Ethnic violence under Pakistan's military rule

Ethnic violence under Pakistan's military rule is depicted not as spontaneous communal disorder but as a political cycle carefully sustained by the military junta. By aggravating divisions among ethnic and religious communities, the regime provokes conflict, suppresses the unrest, and presents its own armed power as the answer to a crisis it helped create. Karachi becomes the setting where this system’s human costs and commercial beneficiaries are visible at once.

Political Setting and Divisions

The account places the violence in Karachi during a period of military rule after a junta seized power in Pakistan and executed the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The regime governs by dividing the population and exploiting genuine grievances between ethnic and religious communities. Among the groups named are the indigenous Sindis, Pashtuns, and Punjabis, and the Mohajirs, immigrants who arrived in the newly founded country after Partition from India. These divisions are not presented as invented from nothing: political manipulation draws upon existing grievances and turns them into instruments of rule.

The junta’s strategy makes communal identity politically dangerous. Rather than resolve conflicts, the military covertly supports extremists from rival groups with weapons, money, and favours. This patronage allows authorities to influence the balance of power while encouraging communities to see one another as immediate threats. As tensions accumulate, the state is not a distant referee: it helps shape the conditions in which violence becomes likely.

A Cycle of Provocation and Repression

When riots erupt, the generals order the police to open fire. Public anger then turns toward police violence, and the army is deployed to contain the resulting unrest. The sequence is central to the account’s explanation of military power: the same institution whose covert operations helped produce the conflict can appear to be the force capable of restoring order. Coercion is thus accompanied by a claim to necessity and public protection.

The violence grows beyond street clashes. Massacres and revenge killings intensify, while kidnappings and torture become routine features of the conflict. Extremists seize people associated with rival groups; some captives die, while others disappear without their bodies being found. When one group becomes powerful enough to threaten the balance, the generals encourage conflict within that group, weakening it through internal rivalry. Violence consequently reproduces itself across and within communities, preventing any faction from becoming secure enough to challenge the regime’s control.

How the Military Consolidates Power

Each new cycle of violence and vengeance strengthens the army, regardless of which form of government may emerge or collapse. The narrative presents this as the political result of the junta’s method: conflict fragments opposition, while the army claims the authority to manage the danger. Its power depends not only on direct force but also on the repeated appearance of force as the only available means of restoring order. The regime’s management of disorder therefore becomes a source of its continuing authority.

This mechanism echoes a political argument made elsewhere in the novel by Abdul Ghani. He distinguishes a small number of powerful decision-makers from the soldiers and police who enforce their decisions, and from officials who enable them by carrying out orders or remaining silent. His account broadens the moral frame beyond the generals alone: state violence depends on both coercive agents and administrative compliance. The Karachi episode gives that framework a specific political form, showing how the army’s use of police, armed factions, and bureaucratic authority can make responsibility appear dispersed even as military power accumulates.

Violence, Profit, and the City

The city’s danger does not prevent business; it helps make Karachi attractive to people seeking profit from instability. The junta has seized the country by force, held it under armed control, and looted the treasury, while assuring powerful foreign governments and arms-producing nations that Pakistan’s armed forces are open to business. Dealers from America, Britain, China, Sweden, Italy, and elsewhere visit the city. Black-market operators, gunrunners, mercenaries, and other foreign adventurers also gather in its cafés and hotels, pursuing deals amid the conflict.

The narrator recognizes himself as part of this economy: he is participating in a mission connected to the Afghan war and understands that he, too, is profiting from it. Yet the calculations of the other foreigners unsettle him. They discuss the war in terms of how many profitable years it might have left and hope that the military will remain in power, preserving the established channels of corruption. Their outlook exposes the distance between the human consequences of conflict and the commercial language used to anticipate its continuation. The violence is not merely a breakdown of economic life; it becomes an opportunity for those able to trade in arms, access, and disorder.

Narrative Significance

The account connects ethnic conflict to institutions and incentives rather than reducing it to ancient hostility or isolated acts of fanaticism. Communities possess real grievances, but the junta manipulates those divisions, encourages armed competition, and then benefits from the demand for military control. The resulting pattern links communal violence, state repression, political survival, and international commerce.

Karachi’s crowded market in weapons and illicit opportunity also sharpens the narrator’s own implication in the system. His discomfort does not place him outside it: he recognizes that his work profits from the same war whose duration the foreign operators discuss as a business prospect. The episode therefore makes political violence both a structure of rule and a moral problem for those who move through its networks. Its most consequential irony is that the army can gain authority from the disorder its actions help perpetuate, while the people caught in the cycle bear the danger and the profiteers treat its continuation as a calculation.