Pakistan’s military junta’s divide-and-rule policy

Pakistan’s military junta’s divide-and-rule policy is a strategy of manufacturing and managing communal conflict so that the army can present itself as the indispensable guardian of order. In the account of Karachi, the junta exploits existing ethnic and religious grievances, covertly arms rival extremists, and intervenes after violence erupts. Each cycle leaves communities weaker and the military stronger.

Political setting and method

After seizing power and executing the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the junta rules through division. Its strategy does not depend on inventing every grievance from nothing: it takes genuine tensions between communities and intensifies them, turning them into instruments of political control.

The groups drawn into this struggle include Sindis, Pashtuns, and Punjabis, as well as Mohajirs, immigrants who arrived in the newly founded country after its partition from India. The army secretly supports extremists from rival groups with weapons, money, and carefully granted favors. Rather than resolve antagonisms, the regime encourages them to become violent and politically useful.

The cycle of violence and restored order

When the conflicts erupt into riots, the generals order the police to open fire. Rage against the police violence is then contained through the deployment of army troops. The sequence allows the institution implicated in fostering conflict to appear as the force capable of restoring order and upholding the rule of law.

The violence spreads beyond street riots. Massacres and revenge killings escalate; kidnappings and torture become routine, and captives may die or disappear without their bodies being found. When one faction grows strong enough to threaten the balance of the conflict, the generals incite violence within that group, redirecting its fighters against rivals from their own community. Division is thus renewed at the moment a group might otherwise consolidate power.

Political consequences and the novel’s wider frame

The recurring result is an unequal distribution of power: governments may emerge or collapse, but the army continues to grow stronger and retains the ability to exercise real authority. The policy’s success lies not in ending conflict but in controlling its consequences, making disorder seem to justify the military power that the strategy has helped preserve.

A separate political argument voiced by Abdul Ghani offers a broader frame for understanding how such power can endure. He describes a hierarchy in which a small number of powerful decision-makers rely on armed enforcers and on officials who know what is happening but remain silent while processing orders. This is not presented as a specific description of the junta’s operations; it echoes the policy’s larger mechanism, in which coercion and bureaucratic acquiescence help sustain rule.

The novel also sets this politics of division against a contrasting local response. When Faroukh and Raghuram’s religious dispute becomes a fight, Qasim Ali Hussein insists that conflict between friends and neighbors harms the whole community. He orders them to work together, binds them with his scarf as a reminder of their friendship, and later oversees a punishment that ends in care and the possibility of forgiveness. The episode does not undo the junta’s strategy, but it shows the alternative on which that strategy preys: solidarity across religious lines rather than hostility between communities.