Ali Fehmi

“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
― Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History

“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

“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

“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