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25 April 2015

Is Karachi’s Biggest Party on the Ropes?


Pakistan’s MQM faces an increasingly difficult set of challenges to hold onto power in the country’s biggest city. 

In Pakistan’s largest and most volatile city, Karachi, a sea change could be afoot. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), which has dominated municipal politics for decades, now faces government raids, foreign criminal investigations, and new competition that threaten its pole position. Is MQM on the ropes?

An analysis published in The New York Times by the paper’s Pakistan bureau chief, Declan Walsh, and Swat Valley-based journalist Zia ur-Rehman last week seems to lean in that direction. Last Friday, MQM’s leader Altaf Hussain, in self-imposed exile in London,resigned his post over pent-up frustrations with the Rabita Committee, the party’s central planning organism, only to roll back on that decision after conferring with party workers. That’s not the only bit of trouble that the party has faced this week: Hussain’s decision to flirt with resignation, the second time he’s done so in as many months, comes just two days after Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Chaudry Nisar Ali Khan, urged the party to “come clean” in the unsolved murder of Imran Farooq, a former MQM ally slain in a London stabbing in 2010.

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