As has been pointed out, it is crucial to understand that the term has important religious connotations. Of course the term comes from those faithful who accompanied the Prophet in his migration (Hijrah) from Mecca to Medina. The Islamic era commences, not from when the Prophet is born, nor even with the first revelation of the Qur’an. Instead the Islamic calendar begins with the Hijrah. Being a Muhajir is therefore a matter of pride indicating sacrifice for Islam. The stigma in the West associated with the term refugee is therefore absent in the Islamic world.
Nevertheless, it is still a legitimate question to ask as to why this identity persisted in places such as Karachi and Hyderabad in a way in which it did not in the Punjab, which in fact witnessed greater migratory flows.
We must turn to history. Part of the reason surely was that the distance between refugees and the locals in Sindh seemed greater in terms of culture, language and life-style than the Punjab. The initial perceptions that many refugees had of the local population was that they were traditional and backward. Sindh was the land where Pirs occupied a central place like no where else on the Indian subcontinent. Many refugees identified themselves more with the themes that underpinned Islamic modernism. The Pakistan movement was spearheaded by Muslim modernists, who held the whip hand in the early years of Pakistan. Modernists Muslims have sought, since the nineteenth century, to recover the ‘sprit of Islam’ freed from ‘blind’ imitation of medieval authorities. ‘Authentic’ Islam for them, is recovered through a fresh reading of Islam’s foundational texts, especially the Qur’an, unmediated by the ulama. Such leaders had always shown an unease with aspects of shrine based Islam which seemed to conflict with their own perception of a rational, this worldly Islam.
Secondly, compared with the Punjab, the rehabilitation of refugees in Karachi was a much slower process. In 1955 the authorities in Karachi carried out a census of people to determine who were still living on the city’s pavements or in undeveloped colonies. The great majority of the estimated 800,000 were refugees. The sense of frustration, especially with how land was allotted, is revealed by a poem by Majeed Lahori as cited by Sarah Ansari on her work on Sindh:
Land was allotted and factory was allotted,
And along with it leadership was allotted to you.
You are the one who has been allotted every happiness,
And I am the one who has been allotted poverty.
Those who were rich are owners of buildings,
The poor citizen has been allotted vagrancy.
My amazed eyes have also seen it happen,
That those who were robbers were allotted leadership.
Those who could not qualify as clerics before,
By God’s glory were allotted post of officers.
During this era of allotment, O Majeed,
I could not get a house but was allotted poetry.
Thirdly, we must take note of the declining political fortunes of many of the elite refugees. Whilst many refugees had settled in squatter communities, there was a Muhajir elite, which dominated the Muslim League and higher bureaucracy in the newly created Pakistan. For instance in 1973 Muhajirs filled about a third of the positions in the Bureaucracy despite being less than one tenth of the population. Muhajirs were also dominant in business led by Gujarati speaking migrants from Bombay. This position of dominance was to however diminish. The shift of the capital city to Islamabad also signalled to Muhajir community a blowing of a new wind. This feeling was to intensify under the Zulfiqur Ali Bhutto period. Nationalisation hurt Muhajir business interests. The introduction of quotas in administration and the introduction of the Sindhi language into the schools of Sindh also undermined Muhajir interests.
Fourthly, the Muslim League in the 1940s propagated an idea of Pakistan that did not have strong geographic moorings. Unity was to be based not so much on geography but simply on belonging to a shared religion.With the coming of Zulfiqur Ali Bhutto, a more territorial notion of Pakistan emerged, where there was an effort to define a Pakistani identity as being one fundamentally rooted in its geography and its unique history. This was a vision of Pakistan as a nation grounded in historic and regional cultures. Concomitant with this the Bhuttos had worshiped regularly at the shrine of Lal Shabaz Qalandar, in Sehwan Sharif. Though we should not overstate the argument, folk culture was given far more attention, than hitherto had been the case by elite Pakistani leadership.
Of course such a vision whilst enthusiastically embraced by many also unsettled the Muhajirs of Sindh, who as migrants could be conceived as a people without a deep attachment to the current land of Pakistan. The Muhajirs who saw themselves as representing a moral community, one that left their homes for the idea of Pakistan, that had sacrificed a great deal for an ideal, saw this as a threatening development and the adoption of the Muhajir label was at least a partial effort to claim an identity and distinctive place for themselves in Pakistan. As one MQM activist told Anatol Lieven:
“When the MQM was created, there was a crisis of identity for all those like us who had migrated from India. We felt that we had no identity because we had no land of our own, unlike the Sindhis, Punjabis or Pathans. But the MQM gave us our identity, and if I could describe it in one sentence, the MQM is a passion for us. Identity is self-respect, freedom, honour. I now feel that I am also something, that there are some things that are in my hands, that I am helping my community to solve their problems, if only in a small way.”
