On Wednesday, Waseem Akhtar will become the mayor of a city that is home to about 20 million to 25 million people. And he will do the job from prison.
His swearing-in will come two days after his party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, faces its biggest internal crisis in recent memory. The MQM has run Karachi, Pakistan's commercial capital, for decades and is one of the country's biggest political parties, though its influence is largely confined to the densely packed megalopolis and surrounding areas.
On Monday, paramilitary forces raided and sealed off the MQM's headquarters after party rank-and-file stormed the office of a television channel. The violence was kicked off by comments from MQM's leader-in-exile, Altaf Hussain, who faces murder and money-laundering charges and has been subject to countless death threats. Since fleeing to London in 1991, Hussain has addressed supporters by a telephone hooked up to a loudspeaker at the party headquarters. His word is seen as sacrosanct among the party faithful.
In his Monday dial-in diatribe, Hussain denounced what he deemed the army's heavy-handed tactics to silence dissenters and went so far as to call Pakistan itself "a cancer on the world." His ensuing critique of Pakistani media sparked the attack on the television channel's office, which resulted in one death and numerous injuries.
Hussain's comments were met with anger and derision from the rest of the Pakistani political establishment. Amid calls for Hussain's ouster, he released a statement saying, “From the depth of my heart, I beg pardon from my remarks against Pakistan," and he tried to explain away his comments as the result of "severe mental stress."
On Tuesday, one of the MQM's top leaders, Farooq Sattar, seemed to imply that Hussain's role would be diminished in the near future.
"If such statements are a result of mental stress, then that mental stress needs to be resolved first. It would be better for MQM to operate from Pakistan until Altaf Hussain's health issues are resolved, as such statements push MQM into confinement. Altaf Hussain and the entire party are being ridiculed due to these statements," Sattar said.
Sattar's speech was received well in the Pakistani press, but it clearly was an attempt at damage control.
Whether the MQM splinters after this incident remains to be seen, but Pakistan's political landscape is scarred by rifts. Almost every political party, and even the Pakistani Taliban and other militant networks, have multiple factions consumed as much by infighting as anything else.
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