Hussain came to prominence as an advocate for the rights of Pakistan's "muhajir" population – those Urdu-speaking communities that originally traveled to the country from India following partition in 1947. The move to Pakistan was traumatic for the subcontinent's Urdu-speaking communities. They often faced hostile indigenous populations, especially in Sindh and Punjab where most of them settled, and were discriminated against in universities and employment.
Hussain's political career was born out of this marginalisation. Had it not been for the military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, however, it is unlikely that he would have risen to prominence. Zia was a master of divide-and-rule politics and sectarianism and ethnic tensions rose under his dictatorship. In Hussain's MQM, Zia saw potential for yet another political platform for dividing would-be federalist opponents.
From inception, the MQM's powerbase has been Karachi, Pakistan's simmering, overcrowded economic hub. It is also home to the country's largest Urdu-speaking population. For decades the MQM has dominated local politics, albeit more often than not in manners and means outside the formal parliamentary process.
When it ruled Karachi with what critics described as a mafia-like organisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the city was engulfed in violence (either endorsed of ignored by the MQM), many of its political opponents mysteriously disappeared only to be later found as corpses, often with the scars of gruesome torture. In 1996 the US state department accused the MQM, along with other political factions, of involvement in torture, summary killings and other abuses. As I noted in an earlier piece for Cif on Karachi, many Karachites have their own personal stories of the period.
The army eventually stepped into the chaotic milieu in 1992, setting the stage for a bloody conflict that, at its height between 1992 and 1995, saw up to 10 political activists murdered per day. The violence compelled Hussain to flee the country, first to the autocrat-friendly Saudi Arabia and finally to the UK where he still lives.
Ever since then, Hussain has been too fearful to return to Pakistan.
Yet he remains ubiquitous in Karachi, not least in the MQM posters liberally scattered in the party's stronghold districts. Hussain still sends his daily orders to them from his Mill Hill residence in North London.
One of those orders has been the controversial effort to prevent ethnic Pashtuns taking refuge in the southern state of Sindh while fleeing from the Taliban war in the North West Frontier Province. Hussain and the MQM, the most vocal and vociferous opponents of the Pashtuns, have spoken regularly of the "Talibanisation" of Karachi owing to its ever-growing Pashtun population, a largely poor community of economic migrants that do much of the menial work in the large port city. Those claims, sparked by rumours that Taliban have slipped into Sindh by posing as refugees and a spate of high-profile police operations against alleged pro-Taliban syndicates in Karachi, have helped add Pakistan's Pashtun population to Hussain's already large list of enemies.
The animosity has fuelled a bloody running battle in Karachi between MQM and Pashtun activists from the secular Awami National party that has claimed hundreds of lives.
It is difficult to find people outside and some inside MQM who consider Hussain a positive influence. According to the cricketer turned politician Imran Khan, Hussain's MQM is "a fascist movement run by criminals".
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