The man at the heart of this unusual situation is Altaf Hussain, a barrel-shaped man with a caterpillar moustache and a vigorous oratorical style who inspires both reverence and fear in the sprawling south Asian city he effectively runs by remote control.
Hussain is the undisputed tsar of the mohajirs, the descendents of Muslim migrants who flooded into Pakistan during the tumult of partition from India in 1947, and who today form Karachi’s largest ethnic group.
A firebrand of student politics, Hussain galvanized the mohajirs into a potent political force in 1984, when he formed the Mohajir Qaumi Movement – now known as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM. The party swept elections in the city in 1987 and 1988 but quickly developed a reputation for violence.
At early rallies Hussain surrounded himself with gunmen and urged supporters to “sell your VCRs and buy kalashnikovs”; violence later erupted between the MQM and ethnic Sindhi rivals and, later, against the army, which deployed troops to Karachi in the early 1990s.
It was during the tumult of this time that Hussain and his right-hand man, Imran Farooq, who has just been killed in London, fled the city, in the wake of a slew of police accusations of involvement in racketeering and killing.
Both men vigorously denied the charges, insisting that they were politically motivated and took refuge in London to set up a base for the MQM in Edgware, a quiet suburb in the north of the city.
Since then, Hussain has run the party from exile with a tight grip. In Pakistan the party is officially led by Farooq Sattar, a mild-mannered former mayor of Karachi, but most decisions of significance are taken by Hussain.
His trademark feature is a pair of coffee-tinted Aviator shades and he speaks in a sometimes maniacal style. But few of his supporters, many of whom are women, can see him: Hussain has pioneered the “telephone rally” in Pakistan, addressing tens of thousands of people crowded into Karachi streets around a loudspeaker linked up to a telephone.
Under Sattar, the party has tried hard to shake its association with violence in recent years. It won control of Karachi city council during Pervez Musharraf’s rule in 2005, and has won praise for the construction of highways, water schemes and other city amenities. Business leaders in particular have praised its management of an often chaotic city.
But the dark reputation has not entirely gone away. In May 2007 armed MQM supporters held the city hostage during a day of political violence, triggered by Musharraf who is himself a mohajir, that saw more than 40 people killed.
Last month, Raza Haider, a senior MQM official, was gunned down as he said his prayers, triggering a ferocious wave of tit-for-tat killings involving the MQM and rivals in ethnic Pashtun parties and the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, whose Karachi factions are also armed.
The MQM has also been split by rivalries within the mohajir community that have seen periodic blood-letting, both within the MQM and with a breakaway faction known as MQM-Haqiqi, which was fostered in the 1990s by Pakistan intelligence as a means of breaking Hussain’s stranglehold on power in Karachi.
Now, with the gruesome killing of Farooq, a senior if largely colourless figure, the bloodshed appears to have spread from Pakistan to the streets of north London.
