Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui — the saviour of urban Sindh? – Pakistan

Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) convener Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui is focusing on Karachi’s development in the run-up to the February 8 polls, bent on ending the PPP’s 15-year-long rule in urban Sindh, one which he has termed a “nightmare”.

A former deputy convener of the united MQM, a former chief of the All Pakistan Muttahida Student Organisation (APMSO), and a former leader of overseas wings, Siddiqui has risen through the ranks and has ample experience when it comes to leadership.

Following the decision to move away from Altaf Hussain after August 22, 2016 — which was taken by Siddiqui, Farooq Sattar, and Amir Khan — Siddiqui was elected as the deputy convener of the party. In 2018, he replaced Sattar as convener. Despite resistance and several visits to the courts, Siddiqui has maintained his hold on the key position till date.

Since the 1988 general elections, the party, once united and led by Altaf, had always emerged as the single largest party in Karachi — with the exception of 1993, when it boycotted the polls on the NA seats. It retained the position even in 2002, when the erstwhile Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal had challenged the MQM in its traditional constituencies and bagged six NA seats in Karachi.

But in the 2018 general elections, when a fragmented MQM contested without the blessings of its founder, Imran Khan’s PTI beat the party in the country’s commercial capital by winning 14 NA seats. The electoral presence of the MQM-P in the lower house of Parliament shrunk to a mere seven from Karachi and Hyderabad, compared to 25 in 2013.

Back and forth political alliances

After the 2018 general elections, Siddiqui had decided to extend support to the PTI for the formation of the federal government and was subsequently appointed as minister for information technology. He resigned from the post in 2020, saying the then-ruling PTI did not fulfill its promises but said the party would continue to support the Imran Khan-led government.

By 2021, however, the party was openly expressing its reservations with the ruling party, saying that it had become a burden to support the latter. Ultimately, just 10 days before Imran was ousted from office through a no-confidence vote on April 10, 2022, Siddiqui’s party had exited the ruling coalition “in the interest of Pakistan”.

At the time of Imran’s unceremonious exit, the MQM-P had signed two agreements with the PPP and the PML-N — two key political parties in the opposition alliance called the Pakistan Democratic Movement. However, that did not stop Siddiqui and his colleagues from criticising the PDM, sometimes for local government elections, other times for inflation and the digital census process.

Ahead of this year’s general election, the MQM-P appears to be working on an electoral alliance with the PML-N. This time around, Siddiqui has filed nomination papers from NA-248 (Central-II), NA-249 (Central-III), and NA-250 (Central-IV). He has also been declared eligible to contest polls from these seats.

Rebranding

In January last year, after weeks of “will they, won’t they” uncertainty, various factions of the MQM joined hands to come up with a “rebranded version of the party.

The merger came after months of meetings, backdoor contacts, and negotiations among the stakeholders — MQM-P, Syed Mustafa Kamal’s Pak Sarzameen Party, and MQM Restoration Committee led by Dr Farooq Sattar.

The development had emerged amid ‘conjecture’ that behind-the-scenes efforts were made by powerful quarters to bring the lost brothers under one umbrella. Multiple sources from the different factions of the party had also revealed that the establishment needed to field a unified party in urban Sindh ahead of the Feb 8 polls.

Since then, it appears that the responsibility to save the nascent merger from any undoing lies on the establishment’s shoulders.

After the merger, Siddiqui has continued to function as the MQM-P head. Kamal and Sattar were made senior deputy conveners, along with Nasreen Jalil and Amir Khan, while Anis Kaimkhani shared the position of deputy convener with Abdul Wasim, Khawja Izharul Hasan, former Karachi mayor Wasim Akhtar and Kaiful Wara. The number of coordination committee members also crossed 70.

The merger had drawn criticism from various rival parties including the PTI and Jamaat-i-Islami, who called it a work of “political engineering” devised by the “powers that be” and being executed by former president and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Asif Ali Zardari.

However, Siddiqui has called today’s MQM the only option “after the failed experiment of imposing an artificial leadership with a fake mandate in urban areas of Sindh”. According to him, the party is more focused, stronger and active now and it is the only solution to the problems of urban Sindh.

Key stances

• Siddiqui has time and again vowed to achieve the MQM-P’s goal of an empowered local government system through the fresh democratic exercise and bring an end to the PPP’s “plundering” of national resources

• He wants to devolve power to the third tier of the government, the local bodies, which he says would strengthen the democracy and parliamentary system

• The MQM-P convener has stated that it is time to review the national power supply policy which, he claimed, favoured certain classes and exploited the poor

• A critic of the fresh delimitation conducted by the Election Commission of Pakistan ahead of the Feb 8 polls, Siddiqui has highlighted “serious flaws” in electoral rolls of urban Sindh, claiming that “flaws and anomalies” in Karachi voter lists had shifted hundreds of thousands of the city votes from their original constituencies to other areas

• The MQM-P convener has also said that this party is against “feudal democracy” and considers only Pakistan as dharti maa [mother land]

Header artwork by Abdul Sattar Abbasi