ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to challenge two common assumptions about political and criminal violence in Karachi: first, that the city would be drifting towards chaos, making it ungovernable and threatening Pakistan's, if not global, stability in the process; second, that the more things change, the more they remain the same in a city ostensibly mired in its conflicts. The militarization of Karachis politics predates the ethnic riots of the mid-1980s as well as the rise of Muttahida Qaumi Movement at the helm of city politics and actually started on the city campuses at the end of the 1970s. The inclusion of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Zias government also guaranteed political protection to Islamist student activists when they tampered with the law. The armed opposition of the Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaba, therefore, prepared the ground for the transformation of the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organization into a political party. For the last three decades Karachi has been subjected to various forms of collective violence.
