5 - The “Rise” of the MQM: Urban Non-elite Citizens and the Space of Martial Rule

Summary

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).