on fire, a group of Thunder Squad militants arrived on the scene and assaulted the agitators. Khani (who contracted polio in his childhood and thus suffered from limited mobility) had been spared from physical assault in the past (‘even the big badmash thought “we cannot touch Akram, otherwise his friends will kill us’”), but this time he was roughed up by Thunder Squad badmashs Farooq and Zarar Khan, and he was eventually captured, detained, and delivered to the army, which arrested him.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“This fragmentation of public authority went even further in Pakistan than in India. In Pakistan, state power never permeated society as deep and far as in India, as the dissemination of highly technological forms of violence within society and the inability of state authorities to enforce a national system of taxation exemplify—two developments that have no parallel in neighbouring India. The evolutions of Karachi’s society over the past four decades bear testimony to this. The proliferation and ever-increasing power of these non-state sovereigns, claiming for themselves the right to discipline and punish but also to protect, tax and represent local populations, has turned the city into a ‘zone of unsettled sovereignties and loyalties’,122 where the access to arms has become the privileged if not the sole venue towards power and wealth.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“One of the first initiatives of the Hindu banyas who founded modern Karachi at the beginning of the eighteenth century was to protect the settlement—and more prosaically their shipments—against incursions from pirates. Seth Bhojoomal, the founder of modern Karachi and himself a prosperous merchant from the interior of Sindh, proceeded to fortify the city. The surrounding mangrove trees were cut down, and foreign workers were recruited to assist local labourers in the construction of mud and wood ramparts, while six cannons were brought from Masqat, according to Bhojoomal’s great grandson, Seth Naomul Hotchand.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“Fig. 5: Distribution of land ownership rights in Karachi (in %) Source: Hasan, Arif and Mansoor Raza, Karachi. The Land Issues, op. cit., p. 15.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“The 1962 Sino-Soviet split took its toll on the left movement, as it led to a fissure of the NSF along pro-Moscow/pro-Beijing lines. This factionalisation of the NSF benefited the IJT, which won students’ union elections at KU between 1969 and 1974. By then, the NSF had imploded into two major factions (the pro-China NSF-Mairaj and the pro-Moscow NSF-Kazmi)22 and Karachi student politics were getting increasingly polarised around the struggle between leftist and Islamist activists. In 1973, independent progressive students formed the Liberal Student Organisation (LSO), which took the lead of an anti-IJT alliance including factions of the NSF as well as the PPP’s student wing, the Peoples Student Federation (PSF), which was formed in 1972.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“I was going on a motorbike with a friend of mine in my area [Shah Faisal Colony] and suddenly we saw a university students’ union van. At that time, the union was run by the Jama‘at-e-Islami [IJT]. It was very surprising because the jama‘atis never dared to enter our area. Then I saw one badmash [rogue] called Sayyid in the van. So I told my friend: ‘Maybe they are planning to do something to us, to attack us. There must be something wrong, we must follow them.’ So we followed them in the colony and they parked the van in front of a house and Sayyid and another badmash came out of the car and they had two large boris [gunny bags] that looked very heavy. Then they dumped these two bags in that house. […] I decided that we should check on them in the morning. I gathered all our friends, maybe 20, 30, in my house, and in the early morning, we surrounded their house. At eight o’clock, Sayyid came back with the van and they started uploading the bags. When they were about to upload the second one, Tipu [the most well known PSF militant] came and, you know, he had no patience in him. I had told everyone, ‘Let them complete their job and then we’ll do something.’ But after the first batch [was uploaded in the van], Tipu shouted ‘O, Sayyid!’ He was carrying a gun—we only had one gun, with maybe 20 bullets—and he started firing at Sayyid. Sayyid ran away and the other man ran away and we captured all those bags. They were full of pistols, Sten guns, knives… Hundreds of them… That is the day we became rich in Karachi, when we realised that we could conquer all Karachi. Jama‘at was vanished from Karachi University for a month. Not a single of them went outside because they knew that we had guns now. It was the first time that we saw so many guns. Then the thinkers, the political people [like him] realised that something is happening. How come they have that much and are bringing that many revolvers in Karachi University? [Nearly] 500 revolvers and Sten guns? What is happening? Everybody realised that things in Karachi were about to change.32”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“Table 3: Vote share of major political parties in Karachi (Sindh Provincial Assembly elections), 1988–2013”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“the population of Karachi increasing by 369 per cent between 1941 and 1961, possibly the fastest rate of growth ever registered for a city of that size in world history.25 By 1951, according to the first Census of Pakistan, the composition of Karachi’s population had drastically changed. In 1941, 51 per cent of the city’s inhabitants were Hindu and only 42 per cent Muslim. Ten years later, 96 per cent of the city’s total population was Muslim, and only 2 per cent Hindu. According to the Census, refugees from India now accounted for 55 per cent of the total population of the city,”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“The patterns of student violence started changing with the inflow of firearms to Karachi campuses. Modern weaponry (Sten-guns and revolvers, and later on Kalashnikovs) was introduced onto the campus by the militants of the Thunder Squad, the armed wing of the IJT.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“Thus, the PTI fared relatively well in a number of constituencies that until now were considered impregnable fiefdoms of the MQM. This was the case, for instance, of NA-245 (National Assembly constituency covering North Nazimabad), where it registered 54,937 votes against 115,776 for the MQM. This was also the case—and even more remarkably, considering that this is the ‘home’ constituency of the MQM—in NA-246 (Azizabad), where Amir Sharjeel registered 31,875 votes against Nabeel Gabol (who won with 137,874 votes). If the PTI won the same number of seats as the PPP (one National Assembly seat and three Provincial Assembly seats) in 2013, it registered more than twice its number of votes in the National Assembly election and 230,000 more votes in the Provincial Assembly election. The MQM has reasons to worry: not only did the PTI become Karachi’s second party in terms of vote share (and a party which, adding insult to injury, garnered a significant number of votes from MQM traditional constituencies, unlike the PPP), but its candidates polled in second position in twenty-two provincial constituencies (out of forty-two) and fifteen (out of twenty) national constituencies.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“Recent developments, such as the tussle between the PAC and the PPP in Lyari, the showdown between the MQM and Muhammad Khan in Altaf Nagar or the eviction of the ANP from its former strongholds at the hands of the Taliban unequivocally demonstrated that mainstream political parties have lost some ground to a new breed of de facto sovereigns in several parts of the city. A growing number of stakeholders, all of whom have formidable economic and military resources, are determined to defend their sense of entitlement to the city.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“Karachi was not always synonymous with charred buses and mutilated bodies wrapped in gunny bags. The ‘Guide to Karachi’ distributed to American soldiers posted in the city during the Second World War described it as the ‘Paris of the East’ and the ‘cleanest city in the whole of India’, while praising its ‘sea beach and bathing places’.2 Many Karachiites who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s also remember the city as pleasant and secure—a safe haven where children would spend most of their time playing outside, where doors would be left unlocked and where women could go to see films and relish the latest Indian hits without chaperones.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“The Rise of Pakistan Leftist Student Organisations In the years that followed the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the student wing of the Pakistan Muslim League, the Muslim Students Federation (MSF),2 reigned supreme over Pakistani student politics. But this hegemony did not last long. In the early 1950s, the MSF imploded along factious lines and was overrun by a new student body, the Democratic Students Federation (DSF), which was launched in Rawalpindi in 1948 and extended to Karachi in 1950. Initially, the DSF concentrated on student matters (admission procedures and fees, improvement of the teaching environment…) but it gradually politicised under the influence of Marxist student leaders.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City