The predicament of Muhajir national recognition was brought into sharp relief for me one winter evening in Karachi, circa 2009, when I stumbled upon a talk show dedicated to the theme of “language and power” (zubaan aur hukmaraan) on a local private satellite television channel. It featured poets representing each of Pakistan's major regional languages, including Sindhi, Balochi, Punjabi, Pashtu, and Urdu, deliberately and favorably highlighting the country's ethnolinguistic diversity. Despite this, Urdu's status as a universalizing “bridge language” was on full display in this setting, as each poet recited a work in their respective regional mother tongue, followed by a lively discussion in Urdu on the commonalities and differences of imagery, form, and political subject matter.

What caught my attention, however, was the presence of a self-identified “Muhajir poet” in a show dedicated to Pakistan's marginalized native poetic cultures. His delivery was in the kind of chaste “Urdu-e-Mualla” that Pakistan's largely non-Urdu-speaking population has grown accustomed to hearing since the advent of state-run radio and television. Although the gentleman's recitation was delivered in Urdu, his comments stood apart from the other panelists in that he did not emphasize the linguistic particularity of Urdu or Muhajirs. The verse's subject matter was more political and existential in character, casting Muhajirs as beings who had crossed a “river of fire” (aag ka darya) to live in Pakistan. Addressing an immediate and impersonal audience made up of the country's native ethnolinguistic communities, the Muhajir poet expressed grievance – “but you still see us as foreign” (tum abhi bhi ghair samajhte ho) – tinged with defiance: “this land is our final place of refuge (thikaana).” The potency of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) poet's recitation elicited audible calls of appreciation from the non-Muhajir panelists (“wah! wah!”), suggesting a flow of aesthetic and moral acknowledgment of the collective history being portrayed. This scene of aesthetic recognition was short-lived, however. Later in the program, the Muhajir poet suggested that Muhajirs were “that nation (wo qaum) that brought people from the lower middle classes into power.” To this, two of the panelists politely replied in unison, as if to clarify a factual error: “Muhajirs are not a nation (muhajir aik qaum nahi hain).”

Like the military coups that give them life, projects of extra-constitutional political reform are “reflective and transformative occasions, moments between and betwixt ordinary times, when axiomatic values are invoked even as they are questioned and reformulated” (Coronil 1997: 124). Pakistan's head of state Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan ruled under martial law from 1958 to 1961 and then as president under a constitution of his regime's own design until a mass-resistance campaign led to his regime's demise in 1969. His administration relied upon emergency powers to contain regional and leftist political forces that had become increasingly aligned in the years preceding the coup against the centralizing tendencies of the postcolonial state. Paying attention to the discursive, spatial, and institutional connections between the powers of exception and the regulation and agency of everyday citizens, this chapter examines cultural and spatial pedagogies of nation-state building and citizenship that were launched in the context of Pakistan's first military dictatorship.

Much of this work in nation-state building took place under the Bureau of National Reconstruction, a “revolutionary” state institution created shortly after the 1958 coup. The bureau spearheaded two significant projects of authoritarian political reform. The first sought to impose a unitary Muslim national subject to the exclusion of native ethnic and regional identities, an initiative that centered Urdu, north Indian Islamicate history, and, to a related and lesser degree, Urdu-speaking Muhajirs as pedagogical models of Muslim nationality. This project was launched in conjunction with another initiative also housed within the bureau known as the “Basic Democracies” (BD) scheme. It sought to remake Pakistan's electoral-political landscape by limiting electoral franchise to locally bounded constituencies, leaving Pakistani citizens with few mechanisms at their disposal to represent problems – such as the inequities arising from industrial and agrarian capitalist control, and the growing economic and political dominance of Punjab – that confronted the nation at large. Both projects were part of a larger and coherent extra-constitutional strategy to enhance centralized state control over the country's provincial units (F. Ahmad 1998; Ayres 2009; F. H. Siddiqui 2012; Caron 2016).

In Pakistan, the term muhajir (migrant) carries religious, political, and biographical significance, pointing to the role that mass migration has played in shaping the country's experience of decolonization. Nearly six million people crossed into Pakistan as involuntary migrants or “evacuees” shortly after independence (1947) under the protection of an official “transfer of population” accord that was launched by the newly formed federal governments of India and Pakistan in an effort to stem the outbreak of communal genocide on both sides of the partitioned province of Punjab. The archive of the anticolonial nationalist period tells us that mass migration was not envisioned in the outline of Muslim emancipation. As late as June of 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader and chief political strategist of the All-India Muslim League (AIML), could therefore advise his Muslim supporters to “stick to their homelands” in India and “avoid the temptation” to migrate to Pakistan (AIML June 9, 1947). Arriving against late colonial expectations, Muslim migrants entering Pakistan were referred to by the state and within public discourses as muhajireen (migrants/refugees), a term whose Islamic connotations were robustly utilized in the post-Partition context to frame the incoming population as affectees, co-nationals, and citizens-in-the-making.

Included yet distinguished from the larger body of mass migrants within Pakistan at the time of Partition were Muslims from northern and central India, who, in contrast to the majority of the muhajireen arriving in Pakistan at this time, were represented in emergent political terms as ideologically guided voluntary migrants. This section of Pakistan's mass-migrant population came to be referred to as “Muhajirs” in more durable and ethnically charged terms, a shift that is underscored by a linguistic and political transformation of muhajir from a descriptor into a proper name. The demographic upheavals associated with Partition were of such a scale that Muhajirs soon became a numerical majority in the major cities of the southern province of Sindh. The regional-, urban-, and neighborhood-level transformations resulting from this newly found “majority– minority” status were most evident in Karachi, the provincial capital and colonial port city, and the locus for this study.

Until Partition, the provincial capital of Karachi was a relatively small port city (pop. 200,000) whose growth during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was accelerated by wartime trading booms (Khuhro 1999). Sindh's attainment of provincial “independence” from Bombay Presidency in 1923 transformed Karachi into an important arena for the province's politically dominant rural Muslim elite, as well as for the All-India Muslim League (AIML), which received early but conditional support from Sindh (in notable contrast to the League's difficulties in enlisting the Punjab at this time). And yet, like many cities in what came to be known as “west Pakistan,” most of Karachi's pre-independence population was a composite of non-Muslim communities. By 1948, it had become apparent that the majority of the city's inhabitants – made up of Hindus, Sikhs, and Parsis – would be supplanted by incoming Muslim refugees and migrants. According to the first national census of 1951, the city's population had doubled since the last accounting in 1946 to approximately 450,000 and had been “more than replaced by the vast stream of incoming Muslims who … classed themselves as Muhajir” in accordance with the official definition at the time of any individual who came to Pakistan as a result of the communal “disturbances” of Partition (Census of Pakistan 1951: 131). However, as I noted in the previous chapter's discussion of the transfer of population in west Pakistan, the influx of Muslims into urban Sindh continued until well after the official transfer of population had concluded in 1949. Most of the arrivals in this case were from the erstwhile “minority Muslim provinces” of India.

Taking Karachi's post-Partition context as my focus, this chapter shifts from the narrative of mass evacuation to consider the political making of voluntary migrants. The “internal” differentiation of Pakistan's mass-migratory population into evacuees and voluntary migrants was part of the broader, situated attempt on the part of the Pakistani state to fashion itself as a sovereign power in the context of responding to “critical events” (V. Das 1995; see also Chapter 2). My aim here is to highlight how late colonial expectations of Muslim sedentarism after independence were not simply dashed by the eventualities of Partition, but to pay closer attention to specific projects of recognition, regulation, and belonging that unfolded in the decolonizing wake of mass-migration.

The expansion of cities in the Global South has given shape to a social and material dynamics of “habitation” whose relationship to the emancipatory promise of citizenship is neither uniform nor stable (Holston 2009). Although cities are known for their capacity to generate the kinds of mass action that can lead to the “enlargement” of citizenship rights (Holston and Appadurai 1996), the material exigencies of urbanization, such as housing, infrastructure, and services, pose certain explanatory limits to this characterization. Henry Lefevbre defined this as a shift in urban political consciousness and representation from “production to reproduction,” specifically, toward neighborhood-level questions of occupation, settlement, and habitation (Lefevbre, quoted in Holston 2009; S. Benjamin 2008). Such transformations in urban political participation and activism highlight the growing role of land in producing the “congregations of interests that underpin disjunctures in the way cities get built” (S. Benjamin 2008: 245). This is especially the case in post-Partition Karachi, where the “control of land ownership comes hand in hand with a degree of power and control over the city, its population and its investors” (Hasan et al. 2015: 20).

I argue that in the case of Pakistan, the narrative of the urbanization of the political has been profoundly shaped by the onset, retreat, and return of competing orders of military and civilian “rule.” As a postcolonial political concept, “rule” implies both neocolonial and self-determining modalities of sovereignty in motion, especially in the context of Pakistan, where, as the previous chapter made clear, the institutional and cultural locus of sovereignty remains undecided. One site where the tussle between martial and civilian forms of “rule” has been especially pronounced is at the level of neighborhood urban life. More specifically, repeated and abrupt shifts in the structure of state sovereignty have been accompanied by the attendant waxing and waning of the apparatus of elected local government. One of the most vivid yet underexamined effects of this process on Pakistan's democratic landscape has been the inflation of the powers of such elected “local bodies” during martial rule combined with the sheer absence of any form of elected local government during periods of civilian democracy (until 2015).

The ethnic panic spawned by the riots of the mid-1980s allowed the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) to come to the forefront of a process of ethnic fortification and siege, culminating in the creation of MQM-controlled “no-go areas” (ilaaqa ghair). The movement's militant inscription of Muhajirs as an urban ethno-majority involved the use of violence to expel non-Muhajir concentrations in the cities of the province. It also included the creation of a network of local “unit” offices that mapped onto Karachi's existing union council (UC) structure (whose grounded transformation of this apparatus of extra-constitutional political regulation is recounted in the next chapter). This was quickly followed by the dispersal of violent territorialism in most of the city's lower-income Muhajir strongholds, leading to the entrenchment of practices of private government and criminal accumulation that primarily ended up targeting members of the Muhajir community. In Karachi, much of this violence has been propagated by MQM recruits, comprised primarily of Pakistan-born Muhajir men from the city's middle- and lower-class neighborhoods. As I came to learn, part of the experience of life in the no-go area at this time meant dealing not only with the immediate threat of intrusion by an ethnic other but with the existence of a new brand of strangers within, in the form of newly galvanized activists. The latter's willingness and capacity to use violence against members of their own ethnic/local communities poses significant questions about the role of ethnicity, democratic power, and urban space in constituting the subject of Muhajir nationalism.

The MQM's sudden mobilization of Karachi's Muhajir youth gave rise to transgressive expressions of political sociality, “fun” and “spectacle” that challenged elite, official, as well as certain generational doxas of nationhood and urban life (Verkaaik 2004). Oskar Verkaaik argues that ethnic violence has consequently “helped create Muhajir political identity” (Verkaaik 2016). This insight aligns with the work of Nichola Khan on Muhajir militancy. According to Khan, the violence enacted by MQM militants is not just destructive but also “generative insofar as it restores or intensifies the self” (N. Khan 2017: 43).

This book has pressed a range of approaches to the study of postcolonial political modernity to give shape to a genealogy of Muhajir questioning, a historically and spatially sensitive contextualization of the capacity of Muhajir nationalism in the present to question universality “from within” and remake it, in the non-elite context of the urban state of emergency, “from below.” The time of Muhajir nationalism is not the time of origins but the more arrested time of the “no longer” (Guha 1998; see Foucault 1977). By questioning their preceding attachments to Pakistan, Muhajir nationalism calls on Muhajirs to do nothing less than question themselves. Such a demand complicates our ideals of whose imagination and whose essences merit deconstruction as forms of nationalist discourse. It follows that the element of questioning, refusal, and transformation within the Muhajir nationalist imaginary complicates any attempt to periodize and interpret the history of Muhajir community formation. Since the time of independence, the groupness of Muhajirs has been imagined in terms of their exemplary embodiment of the extra-territorial ideal of Muslim nationalism. What can be said about the shifting official and popular registers of nationalist and democratic recognition in relation to which such questioning has taken place, at least since the late colonial period? And what light does this shed on the making of collective political identities, institutions, and spaces in Pakistan and South Asia today? At this stage, I wish to reintroduce some of the larger themes I have explored so far: (a) the categorical newness of Muhajirs (being the product of Pakistan's independence, Muhajirs are not marked as such within the colonial archive, (b) the subjective, material, and institutional role of mass migration in shaping Muhajirs into a certain kind of new ethnicity, and (c) the relationship of this process of representation to Pakistan's wider and freighted narrative of postcolonial nation-state formation.

What do nationalism and nationhood mean to groups, such as Muhajirs, whose self-understanding as an ethnic community does not neatly comport with the idea of the essentialist “subject of certainty”? Essentialism can be thought of as a metalinguistic practice that ties the being of an object (in this case, the past and future interests and actions of a group) to a “self-actualizing” nature removed from the heterogeneous shaping effects of history (Cheah 2003).

The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) is a militant ethno-nationalist movement that achieved mass-democratic power in Pakistan during the 1980s. Propelled by ethnic riots and led by university students with lower-middle-class backgrounds, the MQM used a vigilant style of militancy to transform the cities of the southern Pakistani province of Sindh into an ethnic majoritarian stronghold – this, at the unlikely height of Pakistan's third military dictatorship (1978–1988). From the outset, leaders from the movement voiced long-standing concerns that Muhajirs – partition-era migrants from what is today India – had been systematically pushed out of public sector institutions by native Pakistanis (often referred to by activists in English as “sons of the soil”). The more novel aspect of the MQM's platform, however, was its demand for the recognition of Muhajirs as a separate, “oppressed nationality” (mazlum qaum) within Pakistan. This demand for an ethnic nationality and the displacement it enacts on both official and minority conceptions of the nation is the subject of this book.

Some sense of what is at stake in the displacements of Muhajir nationalism can be found in the story of its original leader, Altaf Hussain. Soon before the MQM achieved mass-political power, Hussain was arrested for burning the Pakistani flag on the steps of the mausoleum of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim nation-state's “great founder and leader” (Quaid-e-Azam). A senior MQM activist's voice swelled with feeling as he recalled the ghostly encounter between the two leaders, which took place shortly after the military coup of 1978. The question of what Hussain was trying to convey that day on the steps of the mausoleum hung between us as we sat there, just slightly removed from the evening bustle of the party office. Sensing my apprehension, he turned in closer to break the silence: “After all, what else can a lover of Pakistan do when they don't receive rights?” (Akhir, jab haq nahi milta to mohib-e-vatan ko kiya karna chahiye?).

Further insight into the MQM's distinctive critique of the Pakistani nation-state can be found in Safar-e-Zindagi (My Life's Journey, 1988), Hussain's hastily written political biography published on the eve of Pakistan's return to civilian democratic rule in which he writes, “[T]he Mohajir [sic] nation had its beginnings (shuruat) in the Two-Nation Theory of Pakistani nationhood” (A. Hussain 2011 [1988]: 132), thereby framing the latter simultaneously as a point origin and departure.

Rais Amrohvi's emancipatory vision of post-Partition Karachi as a “new mold” for the creation of Muslim civilization highlights a tendency found in many settler narratives: the negation of that which existed before their arrival (Rolph-Trouillot 1995). The role of Muslim nationalism in shaping this tendency is illustrated by another poem entitled “Karachawi,” in which Karachi, a city whose name harkens to the pre-colonial history of Sindh, is recast by Amrohvi as a crucible of political unity under Islam:

What was the role that mass migration and nation building played in (re) shaping the trajectory of postcolonial urbanization in Karachi? A good place to begin is with the exodus of Karachi's native, non-Muslim population following independence. Chapter 2 considered how, like many pre-Partition cities in western Pakistan, Karachi possessed a non-Muslim majority until the outbreak of communal violence (much of it perpetrated by incoming refugees seeking shelter and revenge) prompted an exodus. By 1951, Karachi's non- Muslim population had been “more than replaced by the vast stream of incoming Muslims who … classed themselves as Muhajir” (Census of Pakistan 1951: 131). The effects of this demographic transformation on Karachi's economic, ethnic, and political landscape were sudden and far-reaching. The exodus of the non-Muslim majority created a “new ratio” (see Chapter 2), leaving the city without an existing dominant ethnic or religious group whose language, public norms, and forms of urban territoriality would have to be negotiated by incoming migrants.

This chapter examines the production of the Muslim “evacuee,” whose representation at the time of Partition prompted Pakistan's earliest use of official emergency powers to resolve what came to be known among the region's political and technocratic elite as the “refugee problem.” Official representations framed evacuation as a crisis phenomenon in need of resolution while simultaneously casting the Muslim evacuee as a certain kind of national subject, one whose unexpected arrival and need for care acquired the status of an existential imperative for the state in ways that shaped its authority (Naqvi 2007). They provide an illustration of how mass migration and mass migrants came to be conceived through a largely responsive process of political signification, one that refashioned colonial technologies and Muslim nationalist ideals to meet unprecedented situations. I discuss how this gave shape to a finite political language of exceptions, means, and ends that engendered the Pakistani state as a body positioned above the Muslim-majority provinces. Such maneuvers, I maintain, were part of a transnational and translational political process of official commensuration with mass violence, in which the end of the official transfer of population came to be equated with the end of violence. In the narratives that follow, I describe how the “refugee problem” gave rise to logics of official problematization that engendered the federal state as an entity capable of regulating life and deciding on exceptions. Part of this narrative of problematization included the creation of new, regionally defined distinctions between Muslim migrants originating from “agreed” or ‘non-agreed” areas within the newly independent India to Pakistan, whose future was closely debated in the catastrophic wake of decolonization.

Further aspects of the topography, scale, and effects of Partition's chain of violence and displacement should be outlined at this point. The earliest migrations were prompted by outbreaks of communal violence in the Punjab and sections of Delhi in the weeks before independence and persisted until the early spring of 1948. During this period, approximately 7 million refugees crossed the eastern and western borders between India and Pakistan (Ashraf 1949: 24).