Karachi's Pashtuns: one of the largest Pashtun cities

At a glance

• Karachi is one of the largest Pashtun cities by any count. The 2023 census counted 2.752 million in its seven districts, 13.52 per cent of the city, up from about 1.2 million in 1998. [9, 11, 12]

• Pashtun labourers came from the North-West Frontier in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the building and industrial boom of Ayub Khan's years. [3, 4]

• The best-documented Pashtun settlements are Sohrab Goth on the Super Highway and Orangi Town, where the Pashtun builders and transporters were noticed by the social worker Akhtar Hameed Khan in the 1990s. [1, 2]

• The city's ethnic riots of April 1985 and December 1986 involved Pashto speakers and Urdu speakers, and an inquiry headed by a former Chief Justice blamed the government for the second. [5, 6]

• Naqeebullah Mehsud, a 27-year-old from South Waziristan, was killed in a police "encounter" on 13 January 2018. His death started the Pashtun Long March. A court acquitted the police officer accused of ordering it in 2023. [13, 14]

How many Pashtuns live in Karachi

No census publishes a count of Pashtuns in Karachi, only of mother tongues. The 1998 census recorded about 12 per cent of Karachi's 9.856 million people as Pakhtun, roughly 1.2 million Pashto speakers. [9] The 2017 census did not publish an ethnic breakdown for the city. [9] The 2023 census counted 2.752 million Pashto speakers across Karachi's seven districts, against 10.315 million for Urdu and 2.264 million for Sindhi. [12] Dawn put the Pashto share at 13.52 per cent. [11]

The speakers are concentrated. In Kemari district, 33 of every 100 people gave Pashto as their first language, and in Malir 18 per cent did. [11] Sindh as a whole had 2.955 million Pashto speakers, so more than nine in ten of them live in Karachi. [12]

Politicians give larger figures. In 2010 the Awami National Party leader Shahi Syed claimed four million Pakhtuns in the city, and the Pakistani columnist Khaled Ahmed asked whether that counted people from Fata and Afghanistan as well. [8] Ahmed wrote that Karachi "hosts the largest concentration of urban Pakhtun population, surpassing Peshawar, Quetta and Kandahar." [8] In 2018 Dawn's Azfar-ul-Ashfaque estimated 2.4 to 3 million Pashto speakers in Karachi division, against a Peshawar population of 1.9 million. [9] The number of Pashtuns in the city is therefore a matter of estimate, and the language figures are the only counted ones. The wider picture of Pashtun cities is in Pashtuns today.

Arrival in the late 1950s and 1960s

Nadeem F. Paracha, writing in Dawn in 2016 under photographs of Karachi's past, dated the Pashtun arrival to the late 1950s. In the early 1950s the city's labour force was mostly working-class refugees from India. By the late 1950s, he wrote, much of it was Pakhtun migrants arriving from the North-West Frontier Province, drawn by the building and industrial boom of Ayub Khan's first years. [3] A second piece by Paracha, from 2014, puts the start of the arrival in the early 1960s. [4] The two dates differ by a few years, and neither gives a count.

Paracha says the newcomers took work as labourers and soon began to run businesses that provided public transport, and that tension grew between the city's Mohajir majority and the Pashtun arrivals. [3] He records the first Mohajir-Pashtun riot as 1965. [3] The Express Tribune's 2013 account of Nazimabad describes a scuffle during Ayub Khan's victory procession after the presidential election against Fatima Jinnah, which it dates to 1964 and calls one of the most significant ethnic clashes the country had seen to that time. [7] The sources give different years for the election riot.

The Akakhel are a separate and later story. Arif Hasan reported in the Herald that the Akakhel, a Pashtun group also known as Koochis or Powindahs, moved from Peshawar to Karachi in 1971 and settled at Sohrab Goth in 1972. [1] Some of their sub-clans had historically carried wool and cloth between Central Asia and India. [1] The Powindah nomads and their road are described in Dera Ismail Khan and the Derajat. Around 1981 Pathans from Dir, Bajaur, Mardan and Swat settled near them. Hasan names Mahsuds, Peshawaris and Mohmands among them. [1]

Work

Akhtar Hameed Khan, who was born in Agra, led the Orangi Pilot Project from April 1990 and wrote about the Pathans he found there. [2] He described how newcomers from the border areas, from Balochistan to Hazara, the tribal belt, Peshawar and Swat, lodged first in deras, bachelor hostels run by patrons, and within a few years replaced their huts with built houses. [2]

He names several trades. Pathans were "the chief diggers and builders" of Orangi, and he calls them the world's quickest and cheapest manual diggers. [2] They sold goods from handcarts, and boys collected rags, paper, plastic and tin and earned fifteen or twenty rupees a day. [2] Pathan women took sewing work home. [2] Pathans were the most common owners, drivers and conductors of trucks and wagons, and owners trained young apprentices from the tribal areas who later bought vehicles on hire purchase. [2] The apprenticeship chain, he writes, spread repair shops and other small businesses. [2]

At Sohrab Goth, Hasan found most of the Pathan settlers were transporters or labourers in the transport trade, with a few wealthy transporters among them. [1] The Akakhel there ran a cloth and household goods market for customers from richer districts, and had built schools and clinics and put more than 70 million rupees into the settlement over sixteen years, according to the residents. [1] The Akakhel had chosen the site partly for its access to the Super Highway. [1]

Neighbourhoods

Sohrab Goth, called Haji Hasan Colony by its residents, grew from tents to concrete and tin houses, and got a water main in 1980. [1] Orangi Town is the largest area where a Pashtun presence is described. Khan names Afridi Colony, a Pathan lane that built its own sanitation, and Benaras Chowk, since renamed Bacha Khan Chowk, which he called "an epitome of Pathan ethos" with its many shops and workshops. [2] During strikes, when Mohajir shops in Orangi closed, he noted that the shops at Benaras Chowk stayed open and gained customers. [2] The renaming honours Bacha Khan.

Paracha's photograph captions place Mohajirs on one side of the hill at Kati Pahari in Orangi and Pakhtuns on the other. [4] Banaras and Quaidabad were the two provincial constituencies the Awami National Party held in Karachi between 2008 and 2013. [9] Machhar Colony and Ganna Mandi, near Sohrab Goth, are where Afghan families were arrested in 2023. [16]

The pattern is of clusters. Paracha ties the city's "clustered diversity" to the 1986 riots, after which ethnic groups lived more in their own areas. [4] Khaled Ahmed called Karachi 75 per cent ethnically segregated. [8]

The riots of 1985 and 1986

On 15 April 1985 Bushra Zaidi, a student of 20, was run over by a minibus near Nazimabad Chowrangi in Karachi and died at Abbasi Shaheed Hospital. [5] Shaikh Aziz, writing in Dawn, says reports named the driver as Pashto-speaking and that there were "great apprehensions that rioting might take an ethnic turn." [5] The protests that followed spread across the city, from Nazimabad and Liaquatabad to Orangi and Banaras Colony, and buses were burned. [5] Aziz says rioting hit almost all localities, those of Pashto speakers and Urdu speakers both. [5] The official death toll was 50 dead and more than 300 injured, and unofficial figures say 200 dead. [5] The Express Tribune says the fuel was already in the city: migration, shifting numbers and competition over resources. [7]

The second round came in December 1986. On 12 December Governor Lt Gen Jahandad Khan ordered a police operation against suspected narcotics and arms houses at Sohrab Goth. Dawn reported the next day a haul of one Kalashnikov, 2,000 rounds and 65 kilograms of heroin. [6] Hasan records the claim that the newer Pathan settlements had become a centre of the narcotics and arms trade, and that the residents disputed it. [1] He reports that the police surrounded the settlement, searched houses without warrants, according to the residents, and bulldozed it, and that the residents said three people died. [1] About 1,200 of some 2,000 families affected were Akakhel, and they were moved to three camps by the Super Highway. [1] The residents said the government had promised in 1983 that they would not be removed. [1]

Aziz writes that the Pakhtun community "developed a feeling" that the raid had been instigated by Urdu-speaking residents, and that on 13 December mosque announcements in Pakhtun areas called it an attack on Pakhtuns. [6] On 14 December fighting broke out between Pakhtun settlers and Urdu-speaking residents in the Aligarh and Qasba colonies near Orangi, with houses burned and firing for hours. [6] Dawn's account calls it among the most horrifying acts of terror in Karachi's history. [6] By 20 December the toll was reported as 166, and some sources say 400. [6] Curfew covered nearly two thirds of the city and the army was called out. [6] Prime Minister Mohammad Khan Junejo asked his cabinet to resign. [6] An inquiry headed by the former Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah called it "the worst kind of massacre" and blamed the government. [6] Aziz gives no Urdu-speaking account in the residents' own words. He traces the violence to unequal shares of Karachi's resources. [6]

Politics

Karachi's Pashtun vote has not stayed with one party. Dawn's Azfar-ul-Ashfaque quotes the analyst Tauseef Ahmed that the community backed a new party in most elections: the MMA in 2002, the Awami National Party in 2008, Imran Khan's PTI in 2013. [9] The ANP, founded by Khan Abdul Wali Khan in 1986, won two provincial seats in Karachi in 2008, Banaras and Quaidabad, and lost both in 2013. [9] Dawn links the decline to the Rangers-led operation and the move of workers to other parties. [9] In 2018 the ANP won no seat in Karachi, and the PTI took 13 of 21 National Assembly seats and 23 of 44 provincial ones. [10] Paracha writes that the ANP's growth followed Karachi's Pashtun growth, and that after 2009 extremist groups moved into Pashtun-majority areas and wiped out its wings there. [4]

Khaled Ahmed argued in 2010 that Karachi's two main blocs were Pashtun and Urdu-speaking, that the ANP could not claim to lead all Pakhtuns in the city, and that killings of ANP leaders were following killings of leaders of the MQM. [8] Dawn adds that many Pashtun voters went to the PPP, PML-N and PTI, and that it is hard to win a National Assembly seat in Karachi on Pashtun votes alone, though some provincial seats cannot be won without them. [9]

Naqeebullah Mehsud

Naqeebullah Mehsud was a 27-year-old man from South Waziristan living in Karachi, whom relatives described as a shop owner who liked modelling. [13] On 13 January 2018 Malir's police chief, Rao Anwar, reported an "encounter" at Usman Khaskheli Goth on the edge of the city, in which four men died, Mehsud among them. [13] Rao Anwar said he was a militant of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan. A spokesman of the Tehreek-i-Taliban's South Waziristan wing called that baseless, and the family denied any link. [13]

The protests began as a Mehsud tribal demand. A caravan organised by the Mehsud Tahafuz Movement left Dera Ismail Khan on 26 January 2018, and members of the tribe sat outside the National Press Club in Islamabad on 1 February. [14] Their first demand was Rao Anwar's arrest and the sharing of the police inquiry. [14] The sit-in turned into the Pashtun Long March, organised by young Pashtuns on social media, with five demands, among them justice for Mehsud, a judicial commission on extrajudicial killings of Pashtuns, the production of missing persons in court, removal of landmines from Fata and an end to curfews. [15] Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi reportedly promised that Mehsud's killers would be brought to justice. [15]

On 23 January 2023 an anti-terrorism court in Karachi acquitted Rao Anwar and 17 others. [13] The judge said the prosecution had failed to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and that geo-fencing and call records did not place Anwar at the scene. [13] The family's lawyer, Jibran Nasir, said the family would appeal, and that witnesses had backed away and documents had gone missing. [13] Rao Anwar said the charges against him were false and that the man killed was a wanted militant named Naseemullah. [13]

Afghans in Karachi

Afghans arrived in Karachi as well. Hasan wrote in 1987 that those who settled near Sohrab Goth around 1981 were poor, almost all Farsi-speaking, and worked as construction and factory labourers. [1] The wars that sent them are in The Saur revolution, the Soviet war and the refugees, 1978–1992. Khaled Ahmed cites Robert Nichols for perhaps 500,000 Afghans still living in Karachi in 2004. [8]

On 1 November 2023 police in Karachi detained over 200 people, mostly Afghans, according to Dawn's Imtiaz Ali. The south zone's DIG said as many as 350 were held across the city, and the east zone's SSP said 54 were taken in Machhar Colony and Ganna Mandi. [16] They were held at Haji Camp and a scouts hostel in Sultanabad, and those without valid papers or Proof of Registration cards were to be sent to Balochistan and out through the Chaman border. [16] The DIG said they were treated with respect and their rights would not be violated. [16]