Free Aboard the Democracy Train by Nafisa Hoodbhoy Page B

in Karachi, alongside Sindhi Hindus. But in 1947, when the British divided India to create Pakistan, our Hindu Sindhi neighbors left Karachi in droves.
    Indeed, as the flood of refugees arrived from India, they headed to the cities and towns of Sindh to occupy the evacuated property and jobs left by the fleeing Hindu Sindhis. Although educated Sindhis from small towns of the province would over time migrate to Karachi and Hyderabad, the millions of Muslim migrants from India who poured into these cities outnumbered them.
    Still, since childhood my parents had taken every possible measure to help us assimilate in a Karachi where the Mohajirs became the dominant population. We were not even encouraged to speak our native Sindhi language and instead spoke Urdu – the language brought by the refugees from India. It helped me to camouflage my ethnicity.
    On September 1, 1988, as I sped from hospital to hospital interviewing families of gunshot victims, no one could figure out whether I was a Sindhi or Mohajir. I was further removed from the fray from having been educated in the schools set up by the British in Karachi. That explained me, a young woman scribbling away in English, even as I interviewed the gunshot victims in Urdu.
    On that evening of 1988, as I drove back to report the massacres, I was driven by an urge to let people know what was really going on. Departing from the newspaper’s rules against naming the ethnicity of victims, I let readers read between the lines that the massacre had mainly killed Sindhis. It was a bit of a wire act to do so in my conservative newspaper, but I wanted people to know the reality.
    My city editor, Akhtar Payami – himself a Mohajir and usually sensitive to my news approach – asked me how I, as a Sindhi, felt about the attacks. I told him that personally, I was not worried that MQM militants would target us. We belonged to a privileged family and were integrated with other ethnic communities. Still, I saw the sense of insecurity among newspaper colleagues who were Sindhis and Balochis – who identify with Sindhis; after the attack, they had gathered in our Reporters Room with a new sense of camaraderie.
    My senior Sindhi colleague, the late Ghulam Ali, no longer cracked his usual jokes. A crime reporter, he had taken to jestingthat the way to scandalize a rickshaw driver was to ask to be taken to Liaquatabad – the very inferno of Mohajir riots. He always had a collection of jokes at the ready to keep me laughing when times were bad. But that night, as I saw the drawn out faces of my senior colleagues, I wondered what the future would hold for us.
The First Spark
    It was no coincidence that ethnic violence first broke out with the creation of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in 1985, shortly after Gen. Zia had held non-partisan elections as part of his plan to usher in controlled democracy.
    That year, the Mohajirs, led by a former Karachi university student, Altaf Hussain contested as an independent party and won a landslide victory. Encouraged by Gen. Zia ul Haq to organize on non-political grounds, the refugees from India mobilized in Karachi on the basis of their separate ethnic identity and registered as a political party.
    In April 1985, I was tipped off by our crime reporter that gunshot victims had begun to pile up at a hospital in the north of Karachi. Word was that a speeding Pashtun mini-van driver had killed a Mohajir college girl, Bushra Zaidi. The accident itself was not news. Indeed, not a day went by when the newspapers did not report traffic deaths. Terrified of the speeding vehicles, young women often held hands as they ran across this particular intersection. But that day, the young college girl that tried nervously to cross the road was struck down and died.
    Bushra’s death became a cue for the unemployed Mohajir youth. They banded, in the newly armed MQM, to fan out throughout the city and destroy mini-vans dubbed “yellow devils.” They also burnt down