KARACHI: For over 25 years, maverick political leader Altaf Hussain had an iron grip on Karachi, able to bring Pakistan’s largest city to a standstill with a single phone call.
But much has changed in the last five years in the coastal metropolis of 20 million people, and the transformation is playing out in the run-up to Pakistan’s general election next week.
The country’s three main national parties now campaign openly in the teeming, financial hub, once considered one of the world’s most dangerous cities and dominated for decades by Hussain’s Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), even though he himself has lived in self-imposed exile in London since 1992.
“Karachi is peaceful today,” said Shehla Raza, a candidate for the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in one of Karachi’s parliamentary constituencies. “I am going to bazaars (markets), multi-story apartment blocks, I am getting a tremendous response.”
At the last election in 2013, the MQM won 16 of Karachi’s 20 seats, and critics say they were aided by a campaign of intimidation and violence.
Some months after the election, a paramilitary crackdown transformed Karachi, sharply bringing down murder and kidnapping rates, while splits within the MQM’s leadership in 2016 broke the grip of Hussain.
