The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

for 40 per cent of the city’s population; his party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, was an electoral juggernaut which had swept every election in the city for two decades. Yet Hussain himself was in England, where he had been living for over twenty-five years, running his party – and, by extension, Pakistan’s largest city – from an anonymous office block in a rundown corner of north London. He kept up with events in Karachi via satellite TV and communicated with the party faithful from London via ‘phone rallies’ – giant street meetings that he addressed by telephone or videoconference. It was not unusual to turn a corner in Karachi and see tens of thousands of people, sitting raptly before a stage that was empty save for Hussain’s portrait, listening to his disembodied voice as it boomed over the loudspeakers. Hussain’s political appeal was not immediately evident. A barrel-shaped man with a caterpillar moustache, he wore unfashionable, amber-tinted glasses and spoke in a squeaky, high-pitched voice. He addressed his followers in the hectoring style of a 1930s fascist – now smirking, now scowling, or jabbing a finger in the air – and was prone to absurdist turns. Mid-speech, Hussain could suddenly launch into song, a kind of mystical caterwauling, or burst into tears, sending salty globs down his glistening cheeks. Critics speculated that he was intoxicated, or mentally disturbed. Yet among his legions of supporters, Hussain was the object of feverish adulation. Som...