The leader of Pakistan's Mohajir community centered in Karachi has asked his followers to seek intervention of the UN, Nato, United States, and even India, to save the ethnic group from persecution by Pakistan's Punjabi-dominated military .
The exhortation, which came during Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) supremo Altaf Hussain's broadcast to the party's 19th worker's convention in Dallas this weekend, has outraged Pakistani's military establishment and its political handmaidens, with charges of treason erupting against the exiled Mohajir leader.
The background to the explosive call for international -and Indian -intervention in Pakistani military's ongoing crackdown in Karachi against workers of the MQM, which professes to represent Mohajirs, as Muslims who migrated from India during partition are called. The crackdown is the outcome of what is essentially a political turf battle that pits the Urduspeaking Mohajirs, who dominate Karachi's politics against the Punjabi-majority military and its political acolytes in the north, for control over Pakistan's biggest revenue-generating city .
Altaf Hussain fled Pakistan for Britain in 1992 fearing threats to his life and has since then controlled MQM from London. Amid growing lawlessness, mayhem, and turf battles between Mohajirs, Baloch, and Pashtuns in Karachi, with the Punjabi-dominated center trying to exert its own control, he has rallied his supporters to demand more devolution, sometimes pressing for a new province for Mohajirs, in moves seen by the establishment as bordering on secessionism. Hussain told his US supporters in a telephonic address to internationalize the atrocities against Mohajirs, who he said are being rounded up and exterminated in large numbers in Karachi. His speech also included an oblique, but explosive invitation to India to intervene to save the Mohajirs, who he said were sons of India. “India is a cowardly country . Had it had so much as a smidgen of honor it wouldn't have allowed Mohajirs to be slaughtered in Pakistan.“
The remarks touched a raw nerve in Islamabad where the military and its stooges have already sought to cast Hussain and his loyalists as traitors, in the same way the Punjabi elite portrayed Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rehman before driving him to demand a separate state.
“The hate-inciting speech, made in a foreign country last night, crossed all limits.Heads of key institutions were insulted,“ said interior minister Nisar Ali Chaudhury, the Dawn daily reported.
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