Violence, Anti-Convention and Desires for Transformation amongst Pakistan’s Mohajirs in Karachi

Nichola Khan

AbstractThis article investigates practices of militancy amongst young men who became political mercenaries during the (1984–2002) Karachi conflict involving Pakistan’s ethno-nationalist Mohajir party, the MQM. It explores the affective domain which emerges out of ethnicized positions on identity, and its role in structuring political subjectivity and violent action. Political killings were not solely driven through class, deprivation or ethnic politics, but also by idealized images of manhood and desires for creating and restoring selfhood in meaningful ties with other militants. While the violence led MQM into government, for militants it produced an incommensurable relationship between generativeness and violence in which deep disappointments and fractured masculinities were powerfully inscribed.

Keywordsaffect, the Karachi conflict, life-history, masculinity, MQM, political subjectivity, transformation, violence

Theorizing Mohajir Militancy

This article explores violence amongst male youth who became political mercenaries in the recent Karachi conflict involving the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (United National Movement, MQM), Pakistan’s ethno-nationalist Mohajir party, representing the Urdu-speaking Muslim migrants to Sindh province following (1947) Partition. Drawing on ethnography and biography in a Central Karachi neighbourhood, it contributes a view on male subjectivity, political terror and the affective force of fantasies, aspects which in Pakistan are relatively unelaborated.

Cultural Dynamics22(3) 225–245

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Corresponding author:Nichola Khan, Mayfield House, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, Falmer, East Sussex BN1 9PH UK Email: nichola.khan@gmail.com; N.Khan@brighton.ac.uk

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The dominant interpretive framework of ethno-nationalism in Pakistan is situated in the neo-Marxist tradition and highlights the crisis of state power in its accounts of the ethnic fragmentation of civil society since (1947) Independence. It emphasizes violence as a radical disjunctural outcome of problematic relationships between the larger catego-ries of state, economy and civil society and emphasizes long-standing failures in demo-cratic political legitimacy, the military’s overdominant position as the ultimate arbiter of (predominantly ethnic Punjabi) political power and the plundering of state resources by those in power. Analyses of the causes of violence amongst Mohajir youth have priori-tized a peripheralized movement of a frustrated petty-bourgeois ‘salariat’ class aspiring to higher employment quotas (Alavi, 1990), discrimination resulting from progres-sive decline in the fortunes of Sindh’s Mohajirs after Independence (Ahmed, 1999), the role of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in promoting MQM in the decade following General Zia-ul-Haq’s military rule (1977–88) (Jalal, 1995), the state’s role more gener-ally in extending differential state patronage to regional subdivisions and creating domestic conflict (Grare, 2006), an ununified Pakistani identity that has fuelled religious nationalisms since Independence (Shaikh,, 2009) and the role of political narrative in structuring Mohajir communities and action around suffering, ressentiment and lost attachments dating back to Partition (e.g. Khattak, 2002). Explanations have additionally accounted for the context of a city at breaking point due, after the mid-1980s, to the proximal effects of massive economic and demographic transformations following the (1977–88) Soviet–Afghan war and, subsequently, ethnic fissures attending disputes over powerful economies of transport, weapons, narcotics and land resources (Gayer, 2007).

One corollary of the deployment of ethnicity as an instrument of political legitimacy by analysts and politicians in Pakistan is a tendency to exaggerate the lenses of ideology and identity and to typify individuals as either uncritical victims and reactionaries to ‘deprivation’ and ‘ideology’, or maverick criminal perpetrators, obscuring other political topographical influences on violence. Though useful, these ‘explanations’ tend to ‘ethni-cize’ the violence rather than to deal with its meaning to communities and individuals involved. The positive active role played by individuals in shaping cultural, political and economic practices of opposition to social marginalization is left fairly unelaborated, as is the deep imaginary and affective appeal of violence to young men. While violence might respond to desires for power and opportunity, to deprivation, humiliation, conflict or unhappiness—and to their symbolic formulation in political culture—the metaphori-cal impact of the centrality of these factors in many intellectual approaches is to collapse political rhetoric into an extemporization of conditions that may equal neither motivation nor intention (Asad, 2007). While intentions may become crystallized into motivation, they are also inexplicit, unconscious and unclear to actors. Violence may be an exhilarat-ing, excessive end in itself, or entered into unthinkingly, or expressive of a traumatic psychical reality that is infused not with motivation or intention, but a fundamental incomprehensibility and illucidity to perpetrators.

This article seeks to interweave political, social, cultural and affective elements in an analysis of political subjectivity and violent action. It employs biography and ethnography to reveal the presence of multiple forms of past and present violence in the contours of militants’ lifeworlds. It questions the extent to which young men’s experiences of violence can be read as a search for self-definition, to which their developmental trajectories are

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intertwined with social and political relations during conflict, and to which these processes are gendered. Beyond material political realities where instrumentalism, training and the political manipulation of boys are prominent, the terror and practice of transgressive male violence fuse the destruction of multiple interrelated forms of power with the exhilaration of a violent political imaginary. Violence additionally translates into a powerful catalyst for restoring fractured selfhood and redeeming the past, offering individuals a solution to their dilemmas of how to be recognized and understood.

The article takes a psychological-cum-social approach to investigate how, after the mid-1980s, MQM transformed the frustrations of many young men into possibilities for realizing autonomy and new modalities for acquiring social, political and economic power, but also to examine how affect and imagination intersect with instrumentalism and ideology for militants in situ. Beyond a political category signifying dispossession and status in the body politic, ethnicity has a personal private face and is critical in revealing the explanatory and instrumental power attributed by activists to ethnicity compared to other factors, and ways they negotiated their daily lives in a complex social and political environment. While violence may respond to poverty and exclusion in urban neighbourhoods, and be contingent, it is also particularistic and individual, and its actualization is dependent on the interaction of biographic meaning and heterogeneous (political, family, local) historical conditions.

Biography is thus given prominence as a key analytical lens in approaching the dilemma of understanding the constellations of events and discourses about violence in which narrators are culturally, politically and historically embedded. This emphasis has engaged ethnographers of violence, for example Farmer (1996) who combines ethnog-raphy with biography in order to illustrate how the structural violence of larger social matrices becomes translated into personal suffering in Haiti. Feldman’s (1991) analysis of Northern Irish sectarianism shows how the ‘disjunctive’ in oral histories can reveal the instrumentalism of political imaginaries, the limits of official political codes and connectivities between event, self and narration. In Karachi, Chaudhry (2004) explores how multiple selves are (re)constituted in the telling of life-stories for two women sur-vivors of extreme violence on the city’s urban margins: what life-stories reveal about the impacts of global political relations, national and regional politics, authoritarian state systems, local hierarchies and national, social and familial patriarchies. In her compelling analysis of survivors of the 1984 Delhi riots, Das urges consideration of more subtle performances of violence in everyday life which may be found, she argues, in uncovering the gap between what is communicated in words and what is revealed non-verbally, in everyday, ordinary rumours, gestures or silences (2007). It is in these details that the internal and external formations and experiences of remembered and embodied pain arising from the extreme violence of critical events may be revealed and a context of meaning and expression may be restored to experiences of violence that have become ‘frozen, numb, without life’ (Das, 2007: 8). Pursuing Das’s analytical insistence on the everyday expression of interior states, Khan offers an interesting account of how sectarianism in Pakistan takes form in the domestic weave of family relations, and how the negativity of a field of religious differences becomes expressed as both malevolence and generosity in the family and internalized as contradictory aspects of selfhood (2006).

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These accounts show how people are neither passive recipients nor mirrors of uncon-scious discourses, images and modes of thinking and feeling, and give prominence to ways individuals aggregate past experiences in alignment with naïve present experience and their concerns for self-presentation. I pursue this approach and the idea that bio-graphical narrative can transform suffering into new agendas for constructing (idealizing) and experiencing selfhood for people living with multiple layers of historical and political violence. The narrativization of violence I submit helps former militants construct post hoc justifications and understandings of violence, rework their experiences through political discourse, fantasy and imagination in order assert themselves as impressive actors on a critical political scene. More subtly, it enables them to experience themselves as active agents in the fragile work of creating selfhood, and resolving the tensions between past and present, the extraordinary and banal, and life and death, that have char-acterized their exposure to multiple forms of violence over time. These aspects take precedence in this article over the causes, explanations and ‘motivations’ derived from the overarching concepts of ethnicity and state.

A further central dimension of this article concerns a gendered analysis of men’s political participation and violence, and the way they approached past and present suffer-ing in their lives. Relevant here are the address to the interplay of gendered performance and desires for violent transformation made in Hansen’s (2004) analysis of Mumbai’s Shiv Sena party, and in Verkaaik’s (2004) ethnography of MQM militancy in Hyderabad in Pakistan. These accounts emphasize the role of performative violence in inscribing claims about male power on the post-Independence social and political landscape, enacted within a particularistic male militant cultural style of enunciating opposition. Hansen’s focus is on ways nationalist identities and politics have been imagined, asserted and reproduced through performative, anti-authoritarian violence—and, germane to the de-emphasis on rational political and economic objectives here, he proposes ritualized violence as an instrinsic raison d’être for political participation. Verkaaik explores how rhetorical play combines with transgressive practices (‘fun’) within MQM militant com-munities to constitute new forms of achieving prestige, power, visibility, rebellious action and self-legitimation. While he skilfully analyses ways pre-and post-Indepen-dence histories of ethnicity and Islam bear on the articulation of identity and violence, he is less concerned with dimensions of suffering and ways subjectivities are also produced from the symbolic, everyday and physical violences of exclusion, poverty, armed con-flict and violent losses. Extending these analyses, this article touches on the role of mem-ory, perception and fantasy in manufacturing violent male subjectivity. Masculinity is emphasized as a political category expressive of an unachievable desire rather than a permanent identity.

Characterizing the ConflictA defining feature of the Karachi conflict was the intense violence of the MQM. All the agencies and state’s security forces and Sindhi, Pukhtun and Punjabi ethnic and political groups in the city were targets of MQM political murders, kidnappings and criminality. MQM’s appeal amongst Karachi’s lower-middle classes led it to win landslide electoral victories in provincial government in 1988, 1990, 1993, 1997 and 2002. In 2006, MQM

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was re-elected to city government. The party’s involvement in violence led the state to enforce multiple military operations in the city in 1986, 1990, 1992, 1995 and 1998. The violence intensified after 1992 when MQM split into two factions and many neighbour-hoods became divided into ‘no-go’ enclaves patrolled by armed militants loyal to MQM under Altaf Hussain or the new MQM-Haqiqi (Real MQM). Estimates of deaths in Karachi due to politically-motivated violence between 1994 and 1998 are cited at around six thousand, since 1996 a thousand per year (UNHCR 1999) and by MQM sources at over 22,000 since MQM’s inception (personal communications, July 25 2000). Daily media reports of violence in the crackdowns of 1992, 1994–5 and 1997–8 implicated the state and MQM. MQM faced difficulties in maintaining a victimized position while engaging in armed conflicts with a repressive state. A key process involved the discur-sive construction of a politically, culturally and militarily oppressed Mohajir community, expressed in party-political commentary as insufferable subjugation, bigotry, ‘brutal rule’ (MQM News, Sept. 1999), ‘slavery’ by the ‘Punjabi state’ (MQM News, Jan. 2001) articulated in powerful metaphors and poetry as collective suffering dating back to Partition and viewed as continuous with the present (e.g. Farooq 19991). MQM premier Altaf Hussain outlined the MQM’s position: ‘I do not advocate violence. But violence breeds violence. When the state itself commits terrorism, when it persistently terrorises its own people, the people will ultimately be forced to retaliate in a similar manner’ (Newsline, 1999). By the early 1990s the MQM had instrumentalized the chaos and instability to create powerful criminal networks involving violent extortion (bhatta). Organizational power in local communities was concentrated with those purportedly most heavily involved in racketeering. Irfan Hussain wrote: ‘boys as young as thirteen and fourteen roam the streets with automatic weapons. Young recruits can’t get jobs but in the profession of killing are adequately compensated out of bhatta’ (1998). The con-flict made violence integral to political processes. Coalition governments formed with MQM in 1988, 1989 and implicitly in 2002 gave credence to claims that peace would depend on political processes including MQM.

‘Pehle Gole, Bat Mein Bat, Liaquatabad, Liaquatabad!’This article draws on fieldwork conducted in Liaquatabad, a semi-formal almost exclu-sively Mohajir settlement or slum (basti’) in Central Karachi.2 Also known interchange-ably by locals as Lalukhet, Liaquatabad runs alongside the Lyari River between ‘old’ sabzi mandi (vegetable market) and Teen Hatti bridge, following S. M. Taufiq Road. The river separates Lalukhet from the largely Pukhtun areas sabzi mandi and PIB Colony and a bridge divides it from the Pukhtun squatter settlement Nishtar basti.

Liaquatabad is typical of a Karachi basti characterized by physical deterioration, where the presence of illegal low-income settlements and the widespread practice of subletting resulted, after the late 1950s, in a low average income in a formerly middle-class area (Van den Linden, 1979: 197). It is also a historical arena and intermittent the-atre of dense conflict that experienced inter- and intra-ethnic riots and military repressions during the conflict. During the 1992 military operation ‘Clean-Up’, it was targeted by the state’s security forces as a major MQM ‘terrorist’ enclave. Many residents were proud of their fearsome Mohajir militants whom they hoped could protect them from attack.

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Verkaaik might describe it as one of those ‘feral’ and perceptibly ‘uncanny, dangerous and disturbing parts of the city’ where urban anarchy became translated into aspects of ethnic pride and self-representation for urban Mohajir youth (2009: 78). For its residents Liaquatabad represented a source of comfort, pride as well as a space of ethnic confron-tation. I first arrived in 1993 (with my then Mohajir husband) and stayed until 1995, during an intense phase of the conflict. I maintained close relations with the community. Subsequently, I combined my visits with dissertation fieldwork and research. My neigh-bours, friends, their extended kin, peer and political networks acted as my informants. This article draws principally on four interviews conducted in 2004 and 2006.

My initial encounters with the militant community were shaped by my roles as wife, sister-in-law (bhabi) and daughter-in-law of a family whose sons were MQM supporters and activists. I represented a somewhat anomalous bhabi. Militants permitted me to hang out with them on street corners (chaboutrey), invited me into their homes, celebrations, or on night missions to ‘guard’ the area. I became privy to whispered details of violent encounters with the police, security forces or ‘enemies’. This initial phase afforded me trust and access to relationships and intimacies with perpetrators, victims and opponents of violence I would have found highly difficult to gain otherwise. While I initially empa-thized with the militant ‘cause’ (manshoor) and logic that ‘war’ (jang) was a suitable resistance to the state’s brutality, I came to see it as reproductive.

Political Mobilization: Envisioning ‘Ways Out’Lalukhet’s largely petty-bourgeois, middle-class-aspirational citizenry were likely to respond enthusiastically to the emergent MQM’s rhetoric in the 1980s of ethnic discrimi-nation in public sector which resonated with their experiences of poverty, unemploy-ment, police partisanship, communal violence, and their associated feelings of frustration and rage. Arshad emphasized the injustice he felt as a newly qualified jobseeker in the public sector:

After my hardworking years in education I still needed to pay a bribe or find personal contacts to get a job. I was furious. Merit was unimportant. My Punjabi class-fellow had a lower-grade certificate and got a job. My father agreed to pay, but why should he?’

While narrating reasons for mobilization within the framework of political discourse could provide an acceptable justification for acts of violence that followed—as well as for class analyses of political mobilization—perhaps the immediacy, dynamism and promise of violence simply held greater appeal for Arshad than the conventional routes to social advancement followed, for example, by his brothers.

Arshad’s recruitment gained him an immediate sense his unique merits had been rec-ognized and of power and autonomy; secrecy strengthened its power. ‘Later everybody joined, like a craze, but I joined very secretly because the government agencies were against MQM. A high local official noticed me. MQM was poor; they needed money so he began giving me a few jobs.’ Arshad stole cars and robbed small businesses to raise party funds, was entrusted with arranging weapons, and ‘silencing enemies’ (MQM ko dushmanoun ko harmush kiya), providing armed assistance during clashes between

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student groups and later, armed security to the MQM leader Farooq Sattar as mayor of Karachi (1988–92).

Evidencing his unique qualities during the interview, as in earlier years, Arshad proudly recounted how being entrusted with ‘secret tasks’ enormously strengthened his feeling of self-importance, of being specially chosen to conduct violent missions. This bears out Aretxaga’s discussion of how whispered conversations, secrets and conspira-cies circulating during conflict can vitalize a space of social fantasy within which rela-tions of power can be imagined and materialized (2000: 64). Killings for Arshad represented a risky, exciting means to access the trust and approval of a select elite, as well as a powerful new self-image—a privilege.

Poverty features in each account of mobilization. Arshad’s earliest memories include hunger and frequent beatings by his father. His father had been a successful ‘millionaire’ until ‘cheated’ by his Punjabi partner. ‘When I was born we had nothing. We lived in Lalukhet in one room.’ Arshad’s father was a strict authoritarian; in ‘teaching’ his son to acquire a dominant male self able to repress hurt and humiliation, paternal violence was synonymous with love: ‘My father adored me, but was strict about manners. Our area was poor, if played with the streetboys, he’d beat me, but afterwards hold me. I miss him. I wouldn’t be in this trouble if he was alive.’ Perhaps because his father had died by the time of this interview Arshad’s anger, as previously, was directed towards the Punjabized state, becoming subsumed within MQM’s political agendas. ‘Altaf Hussain spoke about my experience exactly. MQM was all about equal rights for Mohajirs. That’s why I joined. But to change the system I knew I’d have to die, it was a struggle of my life, not of days.’

Shakeel was entrusted as an infant to his sister because his widowed mother could not afford his keep. Married to a low-paid clerk, she fared little better. Growing up, he became preoccupied with making money, the source of his problems. ‘Our financial position was awful. Finally I found work as a bus-conductor but fought with the passen-gers, drivers or traffic police. They treated us inhumanly.’ He embraced the opportunities presented by organized local action for financial gain: ‘I befriended the MQM boys who seemed smarter than the bus-station boys. Although I pasted posters, my sole aim was to form a gang. I wanted weapons and money. A gang can’t survive by renting guns!’

Faisal describes his father as violent disciplinarian whom he witnessed being vio-lently humiliated by ‘Punjabi’ police as a child. While he was uncritical of the paternal violence he experienced, possibly because disciplinarian forms of parenting and punish-ment are normal in many Pakistani families, he cited this memory to justify his violent hatred of Punjabis. Mobilization to MQM may have offered a chance to avenge attacks on his father and win his approval. ‘The Lalukhetis wanted freedom and hated corrup-tion. We were third-class citizens, defenceless, without rights or law and order. Altaf Hussain urged us to unite and fight. His message attracted everyone, even my father.’

Not all militants cited political commitment or poverty. For Shehzad, desires for sta-tus or respect were paramount. Because of perceptions they bravely protected communi-ties against attacks by the army, police and ethnic enemies, activists commanded high standing: ‘MQM workers were highly respected by all, even us children. We idolized them and envied their respect. Many of us joined.’

Desires to reinstate hope for the future and improve social identity reverberated intensely with individuals’ problems and biographical experiences. For these men

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experiencing the structural violence of poverty, unemployment, ethnicized and classed forms of inequality and exclusion that dominated the political concerns of Karachi soci-ety after the 1980s, violence, as political practice, promised a solution to diverse, effec-tively blocked, desires for power, respect, ready cash and gainful employment.

‘Ways in’: Violent Initiations in the Mohajir–Pukhtun RiotsStructural explanations of the crisis of state and civil society that had thwarted advance-ment for Karachi’s Mohajirs are relevant to the ethnicized violence that followed MQM’s emergence, and to the significance of social and material opportunities afforded militants by the conflict, though they leave unconsidered the enormous, vitalizing affective power that organized violence held for individuals. One of MQM’s first mobilizations occurred in the Mohajir–Pukhtun riots of 1985–6, described by Hussain as virtual ethnic warfare ‘unprecedented since the partition of the subcontinent’ (1990: 192). Liaquatabad, adjoin-ing the Pukhtun area around sabzimandi, was severely affected. The riots also marked Arshad’s transition to a more open engagement in violence, justified in terms of deepen-ing ideological commitment:

‘I first saw Altaf Hussain when he visited Lalukhet. He spoke about equal rights for Mohajirs, it was fire-blood in my body. His words were like magic, they pierced my heart. He didn’t give false hopes. He said ‘We can try, but our dream may be impossible. Or, so hard we may die. Prepare yourself to die if you want to change this system.’ I made a decision—I wanted to change the system and was prepared to die. Killing didn’t bother me, Pakistani politics was so violent anyway. Boys from all parties were fighting and killing each other—we had no choice. I became ashamed when I discovered we were fighting for other reasons. He sold our blood. But then, I believed it was war—innocent people should die. The first time I killed nothing physically bad happened. I didn’t sleep well the first night but had to quickly get used to it. I didn’t care. We just followed orders.’

Arshad’s words convey the pride he experienced as a killer and his present feelings of guilt and shame, resolved through presenting himself as beguiled and betrayed by Altaf Hussain. These tensions appear in his account of the 1986 riots:

‘All this killing was necessary because a war was happening between Pukhtuns, the state and Mohajirs. Sorabh Goth was lawless then, weapons and drugs were available in large quantities. Nearby was a Mohajir neighbourhood. The police-station was one block away but trading was open. Altaf Hussain’s first appeal to the Pakistani government was to shut down Sorabh Goth because our children were buying heroin. One morning in Aligarh Colony the Pukhtuns killed more than 280 Mohajirs in their homes. By evening all Karachi heard what the Pukhtuns had done. The Mohajirs stood up to kill, our blood was hot, we wanted revenge. Our in-charge said they have killed 300 Mohajirs so we must kill 600 Pukhtuns. My first job was to kill 600 Pukhtuns, one night in December 1986. We hijacked two cars. No kalashnikovs—the latest weapons were stenguns. We went looking for Pukhtuns, innocent Pukhtuns. These Pukhtuns are hard workers, they came to Karachi as labourers and sleep under the sky, they don’t have

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homes.3 They’re easily found sleeping on roads and in parks. We were fourteen boys. We killed as many as we could and it was reported in the morning papers. That was the start.’

Faisal also joined during the riots. A student enrolled at a Saddar College, he scrutinized newspaper reports of spiralling communal violence and Mohajir deaths, becoming increas-ingly concerned about the threat from the neighbouring Pukhtun areas. Faisal abandoned college and with his friends began watch-keeping the area at nights, returning home at dawn. Feelings of terror were a key motivation:

‘The Pukhtuns were killing Mohajirs all over Karachi. We were terrified. The army couldn’t protect us, the police were Punjabi.4 Altaf Hussain gave a speech: arm ourselves or be killed tomorrow. I believed I had no choice. Lalukhet is next to Sabzimandi, I couldn’t sleep for five nights, terrified I’d be killed in my home. We started buying weapons. I bought two guns from some Punjabi and Pukhtun friends.5 Every night we guarded the main entrance. Our local MQM official said ‘Join us, we’ll fight together.’ So I joined. But we couldn’t use our weapons properly. He said we needed training. He selected four of us and said we were going to Afghanistan. I said ‘I agree’.’

Becoming MenCharacterizations of the conflict tended to view Mohajir youth as either radically deter-mined ‘victims’ (MQM) or agentive ‘terrorists’ (the state, media and MQM’s detractors) responsible for the ‘kalashnikov culture’ and ‘kidnapping culture’ that resulted in MQM’s ‘terrorization’ of Karachi (e.g. Bakhtiar, 1998; Niazi, 1998). An emphasis on the inter-play of these positions identifies the new opportunities the conflict offered young men to become prime agents in forging routes to bypass the protracted process of acquiring respected adult status conventionally. If we conceptualize Mohajir youth after the mid-1980s as a social moratorium characterized by social marginality, the classed, political and ethnicized aspects of mobilization may be translated, through the structuring medium of violence and its new socialities, into the differing degrees of agency, independence and control made available to militant youth over the (desired) direction of their lives, and meaningful personal and social experiences.

While the acquisition of manhood occurs in a specifically delimited field (‘weapons-training’, political killings), I neither imply it describes a Turner-esque rite of passage with fixed, continuous stages leading to the total achievement of manhood, nor that man-hood is a fixed category. I view political violence more as a heroic performative project in the transformation of selfhood (Butler, 1999) that is enacted in groups of male youth. For Faisal and Arshad, the way ‘into’ militancy involved alternative modes of education and employment, centring on ‘weapons training’ in Afghanistan, and bearing similarities with processes of acquiring adulthood in the army or associated institutions where young men are organized to form characters for larger social purposes. Although the violent form of authority and political agency they acquired corresponded with MQM’s political agendas, and ‘training’ describes their transition into the manly status of professional ‘bodyguards’, their bodyguard group also reflected many practices of the friendship

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gangs that characterize adolescent boys’ culture in Karachi neighbourhoods. ‘Becoming men’ represents just one way masculinity is performed, via violence, in this context.

A novice recruit, Faisal was separated temporally from childhood and physically from his family, community and the mainstream moral conventions of society and political participation. His entry into this phase was precipitated by his commitment, ‘I agree’, words similar to the Urdu marriage vow qabool hai (‘I agree’), conveying a life-death commitment. Faisal describes the training environment as an ‘outside’, hostile, liminal-type environment where people spoke another language and were unwelcoming. His antipathy towards Afghans, following the Mohajir–Pukhtun riots, intensified; he felt an outsider surrounded by strangers. Sleeping in jeeps and suffering the physical and emo-tional hardships of temporary ‘homelessness’, he embodied the Mohajirs’ cultural suffer-ings centred around their migration to Pakistan, as well as the hope invested in MQM’s violent solutions. Training became increasingly exciting, leading to the credentials of alternative education and employment and structuring a political agency for conferring power, dominance and the means for effecting revolutionary change on participants. Training also governed the emergence of new status hierarchies that elevated, for train-ees, a dominant masculinity based on the suppression of fear, vulnerability, contradictory aspects and the ability to kill, lead and sacrifice.

‘We stayed with a tribal leader in Afghanistan. I was scared to see weapons everywhere. We trained with AK47s, mortars, GP7 rocket-launchers and stayed around eight months. It wasn’t like army training. There were many weapons around, we just practised firing them.’

The trainees’ re-entry into Karachi society was signified by a celebratory meeting (‘graduation ceremony’) with their leader. ‘We met our leader, face to face. He said “Congratulations, you are helping achieve Mohajir unity. Now you must teach others, we cannot afford to send every boy to Afghanistan.”’ He confirmed the initiates’ new status by outlining new duties and promoting them as his personal bodyguards. Their status was affirmed through interactions with the community and media. ‘We went to rallies and meetings with him. Our photographs were in the papers. We became respected and famous.’ They displayed mastery and authority by permanently carrying weapons and dressing in white salwar kameez for public engagements, white signifying the colour of qaffin (burial cloth) and their ideological commitment. In promoting conventional con-cepts of physical strength and reiterating the war-like metaphors in MQM rhetoric, their preparation to confront and overthrow repressive power arrangements describes their initiation into an underground leadership cadre.

Training had critical consequences for political consciousness and agency and repro-duced dominant hierarchies of power and gender. In forcing themselves to become brutal and dominant, fears and vulnerabilities were repressed with difficulty. The men’s experi-ences invoke ways that agency, identity and status are continually renegotiated in every-day practices—in a Gramscian sense ‘contradictory’ —as well as illustrating the paradox of the domination of the dominant by his domination (Bourdieu, 2001). Faisal conceded to these via concerns for family which could be expressed without the loss of male pride: ‘I understood we should sacrifice for future generations, but was terrified for my family. I felt so divided.’

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On his return, Faisal says he ‘worked’ with Arshad in a mercenary unit in Liaquatabad, for around six years. Subsequently, Shakeel and Shehzad fought the Haqiqi. Militancy was an all-male affair. Men, on motorbikes, foot and on the rooftops policed and demarcated community boundaries, issued threats and enforced strikes. Men were also overwhelm-ingly the perpetrators of violence. Its gendered dimensions are central to the role of vio-lence in reproducing ethnic identity, effecting change and maintaining unity.

As MenIn its interplay with violence, masculinity enfolded a contradictory range of instrumental, social and personal goals and outcomes. Corresponding with MQM’s political agendas of revolutionary destruction—that had resulted in the high-profile murders, for example, of Sindh governor Hakim Said in 1998, Chiefs and Inspectors of Police as well as MQM’s own dissident Chairman Azim Tariq in 1993—it addressed militants’ desires for status, advancement and respect, as well as for a renewed experience of subjectivity and self-hood. The violent agenda promoted by MQM in the most severe military repressions promoted a brutal (hyper)masculinity typified by virility, prowess and physical aggression that could forcefully address the insecurity of political and personal realities. It offered powerless young men a pathway to subvert conventional (obstructed) routes to respected modes of male authority/adulthood and rewarded the violence of macho youths with col-lective admiration, encouraging them to eclipse the violence of their peers. Each sought to live the dream, to achieve the fantasy and ideal of male political agency as violent reversal as a deshatgard (terrorist) or qatil (killer). While none made explicit statements concern-ing masculinity, all presented themselves in terms of the characteristics of a masculinity that glorified killing and the right for men to terrorize others in order to dominate and survive during conflict: ‘It was war—innocents had to die’. This masculinity promoted violent solutions to oppression and lent material force to discourses of violent self-sacrifice and metaphors of war: ‘I’ve forgotten how many I’ve killed, but not dishonestly. It was war.’ It permitted attacks against property and members of rival groups, and stratified male–male relationships competitively through violent domination, reproducing male/male relations of hierarchy and exclusion and the form of state violence under protest: ‘I was convinced killing would make changes’. Killings were routine and ‘tremendous’ reputations articulated in a contrived indifference, illustrated in Arshad’s claim of having killed ‘more than 400’. This masculinity was demanding and the militants experienced tense relations with it. Nor was it widely endorsed. The men represented a minority within MQM and were not universally respected, despite their claims.

The tensions arising from violent ideals and the contradictory, fragile situations they encountered led narratives of violence to be exaggerated to fit ideal images. The avowed and imagined heroism of violence asserted by the militants recalls Feldman’s notion of a ‘cinema aesthetic’’ (1997) used to describe the violent inscription of power on the visual political landscape, and also incorporates elements of violent cinema heroes depicted in Bollywood films of the time. Watching blockbusters (Khalnayak, Sadak and Sahibaan) starring Sanjay Dutt they passed long curfews. The cinematic themes of respect, violent vengeance and honour are reflected in the men’s narratives, as in Faisal’s claim: ‘As a

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bodyguard I had tremendous respect. I risked my life to protect strangers, they respected me like a hero.’

When the co-ordinates of reality are shattered by the extreme violence of situations, cinema may also serve to fictionalize it. Such depictions reflected back to Faisal an exag-gerated self-image akin to the roles acted by Sanjay Dutt, whom he admired immensely. Following Utas (2005: 405) who argues that male and female killers in Liberia assume the hypermasculine characteristics of prototypical action heroes in order to acquire social, political and economic power, and Shaw (2007) who found in Sierra Leone that many conflict-affected youth viewed Rambo films for instruction for life and survival, they raise questions regarding how the cinematic enfolded into ways lives were lived and valorized during conflict, how desires were shaped, were goal-driven and the formative effects of inter-generational conflict.

For Faisal, films were a social and cultural medium for enacting fantasies of heroism that rewarded him with the (patriarchal, heteronormative) male identification he craved, instruction on how to protect his family and, later, how to be an effective militant. Faisal treasured childhood memories of cinema trips with his father, for example to see the Pakistani movie Maa-puttar (Mother-Son) which described a son who violently restored justice to his family and community. Faisal ‘loved’ the film’s direct personal resonances:

‘The same story was happening in my neighbourhood, I was so affected. It showed you must fight injustice to help powerless people. My father was so vulnerable (beaten by police), I found a role-model for saving myself, my family and others. By the time I became a killer, I felt incredible-nobody could hurt my family.’

Faisal and friends watched hired videos. The ‘boys’ would rent a television, video player and action films from the local store. Their favourites were Chinese martial arts films, the American hits Rambo and Terminator and Indian blockbusters such as Khalnayak (Villain) (1993). Cinema was a major socializing element in male bonding and the ideal-ization and handling of weapons: ‘I scrutinized films for tips on using weapons . . . I loved the sound of guns firing, I still do.’ Moviestars embodied a fantasy of male power and manliness that became entangled with his need for moral resolve as a ‘killer’: ‘I was enthralled by Sanjay Dutt’s personal life—he was both gangster and actor, so strong—watching him I felt reassured.’

Following Taussig, for whom the transformative potential of mimesis lies in the com-bination of magical contact and imitation (1997), via imitative practices militants sought to appropriate the idealized hypermasculine qualities of their heroes in a cinematic, mag-ical fusion of self and other, but also to resolve past grievances, difficult relationships with fathers, their fears arising from violent oppressive situations, to capture their peers’ admiration and forge intimacies with other men.

Love, Heroes, BrothersWhat small ethnographic interest has characterized the study of transformations in forms of male sociality in the social and cultural lifeworlds of Karachi’s Mohajirs has empha-sized highly visible performative elements (Verkaaik, 2004) and the everyday creative

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management of male anger by women (Ring, 2006). Integrating the focus of these dual elements in the violence of direct conflict, the analysis now turns to the socialities and intimacies generated between MQM militants seeking to determine political motivation and their desires for masculinity. After ‘training’ in Afghanistan, Arshad and Faisal joined an elite militia of seven ‘bodyguards’ that conducted high-level assassinations and kidnappings. They lived together in a house in Liaquatabad with another group of seven mercenaries under a different authority. Except for some electric fans, the house was unfurnished and they slept on mats in one room. They bought food from the local hotel, fulfilled orders on their initiative and visited their families rarely. Their leaders lived elsewhere. The bodyguards were dispatched to provide military assistance to larger scale conflicts as they erupted outside their communities, in Orangi or New Karachi, fire on opposition rallies, raise funds through robberies and kidnappings and ‘guarded’ political leaders at official events. ‘Bodyguard’ is a euphemism for diverse violent activities. The house also served as a ‘torture centre’ where, in its empty rooms, political opponents or those they kidnapped were beaten with sticks or belts and hung from the ceiling. Despite its rude furnishings, and the activities conducted inside, for Faisal, it was a ‘fort’, a home, where he felt safe and empowered to act without restraint- ‘no agencies would dare come inside’—thus, also a symbolic ‘inside’, a public/private space for realizing autonomy and transformations of power. Hence, ‘I was really proud, it was famous’. After 1990, the notorious dwelling was converted into an MQM Sector office.

These militants lived together as fictive kin and brothers (bhaiyoun). While in their communities, militants earned the respect of male youth as Lala (elder brother), in the militia deep loyalties were formed in isolation from their families. It provided many accoutrements of an alternative lifestyle (home, employment) and, in fighting the police and rival groups, co-supportive, egalitarian socialities for enacting heroic masculine ide-als. The attachments generated mirrored family ties but, in risking their lives for one other, the bonds created were stronger. Violence mediated private articulations of loyalty and love, which Arshad keenly relayed, to prove killers’ human side. He related how ‘Nadeem’ moved to Liaquatabad, leaving behind his girlfriend. His girlfriend’s parents arranged her marriage meanwhile. Mindful of a violent reaction, they appealed to Nadeem’s honour. If he loved their daughter, he would bless her marriage and help decorate the marriage tent (shamiyan). Heavyhearted, Nadeem enlisted his friends.

Two boys were homesick—one was crying for his girlfriend and one for his mum. It’s strange? Sweet guys, us killers! Nadeem’s girlfriend married someone else. She loved him but respected her father. Nadeem made us decorate the hall for the guests. He was so innocent and sweet. If he hadn’t prevented us, we would’ve shot the groom. We were so brave, risking our lives to fight the police and army.

Practices of vengeance and loyalty transformed the youth and reaffirmed their new sta-tus. In the highly charged atmosphere, such performances, if cast as relations of power, provided a vehicle for desires for positive reconstitution to materialize, for overturning the real and symbolic legitimation of the state, and of rival actors, and for expressing love and loyalty. Of the bodyguards, Arshad singled out ‘Imran’, a ‘funny, intelligent, sweet boy’. After his death, Arshad was heartbroken: ‘Imran was the only one who died.

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The PPP boys ambushed him and Fahim. Fahim killed three, but the bullets killed Imran. We killed his killer and four others.’

The group’s support was crucial in galvanizing militants for perceptibly legitimate vio-lence. Shehzad joined in his mid-teens. During the June 1992 operation Shehzad was kid-napped by Haqiqi militants who he says burnt him with cigarettes, crushed his fingers, blindfolded him for several days, forced him to recite his last prayers and fired kalashnikovs around his ears, nurturing immense hatred. In 1994, Haqiqi activists murdered his younger brother, driving him ‘insane’. The next morning he entered the murderers’ neighbourhood and shot three men. ‘That was the first time I killed. I was obsessed with revenge. After, I was terrified for my family, being arrested or killed. My friends consoled me and I became stronger. Soon we were entering enemy areas and killing dozens.’

Shakeel described the rewards of the militants’ courage and physical and mental ability to outdo other militias:

I received tremendous praise for one incident. I was elated! The Haqiqis invaded a neighbour-hood in Pak Colony, our superiors wanted them evicted. We competed for the job. We seized their guards and reached their hangout. They were about 14 men. We stood each against the wall, killing all—a massive achievement.

The performative cultural production of dominant, competitive masculinities during wartime led to copycat and tit-for-tat practices of violence between militants and the state. It produced cycles of violence between MQM and the state’s security that led the physical aspects of normative masculinity to be exaggerated in an embodied politics of gender desirability that elevated killings. The violence became alienated into a circular confrontation characterized by escalating ferocity and a reluctance to retreat. Consequently, Shehzad suggests, it was difficult to tell who was mirroring whom:

We conducted many retaliatory killings. I became famous. We killed eight big police chiefs and became popular overnight. Rewards were posted for Karachi’s most wanted- my name included. The papers reported our activities daily. The police responded severely. Seven friends were martyred in one operation. I decided to kill the police’s spies. Our popularity increased.

Police stations and police practices are central symbols of the organization and cultiva-tion of state repression (Fanon, 1967) and in Karachi were key targets, and tied to the formation and meaning of political violence. MQM activists also destroyed government institutions and personnel as a legitimate, politically enlightened response, to the abhorred practices of violence and exclusion associated with the state. This included attacks on government property (police stations, buses, banks), on ‘Punjabi’ groups as well as on the police, who replied with extra-judicial killings, dawn-raids on homes and the mis-treatment of arrestees. ‘The Punjabis were armed. They attacked us under police escort, we fought the police too’ (Arshad). Killings became routine: ‘For some years, if there was violence against Mohajirs, we’d kill those people. I can’t remember every incident’ (Faisal).

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The mirror interlinkage of violence between police and militants assumed promi-nence in conflicts over community spaces, evident in Shakeel’s account of factional vio-lence in the mid-1990s:

We frequently heard news of MQM workers being killed by the police or Haqiqis. Our neigh-bourhood was a ‘no-go area’. Any stranger was interrogated. Some confessed their associa-tions. We tortured to extract information about their operations—drilling, amputating limbs, chopping corpses into pieces and hanging them upside down. They were killed, put into bin-bags and thrown into dumps.6 These were police tactics we copied. We’d tie a chit to the bag, ‘the consequences of spying’, as a lesson.

From these mirror practices arise serious questions concerning the rationality of violence to MQM’s agendas of transformation. Considering the state apparatus, its security meth-ods and the militants were all violent, was political violence transformative or regenera-tive, ‘reproducing’ the violence of the dominant (Bourdieu, 1977) and structuring protest conventionally, not radically? Political violence reinforced people’s suffering, their belief in violence and its destructive consequences. It shaped the personal and political formation of gender, drawing militants largely unquestioningly to an idealized and unat-tainable form of masculinity that conventionalized and reproduced the brutality it pro-tested. Violence worked: not in forcing the revolutionary emancipation of the oppressed (Fanon, 1967), but in forcing the redistribution of power and securing a military/political hold on Karachi for MQM. By late 1998, the militants were exhausted, the public too. It appeared MQM had won the war. This conflicted with the genuine desires of militants to transform structural power and improve opportunities, producing deep disappointments, with grave implications for their ‘failed’ status as men (militants).

Absurdity and TransformationThe analysis of the interplay of generative and destructive elements in the miltants’ vio-lent enactment of their desires for political participation and masculinity reveals their incommensurability. From their early dreams of success, the narratives now describe a common experience of despair and terror, and enduring feelings of disappointment, guilt and lost purpose. For Faisal, the differential consequences of violence for the party, mili-tants and citizens were troubling:

Altaf Hussain was powerful but cared little about our problems. His demands escalated. If the army refused, he announced a strike. Who was affected? Mohajir shopkeepers, taxi drivers and rickshaw drivers. The violence was relentless, our goals were far. We kidnapped people, robbed banks and donated everything we robbed, something was wrong.

The deadlock and perpetuation of long-term conflict sustained by equivalent practices of violence between well-matched opponents produced widespread disillusionment. For mili-tants, attempts to force the destruction of oppressive living conditions conflicted with the vested interests of MQM’s leadership in violence. Arshad came to regret many killings:

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I was convinced killing could make changes. Since, I feel used. I’ve seen terrible things. Altaf preached one thing but just wanted power and to live like a god. I fled Pakistan. I realized I’d killed many innocent people. My story is sad. MQM sold my efforts. I was a criminal, not a revolutionary.

The disappointment of the ‘bodyguards’ relates to their expectation that violence could destroy oppressive power relations, and their ‘discovery’ that MQM’s leadership was more concerned with achieving power, not improving conditions for Mohajirs. This disturbing revelation constitutes a hidden paradox in the ideology and use of violence, raising questions relating to its darker, painful aspects and, for Arshad, a major turning point revolving around his murder of the wife of a ‘Punjabi’ police superintendent.

Arshad committed this murder shortly after leaving the bodyguards’ house. Rationalizing the details he would reveal, Arshad described the superintendent, an unutterably vicious torturer who had maimed MQM activists, raped their sisters and victimized them in a personal crusade, embodying, for Arshad, the most hated and feared aspects of Punjabi hegemony.

Every few days my in-charge mentioned some troublesome guy he wanted dead. Once he explained I should kill the wife of a Punjabi police-superintendent. I went by motorbike to the area. She lived upstairs, I’d checked beforehand. I’d been instructed: ‘Don’t use a gun. Kill her so that when it’s reported in the newspapers those people disturbing MQM will get frightened. Not a gun, not an easy kill.’ This was the first woman I’d killed. I only realized she was preg-nant before I killed her. I went up, knocked, she opened the door, I went in, I asked her name. I knew she’d be alone. I saw she was pregnant, I killed her by a knife in her belly. ‘For God’s name, don’t kill me’ she said. The details were horrible. I killed her with a knife, then took off her head and put it on the refrigerator . . . I can’t sleep, all my problems come from killing her. Altaf Hussain never ordered us directly, but he used Karachi’s bravest boys, the best.

This killing was designed to communicate the vengeful organizational power of MQM vis-à-vis the state. Dismembering bodies after torture was routine. While this killing symbolizes the dismemberment of the state’s enemies, it is prominent as an act designed to humiliate and punish the state but which, unpredictably, punished the murderer, desta-bilizing selfhood and political conviction and precipitating lasting suffering.

In the woman’s decapitation might be read a set of metaphors about power, display and capital punishment, linking punishment intrinsically to the exercise of power, fol-lowing Foucault (1985) for whom punishment serves to consolidate relations of domi-nation which may be expressed non-verbally as disciplinary procedures which diffuse through social practice, creating idiosyncratic subjective forms of thought, feeling and desire. Punishment is established and implemented through the production of dis-courses and ideologies residing in the law, and sovereign institutions concerned with regulated, physical practices of torture and imprisonment. Exercised at its extreme points, disciplinary power is always semi-legal. Foucault’s conceptualization of pun-ishment as an extra-judicial technique for consolidating power might bear on this kill-ing which attacked the oligarchic power of the state. Placed on the refrigerator, the decapitated head displayed punishment and vengeful power to an intended audience. It

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was also absurd, grotesque: a trophy; unsacred, humiliated, domestic, macabrely ridic-ulous. This act’s brutality ruptured Arshad’s understanding of the rationality of vio-lence to his espoused agendas of transformation, confronting him with its irrationality and excess. He described this murder not in terms of desires for power, status or glory, or even in symbolic terms of the honour invested in the militarism of the Punjabi-state, but as a personal provocation of the horrors of violence, as if to understand its excesses and his limits.

In their relationship to excessive violence, these aspects might be read through Taussig’s symbolic analysis of violence in Colombia (1987). Taussig queries the paradox between the ‘rational’ colonial project of building political economies of rubber and labour and the senseless excesses of violence inflicted by the traders, arguing for the inadequacy of stan-dardized rational explanations of excessive torture and for incorporating symbolic and affective elements into the notion that violence is a political category. Following Foucault, the representation of torture and terror in the media is important because its acceptance as truth can cement or subvert power relations and contribute to its persistence. In its sensa-tionalizing impulse, the media presides over ‘binding the fantastic to the credible’ and in blending desires and realities of vengeance and savagery (Taussig, 1987: 33). In the fantas-tic realm, the excessiveness of violence, constituted of fantasies of power and mimetic desires to destroy the other, for Taussig, may be an end in itself. In Karachi, excessive vio-lence was enacted, following Foucault, in an extra-legal realm where violent punishment and the exercise of power were most extreme, taking the terrifying and vengeful forms of disappearances, murders in custody, assassinations and torture by the police, as well as the killings of police and other state agents. While practices of state terror and their resistance produced social spaces of desire and action where gendered relations of power could be imagined and enacted, they also produced unfulfilled desires that transformed political practice, discourse and entrenched despair. In Taussig’s terms, the ‘space of death’ in which torture occurs is pre-eminently a space of transformation through which emerges increased self-consciousness but also fragmentation, loss of self and ‘the rupture and revenge of sig-nification’ (1987: 5–7). Arshad experienced the violent fragmentation of self as a volte-face which destroyed established truths and animated a revelation which worked its violence not on the object of Punjabi power but on himself, the ‘good terrorist’: he and his leaders were no less ruthless than the Establishment they fought.

What were the ways out of this quagmire of desire, fantasy and terror? Arshad and Faisal became profoundly demotivated by the circular, ‘corrupt’ nature of violence, flee-ing Pakistan. Returning some years later, they lived in semi-hiding in a political situation where public support for MQM violence, even amongst diehard loyalists, had declined since MQM’s advent to government.7 Shakeel feared death: ‘By 1997, life was unbear-able. Many top-class loyalists were martyred. I left for South Africa on fake papers. I built a good business there. I’ll stay rather than be killed.’ Shehzad fled similar terrors: ‘Circumstances forced us into murders. After my brother and brother-in-law were killed, I fled Pakistan. On my return in 1998, the police registered 33 false murders against me. I fled. I’m desperate to forget that life.’

Despite their deep regret and ambivalence, violence retained its allure as a solution to envisaged problems. Arshad confided, ‘I’ve lived a nightmare because I was a killer, but if my family were in danger, I’d kill again. It seems unbelievable.’ His words reveal the

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obstinacy of violence in insinuating itself structurally, symbolically and normatively into everyday life, and its less visible effects, expressed in cynicism, irony and an air of unre-ality. No longer youths, the men exaggerated memories of violence to prove themselves- tenaciously impressed by the elusive ideal of the killer while struggling to make sense of lives devastated in its pursuit. Despite trite claims of ‘moving on’, their narratives belied the disquieting presence of their enduring losses, both spoken and not spoken of, in their subsequent lives which they lived out in a state of fracture and suspense.

These aspects are less explicit in their accounts that emphasize impressive, spectacular violence. In telling, the men sought to remember themselves and to be remembered, as they idealized themselves in the past. Paradoxically, violence remained a primary force for legitimizing themselves as men. Their attachment to the violent past belied their attempts to heal, work through their sense of absurdity, guilt and suffering and reconsti-tute themselves in a world which, they perceived, had moved on.

ConclusionThis article took as its starting point the lack of attention paid in the prevailing historical-conventional account of Mohajir militancy in Karachi in the 1990s to the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’ of violent militancy. It submitted that the dominant interpretations depend on overarching concepts that do not attend to either the affective and emotional aspect of militancy, or the processes by which these larger social matrices become translated into killings in particular localities. Extending the emphasis on interlocking collective and individual—and visible and less visible—processes of violence in recent accounts of critical events in South Asia (e.g. Das, 2007), it proposed individual subjectivity as a possible explanation and sought to uncover the melding of diverse instrumental, ideo-logical, social and cultural elements in the production of killings in the militants’ entan-glements with violence. It proposed the militant psyche as a hitherto relatively unexplored space that can provide useful forays in understanding the production of political violence and used the combination of ethnography and biographical narrative to show how desire, fantasy and images of masculinity inform the violent subjectivities and actions of young men following their encounters with violence.

This perspective pointed to ways that affects and fantasies of power and violence were concretely tied to oppressive political realities and to a field of public representa-tions and political power relations, but also to individual biography and the psychosocial ‘within’ for those coping with past grievances and fears about the future. The analysis of the militant narratives revealed how, practically, the militant groups producing political killers offered choices of action for realizing a range of divergent goals. Violence pro-duced alternative modes of autonomy and social, economic and generational advance-ment, and addressed militants’ desires for the spectacular destruction of multiple interrelated forms of power and injustice. It also offered a cultural and social support system for men to counter the fear and vulnerabilities arising from violent situations, form intimate, egalitarian loving relationships with other men, and improve a disrupted and damaged sense of self. Idealized images of manhood, circulated through action films, and a desire to restore and create violent masculinity led individuals into a spiral of violent political acts. The adaptive forms of violent masculinity appropriate for

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ensuring dominance and survival in the external world of conflict which were learnt in militia groups were reaffirmed and enhanced through interactions with the media, and assured militants’ notoriety and respect in their communities.

In the final analysis these findings lead to the notion of generative violence as a fruitful way to understand militancy in Karachi. At the same time that it obliterates societal norms and political opponents, militancy is a generative violence that restores fractured masculine selfhood among peer groups. Violence, I have argued, should be analysed not only a destruc-tive force, perpetuated on the other, but also in a generative capacity that restores or intensi-fies the self in terms of masculinity. More precisely, in this case militancy is an incommensurable relationship between generativeness and violence that does not allow determination of any fixed single category, whether desire for masculinity or political motivation.

While this eschews a discrete solution to the intellectual problem of violence, the more pressing dilemma raised for political society, as well as for these militants, is how to transcend the destructive legacy of violence that shapes and persistently determines its regeneration.

Notes1. Throughout the 1990s, MQM narratives persuaded Mohajirs to draw on Partition discourse

which was redolent with grief for the Mohajirs’ wasted sacrifices made for ‘Pakistan’ and for aspirations lost over post-Independence history. These sentiments are expressed by MQM leader Imran Farooq in his poem Whispers of Night (1999), published on the MQM website. They gesture to the 20th-century literary tradition of progressive Urdu poetry which drew on sombre themes of sorrow and longing to reflect on the blood spilt during Partition.

2. The section heading translates as ‘Shoot first, talk later, Liaquatabad, Liaquatabad!’: a popular MQM slogan painted on a community wall in Liaquatabad.

3. Mohajir representations of the accretion of Pukhtun power in Karachi’s transport sector largely ignore the unforgiving exploitation of young Pukhtun men. Asdar Ali (2009) emphasizes how transport workers faced pot-holed roads, corrupt traffic police, pollution and immense crowds for up to 18 hours daily; they slept in their vehicles or make-shift hostels in unhygienic conditions in order to meet the fixed rents levied on their vehicles.

4. Malik (1997) highlights the ethnic preponderance of Punjabis in Pakistan’s national institutions after the 1970s, which was exacerbated by the large-scale influx of migrants into Karachi, and reflected in Karachi’s police force.

5. Despite ethnic conflicts between Mohajirs and Pukhtuns in Karachi, trading flourished between Mohajir, Pukhtun and Punjabi arms brokers. ‘Weapons-training’ appears part of this paradox.

6. Shakeel refers to Kaji Ground in Pak Colony, a notorious dumping ground for bodies in the mid-1990s used by the police, MQM and the Haqiqi factions. It was located near a working-class Punjabi neighbourhood where many residents were also killed and dumped, according to militants.

7. The ‘peace’ has not prevailed; after the initial calm of MQM’s first term, in June 2005 the Dawn newspaper published a report accusing MQM of continuing to intimidate and eliminate political opponents with virtual impunity since 2002. This was harshly demonstrated on 12 May 2007 when a multi-party PPP-led demonstration protesting against President Musharraf’s autocratic rule, exemplified by his dismissal of Chief Justice Mohammed Chaudhry, clashed with a MQM-organised pro-government rally, resulting in around fifty killings and clashes at sites of the eighties’ Mohajir-Pukhtun riots. Musharraf refused to conduct an inquiry into the deaths.

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Fears of revisionist violence were realized most recently in August 2010 following the murder of an MQM leader that left over 60 dead. This occurs amidst recurrent Mohajir discontents surrounding fears of the expansion of the Pakistan Taliban’s power into Karachi—and Pukhtun resentment concerning MQM’s unchecked expansion of its power in Karachi’s land ‘mafias’, a historical economic field of ethnic tension. The transnational implications of violence involving MQM acquired prominence in September 2010 when MQM founder Imran Farooq was murdered in London, (the case as yet unresolved). His murder followed the intensification of political hostilities in Sindh surrounding governance of the 2010 floods, during which Altaf Hussain called for martial law. The result of such hostilities is the further ethnicisation of Karachi politics and institutions and a solid groundswell of support for MQM.

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Nichola Khan completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex (UK) and is currently a Lecturer in Psychology and Psychosocial Studies at the University of Brighton (UK). Address: Nichola Khan, Mayfield House, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, Falmer, East Sussex BN1 9PH UK [Email: nichola.khan@gmail.com; N.Khan@brighton.ac.uk]