Violence and ethnic identity in Karachi and Hyderabad

From the mid 1980s onwards, urban Sindh has often been in the grip of ethnic violence. The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (now known as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement), established at around the same time, has played a central role in these conflicts. Most analyses interpret the violence as an escalation of already-existing communal differences between various migrant groups in cities like Karachi and Hyderabad. In this paper I argue that violence itself has often been constitutive of ethnic identity and ethnic mobilisation. Tracing the background of the language of ethnicity in Pakistani politics since Independence, I analyse how ethnic identity politics and violence have often gone hand in hand, beginning with the student activism of the late 1970s and developing into full-scale ethnic conflict during the 1980s and 1990s. This enables us to move away from primordial and communal interpretations of ethnic identity towards an analysis of ethnic identity in terms of political mobilisation.