Making of Mohajir Political Entity and City of Karachi
By Guest Blogger • Aug 24th, 2011 • Category: Lead Story • 5 CommentsMohajirs constitute a part of the population, which migrated from India to Pakistan after partition in 1947. A majority of migrants came from East Punjab In West Punjab. They got relatively assimilated with the native population within a generation.
On the other hand, Mohajirs came from areas further east, south and west in India and settled mainly in urban Sindh. They remained largely unassimilated with the local population even after two generations.
Patterns of Migration Number of Share of Ratio in Total Refugees Population
1. Pakistan7.22 million 100 10%
2. East Bengal.7 million9.67%1.7%
3. W. Pakistan6.52 million 90.3%20%
4. Punjab5.3 million73%25.6%
5. Sindh (ex K).55 million7.6%11.7%
6. Karachi.61 million8.53%55%
Source: Census of Pakistan 1951, Vol. I, Table 19-A, Vol. 6, p. 65.Unlike in Punjab, refugees in Sindh deified integration in the local society because of their linguistic, cultural and historical remoteness from Sindhis.
These differences were patterned along sectoral lines. 63.9 percent of refugees in Sindh lived in urban areas, 86.16 percent in Hyderabad district and 71 percent in Sukkur.
In Karachi, there were only 14.28 percent speakers of Sindhi in 1951 as opposed to 58.7 percent who spoke Urdu as their mother tongue. Thus, Karachi overnight became a Mohajir city.
The government of Pakistan carved the city out of Sindh in July 1948. It became a federally administered area as capital of Pakistan. The process of refugee rehabilitation in Karachi and Sindh generally remained far from satisfactory.
Even in 1954, i.e. 7 years after partition, no less than 2,40,000 out of a total of 7,50,000 refugees in Karachi were still to be rehabilitated.
While in Punjab, immigration had virtually stopped in 1948, in Sindh it continued even after the passport and visa system was introduced for travel between India and Pakistan.
About 1,00,000 refugees from India continued to come to Pakistan each year, with a majority belonging to ‘urban classes’ who generally came straight to Karachi. This created an immense problem of settlement, which in turn led to gross frustration among refugees.
Census of Pakistan, Karachi, 1951, Vol. 6, Statement 3-R, p. 36.13Ibid. Vol. 1, Statement 5-C, p. 87.14Debates (CAP), 23 March 1954, p. 405.
Mohajirs constitute a privileged community on the decline. Initially, they dominated the All India Muslim League in British India and later the government in Pakistan.
However, they occupied an inherently insecure position in terms of electoral politics. Prime Minister-designate Liaqat Ali Khan who was a Mohajir was inducted into the Constituent Assembly in place of an elected member from East Bengal.
The Mohajir leadership chose to bypass the Constituent Assembly which had been elected by the Muslim members of the legislative assemblies of Muslim majority provinces comprising Pakistan, and which was therefore dominated by ‘locals.’ It shunned elections, which would lead to its exit from power.
Instead, it operated through the higher bureaucracy that was also dominated by migrants of both Punjabi and Mohajir extraction.
Mohajirs who were only 3 percent of the population had 21 percent jobs. Among senior jobs, Mohajirs had 33.5 percent in federal bureaucracy in 1973 and 20 percent in the Secretariat group in 1974;however, their share came down to 18.3 percent in 1986 and 14.3 percent in 1989 respectively.
Mohajirs not only dominated politics and bureaucracy but also business. The Gujrati-speaking migrants from Bombay in India, especially Memon, Bohra and Khoja communities, were in the vanguard of industrialization in Pakistan. Gujrati-speaking Mohajirs controlled seven of the twelve largest industrial houses.
In 1972, when Bhutto nationalized industry in the ten leading sectors including electrical engineering, petrochemicals, iron and steel as well as rudimentary automotive assembly plants, Mohajirs were dealt a severe blow.
The Mohajir-led political leadership in the immediate post independence period sought to identify Pakistan with the Islamic world. Political loyalties in Pakistan were thus ‘externalized’ in the name of religion.
Mohajirs also continued to be deeply involved in the fate of Indian Muslims across the border. They were acutely sensitive to the latter’s needs to get jobs and tried to help them migrate to Pakistan.
Indeed, Mohajirs interpreted the Two Nation Theory itself in the context of the right of Indian Muslims to migrate to Pakistan. This led to a general deification of the state, accompanied by a cult of unity of the nation in the face of the perceived Indian bellicosity, largely at the cost of provincial autonomy, indigenous cultures.
Both the first Governor general and the first prime minister of Pakistan were Mohajirs. Similarly, Mohajirs also dominated the Central Working Committee of the Muslim League.
Mohajirs’ political attitudes were typically based on a paternalistic vision of the society, enhanced commitment to ideological mobilization and lack of tolerance for provincial and ethnic aspirations.
Three broad areas of change adversely affected Mohajirs: First, One-Unit was conceived to counter the weight of Bengalis in the National Assembly of Pakistan in view of the latter’s share of 55 percent in the country’s population.
However, under One Unit, it was Punjabis not Mohajirs who expanded their job circuit. Secondly, the 1958 coup put Punjabi generals in control of key positions in the corporate sector, opening up jobs for their co-ethnics.
Finally, the shift of capital to Islamabad in the vicinity of the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi pointed to the centrality of Punjab-based army in the new dispensation, largely at the expense of Mohajirs.
Pakistan was a state infused with a dominant migrant ethos, couched in an ideological framework of the Two-Nation Theory as the raison d’etre of Pakistan.
The ruling elite took pride in the achievements of the Indo-Muslim civilization over a thousand years and appropriated its symbols such as Urdu language, Mogul architectural monuments and the Indo-Iranian tradition of art.
The 1970 election was to change all that. The elite was unable to take into account the massive currents of indigenous revival in East Bengal, Punjab and Sindh. In (W) Pakistan, the Indus Valley overtook the Indo-Muslim civilization as a source of cultural symbols. Territorial nationalism pushed aside ideological nationalism as the dominant mode of thinking.
The popular refrain in the 1970s was that Pakistan was the home of four cultures, Sindhi, Punjabi, Baloch and Pakhtuns. This gradually legitimized the thesis that Pakistan consisted of four nationalities. The new populism flourished at the cost of the cherished worldview of the migrant elite rooted in a Unitarian model of politics.
In 1970, the state of Pakistan, which was originally conceived in non-Pakistan areas, finally took roots in the languages and cultures of the country itself. The indigenous revival put a new generation of Sindhi leadership in power.
It represented popular aspirations identified with historical and cultural identity of Sindh and was committed to the goal of cultural preservation against the perceived onslaught of Mohajirs.
It criticized the fact that only one fourth of the material in school text books reflected indigenous Pakistani cultures and their heroes while three fourths represented northern Indian cultural symbols and that making of Pakistan was attributed predominantly to Muslims of minority provinces while the role of majority provinces, especially Sindh which voted for Pakistan before others, was ignored.
The land question was another major source of Sindhi nationalist sentiment. Out of the land brought under cultivation by Ghulam Mohammad, Guddu and Sukkur. For a discussion of the migrant ethos, see Mohammad Waseem, op. cit., pp. 110-11.21Aftab Kazi, ‘Ethnic Nationalities, Education and Problems of National Integration in Pakistan-II’, Sindh Quarterly, 1989, No.1, pp. 21–27.
Barrages, 1.48 million, 0.64 million and 0.28 million acres respectively, ex-military officers and bureaucrats among others—mostly Punjabi but also Mohajirs—were allotted .87 million, 0.32 million and 0.13 million acres in that order.
The standard Mohajir response to Sindhi protest was that Sindhi waderas were too much given to a life of luxury and Sindhi haris were far too condemned to a life of misery to cultivate lands irrigated by Sukkur Barrage and that Mohajir domination in education and services was the product of inability or unwillingness of Sindhis to fill the vacuum created by the departing Hindus.
Mohajirs favored an open system of recruitment to educational institutions, jobs and businesses through competition on the basis of merit. Sindhis wanted protection through a fixed quota for jobs and services.
During the second quarter century after independence, Mohajirs’ social vision was effectively ‘nativised’. They now looked at themselves as belonging to Sindh and, especially, Karachi.
This happened due to arrival of new migrants who challenged their cultural, economic and political interests. During the last half century, Karachi experienced four major waves of migration, comprising Mohajirs (1940s–50s), Punjabis and Pathan (1960s–80s), Sindhis (1970s–90s), and foreigners including from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand and Philippines, among others (1980s–90s).
The Mohajir mass public, which represented the bulk of the first wave migrants, squatted in kachi abadis (Shanty Towns), in conditions of acute residential and income insecurity. This situation reflected their helplessness with the local government for provision of tenure and civic amenities.
During the 1980s, the popular idiom shifted away from the two traditional sources of Mohajir identity formation, Islam and Pakistan to ethno-linguistic.
The second wave of migrants representing Punjabis and Pathan has been defined as ‘circular migration’ as opposed to the ‘permanent migration’ of Mohajirs. The former kept relations with family back home and visited home at varying intervals. It was estimated that out of 350,000 new inhabitants of Karachi every year, 150,000 were migrants from upcountry.
Punjabi migrants entered jobs in the new industrial units. Pathan construction workers, diggers of soil, retail sellers and transport workers, followed them.
At least half of them behaved as working-life migrants tied with home. Unlike the first wave migrants, the second wave migrants tended to keep their upcountry identity and loyalty intact.
As Linguistic Groups Karachi comprised, Urdu, Punjabi Pushtoon, Sindhi, Balochi, Hindko and Others 54.3%13.6%8.7%6.3%4.4%1%11.7%, respectively.
Source: 1981 Census Report of Karachi Division.
In Karachi, ethnicity emerged as the dominant theme in the 1980s as the mass of humanity living off the mainstream ‘planned’ social and political life developed its own rules of game for survival.
Ethnic groups were huddled together into informal security structures woven around vested interests such as jobs, houses, security against eviction or bulldozing of illegal tenements and other psychological support mechanisms.
Mohajirs started developing a sense of nationalism about Karachi and Sindh as a bulwark against Punjabi and Pathan migrants.
Previously, Punjabis had joined hands with Mohajirs and Pathan to form the Mohajir-Punjabi-Pashtun Muttahida Mahaz, which sought to safeguard the rights of the three migrant communities in Sindh.
However, as Mohajirs sought to co-operate with Sindhis against Punjabis, the latter reacted by closing their gap with Sindhis. The third wave of migration brought Sindhis into Karachi and Hyderabad.
Re-integration of Karachi with Sindh in an administrative and ‘political’ sense in 1970 and installation of a PPP government led by nationalist elements under Mumtaz Ali Bhutto as well as acts such as passing of the Language Bill and introduction of the quota system made the presence of Sindhis felt in the city.
The quota system provided jobs for the nascent Sindhi middle class. Moreover, the late arrival of Green Revolution in Sindh in the 1980s displaced many Sindhi tenants and haris from land and pushed them to Karachi.
The fourth wave of migration emerged in the 1980s when nationals of the neighboring countries started coming to Karachi.
A huge market in manpower transport emerged in the east of Arabian Sea extending to India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma (Myanmar), Indonesia and Philippines up to South Korea. Karachi became an important mid-way stop on the route to the Gulf, often becoming the hub of under ground activity surrounding traffic in workers, drug and women from Bangladesh and Philippines.
The number of political refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq (Kurds), Iran (Bahais), Burma (Muslims), and Sri Lanka (Tamils) and economic 27 Ibid. pp. 25–27.28.
Akbar Zaidi, ‘Sindhi vs Mohajir in Pakistan: Contradiction, Conflict, Compromise’, Economic and Political Weekly. May 16, 1991, p. 1297.
Refugees from Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand, Somalia and Ethiopia in 1995 rose to 1,626,324.29. The first wave migrants—Mohajirs—resent the second, third and fourth wave migrants, and now considered themselves ‘natives’ of Karachi and Sindh.
They view Punjabis and Pathan as migrants of fortune who earn in Karachi but send back their earnings to their families’ upcountry, and invest money there in property and education of children, involving a net transfer of resources from Karachi. Mohajirs also object to the Sindhis’ practices of earning in Karachi and spending in the interior, (which is erroneous as it is other way around in large measure.
MQM: A POLITICAL PROFILE Squatter settlements provided a fertile ground for the ethnic message of Mohajir student activists. Universities and colleges crystallized Mohajir consciousness. Mohajir students had to contend with student association’s organized on linguistic and regional lines, including the Punjab Students Association, Pashtun Students Association, Baloch Students Organization and Jiye Sindh Students Federation.
This led to formation of the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organization (APMSO) in 1978. APMSO was a product of the perceived Mohajir grievances in terms of non-delivery of promises of the PNA leaders to eliminate the quota system and to secure the lives of Mohajirs against the perceived tyranny and violence. These student leaders later formed the MQM in 1984. In the new party, blind faith in the leader provided a string binding different participants of the movement. The MQM created a strong cult of personality of Altaf Hussain.
The non-elite character of the MQM leadership gave it a certain level of legitimacy to call itself a party of the poor. It claimed that it had broken the spell of traditional drawing room politics of capitalists and feudal and brought the poor and middle class leadership into assemblies.
It observed that masses could not vote according to their own choice because jagirdars, waderas, sardars and nawabs held them down under their cruel and dictatorial system.
It vowed to establish a system in the country under which there would be the rule of not the 2 percent privileged but the 98 percent poor and middle class.
However, despite its progressive rhetoric, the MQM lacked any policy structure, reform program or legislative proposals, observes Mohammad Suleman Sheikh, in ‘The Issue of Migration in Pakistan’, Unpublished paper, Islamabad, 1995.
Imran Farooq, Imperatives of Discipline and Organization, (Urdu), MQM document, Karachi, pp. 10–17.31 Reply Statement of the Government of Pakistan and the Government of Sindh in the Supreme Court of Pakistan, 5 June 1995, Petition No. 46/94, pp. 32-33.
MQM is the Symbol of Being Oppressed, (Urdu), MQM document, Karachi, 1994, pp. 6, 13.33Ibid. p. 14.34The Rule of the Poor, (Urdu), MQM document, Karachi, n.d., p. 7.
Not surprisingly, the MQM’s self-image as a party of the poor lacked credibility in the eyes of non-Mohajirs everywhere. In the public view, the MQM pitted the poor of one community against the poor of the other community across the street, not against the rich from the other side of the city.
The MQM can be considered as a policy-neutral, ideologically agnostic and pro-status quo party despite claims to the contrary. The quota system has been at the heart of the MQM politics.
After the Sindhi-dominated PPP government took power in Karachi in 1971, the issue of the share of Sindhis in education and jobs re-emerged on the political agenda.
The MQM points to a deliberate policy of discrimination against Mohajirs. Similarly, the fate of a quarter of a million Biharis in Bangladesh is a constant reference in the MQM’s literature.
The party has strongly criticized the government of Pakistan for not accepting its own citizens back into the country. A closely related issue is population because it has implications for jobs and elections.
The MQM has claimed that Mohajirs constituted 60 percent of the population in Sindh and that the 1961, 1972and 1981 census figures were manipulated to reduce the population of Mohajirs by more than half.
The MQM defined Mohajirs as those who (i) migrated to Pakistan from Muslim minority provinces of the sub-continent at the time of the partition, (ii) are not considered to belong to any of the nationalities of Pakistan—neither Punjabi, nor Sindhi, nor Balochi, nor Pakhtun, and (iii) migrated from those areas of East Punjab whose language and culture was not Punjabi.
The MQM took exception to the fact that the four provinces of Pakistan were constantly being declared as four brothers, excluding those who did not originally belong to any of these provinces.
Altaf Hussain declared that the slogan of Mohajir nationality was indeed the product of reaction to the slogan of four nationalities.
It was claimed that Mohajirs had now aligned themselves with the destiny of Sindh and become de facto sons of the soil. The MQM demanded rationalization of the prevalent domicile system so that only those locals should be issued domicile that had lived in Sindh along with their whole family for at least 20 years. It defined ‘locals’ as those who lived a family life, earned, spent, died and got buried in, and linked their interests with, the interests of Sindh.
This was essentially a nativity idiom rooted in a part of the territory of Sindh. The MQM leadership’s hobnobbing with the Sindhi nationalist leadership reflected its political stand against the upcountry migrants. Herald, Karachi, February 1988, p. 58.36MQM, Constitutional Petition in the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Part 1.
The Punjabi Pakhtun Ittehad (PPI) came in to being on 7 March 1987. However, the PPI never really took off. In the 1988 elections, MQM and PPP bagged almost all Mohajir and Sindhi seats representing the two ethnic nationalisms respectively. The MQM and PPP formed a coalition and signed the Karachi Accord as a basis for co-operation.
However, soon their distinct party profiles on the issue of implementation of the Accord led them apart.
The downhill march of the coalition culminated in a secret alliance between the IJI opposition and MQM, which was disclosed and signed on 24 October 1989, but negotiated and signed much earlier in July 1989, on the eve of the no-confidence motion against Benazir Bhutto. Violence increased on the street and so did army’s involvement in civil administration.
The MQM’s partnership in the IJI government from 1990–92 represented the high point in its street power whereby it sought to maintain an iron grip on all Mohajir public activity.
The press was a special target of the MQM workers who burnt thousands of copies of the daily Dawn and stopped its distribution, looted the offices of daily Jang, and attacked the houses of journalists.
It demanded full coverage of its activities on prominent places on the papers, condemned critical views about the party and sought to punish those who would not oblige.
As long as some sections of the Mohajir population stayed outside its fold, the MQM felt that its legitimacy as an exclusively Mohajir party remained less than total.
These people were called traitors to the Mohajir cause and were sometimes beaten, abducted and tortured to teach a lesson to others.
Mohajirs were still far from integrated into a community because of their different linguistic, geographic and cultural backgrounds. In order to bind them together and put them immediately at the front of the political stage, unity by command rather than by persuasion was considered to be the way out.
In 1989-90, the MQM played the local bully for a national level political alliance, with a larger political objective of destabilizing the PPP government.
The MQM kept the momentum of its street politics high when it was a partner in Jam Sadiq Ali’s government in Sindh. Its share in state power, combined with its unchallenged street power, produced an inordinately high level of confidence in the party workers. Again in 1994-95, the MQM’s strategy focused on destabilizing the PPP government by exposing its inability to control street violence.
Moving beyond the rival ethnic groups and internal dissidents as targets of their action, the party workers abducted and tortured a serving army officer, Major Kaleem Ahmad. That was the last straw, which brought the army into play with full force. On 19 June 1992, army started Operation-Clean up in Sindh. It claimed that it had got hold of maps of ‘Jinnahpur’ or ‘Urdu Desh’ meant to be carved out of Sindh including Karachi, Hyderabad and some coastal area as an independent country by the MQM. It also unearthed 22 MQM torture cells, including one in Abbasi Shaheed Hospital.
Many of the top leaders of the MQM including Altaf Hussain were declared proclaimed offenders. Many others, including MNAs and MPAs of the MQM went underground.
The latter resigned from membership of the two assemblies. The army allegedly sponsored a rival faction within the MQM, called Haqiqi, comprising opponents of the Altaf group.
The MQM boycotted the 1993 elections for the National Assembly but it participated in the Sindh Assembly elections three days later and won 27 out of 100 seats. The new Benazir Bhutto government started a dialogue with the MQM, especially after the latter voted for the PPP nominee Farooq Leghari as president. However, each round of talks ended in failure. In June 1994, the Suppression of Terrorist Activities Court to a 27-year jail term sentenced Altaf Hussain.
In a series of open letters addressed to armed services chiefs, Altaf Hussain accused the military unit FIT and ‘officials of the armed forces’ in general of perpetrating atrocities on Mohajirs, extracting bribes from people worth millions of rupees and becoming ‘wealthy but devoid of moral fiber and patriotism’.
In end November 1994, the civil armed forces took over from the regular army units in Sindh. In the aftermath of the army withdrawal, the MQM launched its major attack on the institutions of civil administration and sought to create a law and order situation out in the street. In July 1995, a new Operation Clean-up was started in Karachi under the supervision of Interior Minister General Babar.
It was a coordinated effort between elite security and intelligence agencies, which used sophisticated monitoring equipment, network of informers, evaluation and corroboration of information acquired through interrogation and intelligence links within the MQM.
In the process of the operation, the PPP government allegedly carried out extra judicial killings, especially in fake police encounters, torture of the MQM’s workers and persecution of the latter’s families.
The humiliating searches inside households and brutish behavior of the police vis-à-vis the Mohajir youth alienated the community still further. Not surprisingly, Mohajirs continued to look towards the MQM for safeguarding their rights and interests.
By the second quarter of 1996, the MQM’s movement had been largely contained. While the MQM had intensely lobbied human rights organizations in and outside Pakistan, no generalized protest campaign against the government’s strong-arm tactics against it emerged in the country.
The MQM’s failure lay in its inability to challenge the legitimacy of the elected PPP government at any stage from 1993–96 either at Karachi or in Islamabad.
Rise of ethno nationalism, without incorporating the possibility and the nature of decline in its scope and intensity. An absolute majority of such movements have indeed been contained in the postwar era. It is unlikely that this trend will reserve in near future.
In this context, one can point to the Pushtoon, Baloch and Sindhi nationalist movements in Pakistan, which have been relatively contained within the framework of the political system of the country.
One can hope that the Mohajir nationalist movement will be reoriented towards a constitutional form of struggle and a parliamentary way to negotiating an ethnic bargain with other communities living in Sindh. It is significant to note that it is the state at the non-policy level, which created a situation of ethnic explosion in urban Sindh.
Various macro-level issues revolving around conflicts between politicians and army, federalist and provincial forces, Islamist and secularist elements and, externally, India and Pakistan seriously circumscribed the state’s capacity and will to pursue micro-level issues such as urban planning, educational and manpower strategies, as well as rural-urban and inter-provincial migration.
What is immediately required is the expansion of the service-giving network of the state in order to incorporate large sections of the population.
As the state defaulted on various counts such as citizen orientations, legal protection and security of life and property, ethnicity emerged as the new source of definition and categorization of interests and identity formation.
In other words, it was not too much of the (Jacobin) state, as primordial would have us believe, but rather too little of it which produced the Mohajir ethnic movement.
MQM has, since 2002, when General Pervez Musharraf opted for inclusive politics and rehabilitated the, MQM and MQM responded coming in to mainstream politics and since then is in the power corridors.
The PPP government opted for the same policy with MQM, although definitely for altogether different considerations, indispensability of MQM for formation and since then sustainability of Federal Government.
Hence in the Sindh Province MQM is a necessary evil for PPP, it is indispensable in keeping Zardari led PPP Government in Islamabad.
In this backdrop it is Karachi, which has become Achilles’ Heel-the vulnerable spot for the Mr. Zardari and Gilani. In the case of Karachi read MQM, the Peoples Party Sindh clearly appears to be at odds with its own Federal Government. The state is bearing the cost for the indecisiveness of incumbent dispensation in Islamabad.
One may seek guidance from Jinnah to address the contemporary issues of Karachi.
KARACHI–A CITY WITH BRIGHT FUTURE
Reply to the Civic Address presented by the Karachi Corporation on 25th August, 1947:
“I thank you Mayor and Councilors of the Corporation of the City of Karachi for your cordial address of welcome and all the kind thoughts and personal references you have been good enough to make with regard to myself and my sister. I appreciate the noble sentiments and ideals, which you have referred to and I assure you that it is my desire and hope that they will be cherished and lived up to. I am very glad that I have had this opportunity of meeting you all and the citizens of Karachi.
Undoubtedly, I have great love and regard for this beautiful town not only because of my old associations with it, or because it is my birthplace, as you have said, but because it has now become the birthplace of the free, sovereign and independent state of Pakistan. For all freedom - loving people, Karachi will on that account not only be symbol of special significance but will occupy a place in history for which there is no parallel, and I feel it my good fortune that I have the honor to be the first to receive this Civic Address.
Karachi is no ordinary town. Nature has given it exceptional advantages, which particularly suit modern needs and conditions.
That is why starting from humble beginnings it has come to be what it is, and one could say with confidence that the day is not far hence when it will be ranked amongst the first cities of the world. Not only its airports, but also the naval port and also the main town will be amongst the finest. There is one especially pleasing feature about Karachi –while most of the big cities are crowded and cramped with over towering structures, Karachi has large open spaces and hill station style roofs which give to the visitor a feeling of space and ease.
It has also got the advantage of a salubrious climate and is always blessed with healthy and cool breezes throughout the year. I visualize a great future for Karachi –it always had immense potentialities. Now with the establishment of Pakistan’s Capital here and the arrival of Pakistan Government and its personnel and the consequent influx of trade, industry and business, immense opportunities have opened out for it. So let us all strive together to make this beautiful town a great metropolis, a center of trade, industry and commerce, and a seat of learning and culture.
As you have said, the responsibilities of Karachi and its Corporation have increased along with its importance. I hope that the Corporation will prove equal to the task. There would be an extra strain on all phases of Corporation activities, but under the wise and able guidance of the City fathers, and with the co-operation of all the citizens, this would be, I trust, borne with alacrity and willingness. The help of the Government, I feel, will be available in your difficulties and problems and I am sure that the authorities concerned will in time deal appropriately with question of the power and status of the Corporation and its Mayor, questions which appear to worry you just now a great deal.
Karachi has the distinction of being the only town of importance where, during these times of communal disturbances, people have kept their heads cool and lived amicable, and I hope we shall continue to do so.
Pakistan is grateful to the Sindh Government and the Corporation and people of Karachi for welcoming its Central Government to have its headquarters here and for providing all facilities. With the arrival of Pakistan’s staff, Karachi already has, as its citizens, people from all parts of Pakistan and Hindustan. They will all live here together like true citizens and devote their energies to and avail themselves of the great opportunities that present themselves to us all to build up and reconstruct Pakistan in a manner which will command the respect of sister nations and find a place of honor along with great nations of the world as an equal.
It should be our aim not only to remove want and fear of all types, but also to secure liberty, fraternity and equality as enjoined upon us by Islam.
I thank you again, Mayor and Councillor for your address of welcome. Pakistan Zindabad”
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