With legislative elections in May, tensions are rising in Pakistan. In Karachi, murder for profit or political gain is a commonplace, as are demands for protection money, energy blackouts, and ethnic and religious violence.

(1). Without unions to defend them, many workers have found themselves jobless.

Social instability and power cuts have prompted a wave of industrial relocations to Bangladesh and Malaysia. The government has offered generous financial incentives for companies to come back, but without much success. “I believe a few companies have returned because of tariff concessions,” said Yasin Siddique, head of APTMA in southern Pakistan. But it would take more to reassure his colleagues: “If your livelihood, your property and your business are threatened, to avoid economic death you just have to find another solution.”

Businesses unable to find “another solution” face another obstacle: extortion by gangs. This is a growing phenomenon, especially in the Lyari district, next to the port and the country’s biggest industrial estate. Traders and industrialists who refuse to pay bhatta (protection money) run the risk of assassination or kidnapping and torture. Many end up in a sack dumped at the roadside. Meetings, protests and lockouts to pressure the administration into taking action have had no result. “To stay alive, many of our members have agreed to pay monthly protection money to the gangs,” said Atiq Mir, head of the All Karachi Traders’ Association. “The government has totally failed to protect us and it feels as if the whole city is falling into the hands of the gangsters. They already control many districts.”

The growth of violent crime is a huge challenge for the authorities, whose incompetence and lack of commitment have never been so obvious. “The pattern of killings in 2012 differed from 2011,” said Zohra Yusuf of the HRCP. In 2011 ethnic conflict was limited to a few districts such as Katti Pahari, which saw bloody clashes between Pashtuns and Urdu-speaking Muhajirs. Today, the violence has spread across the city and permeated every social class. Sharfuddin Memon, security advisor to the government of Sindh Province, talked of “multidirectional killings”, with a variety of motives, political, ethnic, religious and criminal. Some killers, he said, take advantage of the confusion to settle personal scores.

Extremist religious groups play a major part. They exist throughout Pakistan, and have a long history in the country. In 1971 it was ethnic sectarianism that led to the division of Pakistan, the eastern part declaring independence to become Bangladesh, the land of the Bengalis. Successive Pakistani governments have failed to learn from history, allowing ethnic divisions to grow.

Internal tensions

The Muhajirs fled to Pakistan from India in 1947, after Partition (muhajir means migrant in Urdu). Educated and qualified, they made an important contribution to the new country’s development. Over the years, quotas established by the government have given them privileged access to jobs in government and teaching. This has resulted in tensions and bloody clashes between the Muhajirs and indigenous populations, especially the Sindhis and Pashtuns, who have united under the banner of the Awami National Party (ANP).

The clashes intensified as a result of the dispute between Muhajirs and Sindhis in 1972, when the Sindhis refused to accept Urdu as the official language of Sindh Province. In the mid-1980s, the establishment of a Muhajir political party, the National Movement for Refugees (MQM), led to massacres of Muhajirs, instigated by Pashtun drug lords. This violence deepened the divide between Karachi’s two main ethnic groups.

Tensions remained high with further clashes between Sindhis and Muhajirs in 1988 and 1990, and military and police repression of the MQM between 1992 and 1995. These did not prevent the MQM from attracting supporters from beyond its ethnic base, and in the general election of 2008 it won 69.2% of the vote in Karachi.

Karachi has become a battleground for criminal gangs involved in racketeering, drugs, arms and human trafficking. Ethnic and political divisions fan the violence. Turf wars between the many gangs in Lyari, where the ethnic majority are Baluchs, often turn into ethnic clashes. Organised crime is also manipulated by political parties and linked to terrorist movements, which further strengthens its hold on society and economic life. The Lyari gangs wield immense power: they could paralyse the Judia Bazar, or even the entire city centre, if traders grew tired of paying for protection.

The situation worsened in 2007, with the arrival of a new wave of Pashtun refugees. Displaced by the military operations against the Taliban in the tribal regions of Swat and Waziristan (2), a million ended up in the suburbs of Karachi, especially the shantytowns. The authorities hoped to tame the Islamist fighters by letting them live in relative peace, providing healthcare and allowing them to raise funds. But they have declared war on every secular organisation in Karachi, including the MQM and its main rival, the ANP. Although the ANP’s members are almost all Pashtun, the Taliban regard them as traitors, for adopting secular positions and taking part in government in Islamabad. Police sources say attacks by Islamists have weakened the ANP considerably, even in its traditional strongholds.

Chaudhry Mohammad Aslam, a senior police superintendent in Karachi who has led many operations against the Taliban, told how, last year, two men claiming to be volunteers working for Tablighi Jamaat (Society for Spreading Faith) — a widely respected Islamic movement, with a non-violent reputation — recruited seven teenage boys in Karachi. The parents were told the boys would be going to the relatively quiet eastern city of Lahore, to be educated by the movement. Instead they were taken to Miranshah, administrative capital of North Waziristan, on the border with Afghanistan. They were held at a training camp for suicide bombers, directed by a senior Taliban commander, Wali Mohammad. After a US drone hit the camp, killing 17 recruits, the survivors told their story to the police and the principal recruiters were arrested. They told the magistrate who recorded their confessions: “We will attack and kill policemen, soldiers and law enforcement officers, because they are agents of America.”

No mercy for ‘traitors and tyrants’

It was not an empty threat. More than 150 police officers and magistrates were killed in Karachi during 2012 — most, probably, at the instigation of the Taliban. The message is clear. According to Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan, there will be no mercy for “the traitors and tyrants of Karachi”. Wasay Jalil, a spokesman for MQM, said: “We warned the authorities about the growing presence of the Taliban a long time ago, but they didn’t believe us. The war really has come down from the north.” But opponents of MQM shrugged off the warning as a publicity stunt, because of the party’s ethno-political rivalry with the Pashtuns.

The Taliban have followed the example of the gangs and taken up racketeering, attacking uncooperative traders with hand grenades. They also support extremist Sunni groups’ attacks on the Shia minority. In some of the Pashtun areas of the city, barbers are not allowed to shave beards and women cannot go out without a veil. The police offer no estimates of Taliban numbers in Karachi, but insiders say there may be 4,000-5,000 fighters. These numbers could mean trouble not only for Karachi residents, but for the US and its allies: Karachi is the only port through which Nato can import materials for its operations in Afghanistan.

According to Aslam, the Taliban were responsible for 14 bombings in 2011. This January his men seized 100kg of explosives in the Mangopir district. “It’s time to stop [the Taliban], otherwise the city will see bloodshed on an unprecedented scale,” said political analyst Tauseef Ahmed Khan. “That would be a severe setback for secular and progressive Karachi, and might take years to recover from.” But secular and progressive Karachi is already under threat from the violence used by political parties vying for power. “The political divisions here are extremely complicated, and the financial stakes are very high,” said Zohra Yusuf. “Criminal gangs, the Taliban, political decision-makers, banned extremist organisations — there are plenty of people ready to shed blood and burn buildings.”

Criminologist Fateh Muhammad Burfat, head of the sociology department at the University of Karachi, said: “There is only a 5% conviction rate in criminal cases, and 90% of inmates in Pakistan’s jails are awaiting trial.” Sharfuddin Memon blamed “institutional incapacity, due to insufficient police numbers and an intelligence network that is growing weaker.”

Is there a risk that the system will collapse? “We have to accept that the state has failed,” said Burfat. “All political parties should accept this harsh reality if they have any commitment to the nation.” Economist Shahid Hassan Siddiqui pointed out that Pakistan’s education budget is smaller than Ethiopia’s, while its health budget is the lowest in the world, and asked: “How can we hope for even a slight change for the better, let alone a revolution, when the economy is in such a poor state?”