For most Pakistanis residing outside the Sindh province, the Mutahidda Qaumi Movement (MQM), has continued to attract curiosity as well as suspicion.

This is because a bulk of them have been somewhat slow to notice the many changes MQM has gone through. Their perception of the party still seems to be influenced by events frozen in a rather destructive period of the politics of Karachi.

Ever since its inception in 1984, MQM has evolved from being a confrontational political organ of Karachi and Hyderabad’s ‘mohajirs’, into becoming a no-nonsense and unambiguous advocate of secular politics and sociology.

Though allegedly engineered by the Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship to counter-balance the PPP’s influence in Sindh, MQM soon broke away from the dictator’s oxymoronic orbit, and by 1987 it had established its own distinctive stamp of authority and electoral might.

Then called the Mohajir Qaumi Movement, it rationalized its emergence as a mouthpiece of mohajirs whose political and economic interests it believed had been sidelined by ‘Punjab’s hegemony in the armed forces and the State,’ and by Sindh’s feudal-centric politics.

It also targeted the parties whom the mohajirs of Karachi had been voting for ever since independence, i.e. the Jamat Islami (JI) and Jamiat Ulema Pakistan (JUP). MQM accused both of them of ‘taking mohajir support for granted.’

Another important reason behind MQM’s eruptive appearance was the rapid influx of Afghan refugees who poured into the city of Karachi from their camps in the NWFP and Balochistan in the wake of the so-called anti-Soviet ‘Afghan jihad’ in Afghanistan.

Thanks to a corrupt military-civilian administration running this war from Pakistan’s side, with the refugees also came stacks of modern weapons and heroin. By 1986 crime in Karachi had quadrupled, and where there was once literally a single reported case of heroin addiction in the city in 1979, five years later Karachi had one of the largest populations of addicts in the world!

The stressful social and economic tensions that such a scenario generated eventually exploded into ethnic violence between the pathans of the city (who were accused of siding with the Afghan refugees), and the mohajirs - even though, ever since the 1960s, both the communities had been the twin engines behind Karachi’s once prosperous economic milieu.

This violent scenario saw MQM baptized by fire, giving its initiation a militant dimension.

Unfortunately, this is the dimension that has frozen itself in the minds of most Pakistanis outside Sindh. It got even more pronounced when (in the 1990s), the MQM clashed with the state itself. Buoyant by its electoral successes, it lost some of its bearings by allowing the first Nawaz Sharif government’s Machiavellian Sindh Chief Minister, Jam Sadiq Ali, to exploit MQM’s militant tendencies in his egoistical war against Benazir Bhutto’s PPP.

The cost of playing Jam’s street-fighting bidders, (sometimes against sensitive State elements), was a violent and long-running tragedy that haunted the MQM throughout the 1990s. Persuaded by intelligence agencies, the governments of Benazir Bhutto (her second) and Nawaz Sharif simultaneously conducted at least three major operations (backed by paramilitary forces) against the MQM.

Scores of MQM activists and policemen fell in bloody clashes that gripped Karachi across the 1990s, turning the city into a virtual battle zone. The city’s infrastructure and economy were in shambles, a situation that only recently started to be reversed (from 2002 onwards.)

It is a stunning case of irony that Karachi’s recovery is now being spearheaded by MQM’s popularly elected city government, first supported by Musharraf’s military-civilian set-up and now by the PPP-led coalition.

Another misconception about the MQM outside Sindh is that it grew its prominent secular wings under the Musharraf regime. Emerging from its student organ, the APMSO (formed in 1978), it is correct that most of APMSO’s founding members were former activists of the Jamat Islami’s student-wing, the IJT. However, by 1979, APMSO became a culmination of disgruntled IJT activists and progressive Urdu-speaking students who’d quit prominent left-wing student organizations like National Students Federation (NSF) to join APMSO. In fact, between 1978 and 1987, the APMSO was an important member of major progressive student alliances in Karachi’s colleges and universities such as the United Students Movement (USM) that also had student wings of the Pakistan Peoples Party (the PSF), National Awami Party (the PkSF), and Baloch Students Organization (BSO) as members. The USM became the main bulwark force against the Zia-backed hegemony of the Islami Jamiat Taleba (IJT), the student-wing of the fundamentalist Jamat Islami.

Till the emergence of the MQM in 1984, Karachi’s mohajir majority had been socially liberal but politically conservative (largely voting for the Jamat Islami). By the mid-‘90s, however, MQM had successfully stretched the liberal trend into the community’s political spheres as well.

Today the MQM operates as a well-organized liberal-secular expression of Karachi and Hyderabad’s middle and lower-middle-class sections. This does not mean that its militant tendencies have evaporated. As witnessed during the tragic May 12, 2007 violence in Karachi, MQM still maintains a militant streak – but then, so do the youth wings of the PPP, ANP, JI and PML-N.

But interestingly it is this streak that many Karachiites now believe may not be such a bad card to hold in the wake of the violent pressure being applied by armed militants across major Pakistani cities.

Does this mean that Karachi’s status as the last bastion of secular pluralism in Pakistan may as well be due to the secular muscle that the MQM flexes in this city? 

The answer, most probably, is yes. But it is yet to be seen how this muscle shapes up against an enemy trained for ‘jihad’ and audacious suicide attacks.