Introduction
Spring, 2018. It was a typical Karachi night, smoggy and starless, when I last met Yazid Baloch at a graveyard. He was barely conscious, leaning against the wall of a low building, and smelt of human faeces. Five years earlier, he had been introduced to me by a journalist, Maunra, as a notorious gangster of Lyari. Over time, we had become friends.
‘Kaise ho dost,’ I asked. How are you, friend.
‘Are, Adeem bhai. Ao ao, taeen joR ent, wash ent…,’ he started greeting me, his smile familiar, but his eyes distant. A naked syringe languished in his limp left hand. He did not finish his greeting as the effects of the drugs overtook him. That was the last time I saw Yazid.
I never really knew Yazid as a gangster—only as a friend. He was a young man caught in the grip of larger forces that had turned petty criminal gangs in his neighbourhood into brokers of political order in Karachi. During my fieldwork between 2013 and 2018, I met dozens like him—young men loosely affiliated with Lyari’s infamous gangs, but far from being violent threats to public order. Many gang affiliates like him, in fact, carried out routine, everyday tasks that helped mediate between the military and business elite, and Lyari’s poor, working-class residents. In doing so they articulated contradictory interests, that is exploitation and subjection by the elite, against the needs of the working classes. When they were no longer useful to this process I identify as brokerage, a brutal military crackdown ensued, beginning in 2013, that targeted young Baloch men, labelling them as criminal and socially pathological disorderly bodies that needed to be exterminated from city by the very forces that had patronized them before.
This article argues that the gangs of Lyari were, for a period of roughly ten years, crucial brokers of political order in Karachi, situated within broader political, military, and epistemological regimes. It interrogates how the figure of the gangster was produced, circulated, and consumed by state and civil society actors alike. This discursive object, ‘the Lyari gangster’, was instrumentalized to temporarily erect social boundaries that exceptionalized Lyari and legitimized subsequent direct militarized state violence. This article intervenes in debates on Karachi’s violence. It critiques scholarly accounts that tend to reify, fetishize, and depoliticize that violence. The gangs of Lyari were treated as archetypal criminals by Pakistan’s sensationalist news media. The same treatment obtained in social scientific literature that overdetermined Karachi in general, and Lyari in particular, with exceptional disorder, fear, and danger.Footnote 1
I draw on ethnographic and archival research conducted between 2013 and 2018, including fieldwork in Lyari’s public health infrastructure, to critique this synthesis. I examine the political processes that interpellated—in the Althusserian sense—lives like Yazid’s into highly synthetic discursive formations, where conflicting narratives and interests converged to script Lyari as a gangland. Lyari-as-gangland was not an empirical fact but an epistemological construct. I interrogate the fetish for the gangster, the gangland imaginary, and the fear it generates. This narrative enabled civil and military institutions, journalists, and even progressive scholars to project fantasies of disorder upon the working-class Baloch neighbourhood, legitimizing the Army Rangers’ campaign of spectacular violence that began in 2013—violence that killed, maimed, incarcerated, and disappeared young Baloch men weekly, without trial or accountability.
My argument is based in the ethnographic fragments of three lives: Yazid Baloch, Akram bhai, and Robin Sharif. Each interlocutor demonstrates the larger processes by which the gangster became the dominant broker of order in Lyari. While Yazid is emblematic of the effects of this development, Akram, a gang under-boss, and Robin, a community activist, demonstrate that the gangs’ ascendancy was neither inevitable nor unprecedented. Rather, the ascension of the gangs to the role of dominant brokers of order coincides with General Musharraf’s military regime and its complicity in the American war on terror, where those national and transnational interests required local partners in Karachi that could wield deniable, non-state violence as a mechanism of order-making. These large-scale processes of domination and exploitation enveloped and eventually destroyed my interlocutors’ ‘small’ lives.Footnote 2
The argument unfolds in four parts. First, I situate the figure of the gangster-as-broker within a broader epistemological frame to show that violent political mediation is not unique to Lyari. Second, we zoom down to the ethnographic level, looking at the life of Akram bhai, to evince how violence was neither the gang’s main activity nor its defining feature. Instead, the gang regularly provided everyday services and abetted larger projects in lieu of state institutions—a task other brokers had rendered in Lyari’s past. Third, I place ‘gangsters’, like Akram, within a historical genealogy of brokerage in Lyari across multiple scales, arguing that gangs emerged as dominant brokers in Lyari because they filled a role produced by the specific historical conjuncture opened by the global war on terror and a military regime. In the last part of this article, I show that gang violence regularly targeted figures and formations that challenged the ‘order’ of accumulation and dispossession maintained by Pakistan’s military and political elite. The persecution of the young socialist activist Robin reveals how both gang and state, though officially opposed, policed the same threats and upheld the same violent urban order.
Producing the gangland
Yazid came of age in Lyari at the height of the so-called ‘gangster rule’. By the age of 16, the scrawny, buck-toothed Afro-Baloch youth with an affable manner about him had taken to hanging out at the corner spot (theka) where older cousins and friends from the neighbourhood had begun purveying hash and bootlegger booze to rich young folk from the ‘city proper’. Yazid is better described as a worker in a small business enterprise than a gangster. The theka was funded by a Baloch entrepreneur who employed youth from the neighbourhood in which he had grown up. This entrepreneur, who would have had no hope of convincing any legitimate bank in the city to fund his enterprise, had to turn to community resources afforded within his neighbourhood. He turned, naturally, to Uzair Jan, a notorious gang boss from Lyari. Uzair Jan at that time had a reputation for generosity towards Baloch enterprises within Lyari, whether licit or illicit. It is through this intricate ensemble of relations that any youth, especially Afro-Baloch youth from Lyari, would aggregate into the assemblage identified as ‘the gang’. So interpellated, the ‘gangsters’ operated in a grey zone of informal and formal economies. Through these everyday ‘gangsters’ the gangs brokered processes of rule across the boundary between law and outlaw, civil society and state, licit and illicit, Lyari and Karachi.
When the gangs rose to prominence in Lyari in the mid-aughts, many young men like Yazid became entangled with them, despite not formally being a part of the gangs’ structure. Yazid started out as one of the ‘boys’ (chukke) at the theka, through filiation with his cousin, who was formally a part of a gang. By proximity to his cousin, Yazid began claiming belonging to Uzair’s gang and acquired ‘street cred’ and ‘respect’ in the neighbourhood. In time, the claim stuck, and eventually he began running hashish for his cousin.Footnote 3 The Yazids of this world were very useful to the gangs and the confluence of interests they articulated. When Maunra, nominally a local journalist who had made a career facilitating gangland tours for curious outsiders—journalists and scholars like me—introduced Yazid to me, he was introduced as a lala, a gangster.
Indeed, Maunra also operated as a kind of a broker of access to Lyari-as-gangland for international crime reporters from the United States, European social scientists, HBO documentarians, and numerous television ‘news’ pundits, both local and global. And myself, of course. At some point or another, Maunra had worked with or for most outsiders interested in Lyari. He became one of the key gateways, as it were, that opened onto Lyari as a gangland, a dark fantasy world where young Baloch men from working-class Karachi were curated as gangsters for the intrusive objectifying gaze.Footnote 4
This fantasy was anticipated, enacted, and exploited by the gang. It was in the interest of the gang to appear more powerful than it might have been, to hint at a capacity for violence even when not actually inflicting it, to demonstrate a pervasive presence in the neighbourhood, and represent itself as a formidable frontier to the writ of the state.Footnote 5 Which is to say, it was in the gang’s interest to perpetuate the myth of Lyari-as-gangland—cementing gangsters as gatekeepers of its violent interiority.
The construct of fear also deterred close, ethnographic scrutiny from observers, thus reinforcing the hegemonic discourse from a distance. This hegemonic discourse had material effects for Yazid and his peers who were trapped in the gangster mould and were forced to embrace its archetypes—from Balochi-language gangster rap, to the aesthetic deployment of drugs, guns, and getaway bikes. In Althusser’s terms, to be ‘interpellated’ is to be hailed into a social identity by dominant ideology—as when Yazid is ‘called’ into being a gangster by the overlapping gazes of state, media, and community. Looking back on our conversations, I wonder if the pressure of these expectations pushed him towards the needle. To appear as the archetypal gangster, young Baloch and Afro-Baloch men like Yazid had to twist their lives to fit a prewritten script. Yet in the 16 months I spent in Lyari hanging out with Yazid and his posse, they hardly engaged in any activity that would satisfy the archetypical gangster.
In fact, a lot of everyday life in Lyari has to be redacted from the dataset to make it fit the darkly fantastical dominant narratives about Lyari, its people, and its gangsters. Many histories and lives had to be edited from the frame of reference in order to reproduce the normative ways of writing about Lyari. The production of a gangland in Karachi’s historic old city catered to very different audiences, and served widely differing, often competing interests. On one side, the gangland fetish found strong support among forces aligned with the state. Foremost among these was Pakistan’s draconian security apparatus, led by a highly politicized military establishment that adjusts threat and security narratives to secure its economic interests and political clout. This apparatus includes the local police and segments of the city’s wealthy elite. Henceforth, I will use ‘the state’ to refer to this confluence of interests.
On the other side stands a range of voices I group under the banner of ‘civil society’. Prominent among them are scholars who would identify as progressive, humanist, and left-liberal, and who, in other cases and presumably always in good faith, critique the excesses of the Pakistani state. They are activist, solidaristic, and critically engaged social scientists—this is to their credit and my work builds on their foundational investigations. But for all this, it is all the more striking that much of the scholarship on Lyari ends up aligning with statist discourse. It joins local politicians, crime-beat journalists chasing a scoop, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with political or financial stakes in ethnicizing and spatializing fear and violence onto Baloch youth formations in Lyari.
The gangs of Lyari were one among several social formations that helped maintain the boundary between two ostensibly antagonistic but functionally aligned social locations. They were not simply archetypal criminals, but brokers in a lineage that includes many others—some criminal, many not. This lineage operated through procedures that fused contradictory practices and discourses to reproduce existing relations of power in specific historical conjunctures. That reproduction depends on drawing boundaries between Lyari and the rest of Karachi. These spatial categories become stand-ins for ‘order’, made real only through the fabrication of ‘disorder’—Lyari as gangland, gangs as disorderly objects. Order, then, is never asserted directly. No authority defines it except as a horizon deferred, promised in a future where disorderly objects no longer exist. Discourses of order latch onto fetishized material objects—human and non-human—whose elimination becomes the pretext for greater state intervention and surveillance. The gangs of Lyari functioned precisely as such a disorderly object.Footnote 6
The curation of the possibility of seemingly arbitrary, seemingly senseless, criminal, hyper-visible, and spectacular forms of public violence ensures the continued need for the securitization (read, militarization) of the present. Order could mean guarantees afforded a formal social contract between states and citizens (that is, food security, guarantees around life and livelihood, access to public services and rights). Yet the state, tethered to processes of accumulation by dispossession and exploitation, has no interest in delivering such. Rather, order prevails as an absence of certain disorderly objects imbued with the affect of danger, impurity, fear, and uncertainty.Footnote 7
The gangs in Lyari wielded arbitrary but spectacular violence—there is no doubt about that—but only to functionally reproduce a sense of statist order in the city by distinction. The gangs sustained their position as a broker mediating access across this boundary by convincing one and all that they were the only formation capable of effectively reproducing power relations and strived to distinguish themselves from other formations that could potentially perform the same function of brokerage.Footnote 8 They partly did this by ruthlessly eliminating any threats to their authority, while also eliminating any threats to the interests of their patrons in power. They also partly sustained themselves as brokers by distributing resources they commanded, both as patronage from the state and through their illicit economies, which made everyday life possible in Lyari.
Brokerage and order
The social function of brokerage has long been key to anthropology’s understanding of political processes.Footnote 9 I am specifically drawing on Eric Wolf’s emphasis on the importance of understanding the role of intermediaries he called ‘cultural brokers’ as liminal figures who speak to both elite and marginal actors—‘Janus-faced’ intermediaries whose power comes from straddling social divides that appear incommensurable.Footnote 10 As intermediaries, they possess knowledge of both the dominant and the marginalized cultures, allowing them to navigate and negotiate between the two.Footnote 11 Through their mediatory intervention, cultural brokers can influence the power dynamics between different social groups, reinforcing existing hierarchies and systems of domination while wielding the potential to disrupt the same through withdrawing from brokerage.Footnote 12
In their ‘Janus-like’ character, brokers thrive in zones of undecidability and uncertainty where the constitutive framework of the social fabric is fragile.Footnote 13 In contexts where the writ of the state is especially weak, in terms of its recognition by subject populations in a given territory, brokerage practices are key to obtaining some semblance of a dynamic equilibrium with regimes of power.Footnote 14 Brokers in such contexts are important intermediaries between populations and extra-scalar authorities tethering otherwise isolated domains through culturally specific modes of bricolage.Footnote 15 They thus ensure the translation of awkward commensurability between divergent regimes of valuation, logics, and meanings.Footnote 16 As such, they must necessarily be ‘shady’, speak out of ‘both sides of their mouth’, deemed compromisedFootnote 17 and suspect,Footnote 18 and embody interests that, from one perspective, transcend the artifice of social boundaries and, from the other, sublate them.Footnote 19
Furthermore, anthropologists of decolonizing Africa have identified the importance of the broker figure in processes of transition and translation. Brokers appeared in the field as a social class of functionaries that mediated communication between ‘semi-autonomous social fields’Footnote 20 quilting first the colonized to colonial imperatives, and later the level of the quotidian to those of nationalist bourgeoisie and global capital.Footnote 21 In the South Asian context, Lisa Björkman and Asher Ghertner follow this classical literature to conceptualize brokers not simply as intermediaries, but as figures who translate and mediate between competing regimes of value, legality, and authority. Their work highlights how brokers operate within fragmented urban landscapes, not just navigating but helping produce the blurred boundaries between state and non-state power.Footnote 22
In Pakistan, especially after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, state authorities have struggled to command popular legitimacy. State-making is reliant on cultivating a multiscalar coercive apparatus, on the one hand, and relying heavily on local brokers from a variety of extra-statal domains to execute everyday governance, on the other.Footnote 23 In Lyari, the gangster is a broker sustaining the fictitious state-legitimating boundaries between ‘the City’ and ‘the gangland’.
It is not unique as such. In Policing the Crisis Stuart Hall argues that discourses around crime and policing do not simply describe a simple matter of law breakers and law enforcers. Rather, they constitute a central ideological practice through which dominant classes define and secure a social order in crisis.Footnote 24 Policing, after Hall, cannot simplistically be disarticulated from the maintenance of ideologies, values, and processes that determine and sustain regimes of power.Footnote 25 Maintenance of ‘order’, in this sense, takes on a different connotation as policing becomes the primary technology through which a multiscalar sense of stability that can be characterized and claimed by the classes that claim to constitute the state, as the order they can guarantee is maintained.Footnote 26 My claim is not that the militarized state directly co-opts academic narratives, nor that gangsters fully embrace elite tropes about the gangland as a general category. Rather, I argue that the broker’s task is to articulate—operationalize, despite contradictions—the incommensurability between these ideal types and the lived realities of gangsters on the ground. Gangsters police order in much of the postcolony, while the police as a state institution frequently operate beyond the ambit of law and social legitimacy.Footnote 27 Another way to approach this problem is to understand that ‘order’ depends on the mediation of violent brokerage.
Anthropologists have identified the role played by violent state and non-state operators in terms of brokerage. Anton Blok’s classic study of peasant communities in mid-twentieth century Sicily highlights how the Mafiosi articulated relations of domination between the ‘national’ landed gentry and ‘local’ peasant community. To establish and maintain their role as mediators, the Mafiosi wielded the threat of spectacular violence, enabling the extraction of votes and labour from the peasantry while claiming to be their sole avenue to social mobility and resource access.Footnote 28 Their violence inhibited the formation of resistance among the peasants and channelled restive elements away into the mainland industrial centres as émigré labour. Their ‘brokerage of a violent kind’ in Sicily, criminal as it was, had the full support of the Italian political elite.
This model resonates powerfully with Lyari, allowing us to move beyond the location of the spectacle of violence to consider how power articulates across social fields.Footnote 29 Gangs in Lyari functioned as cultural brokers, drawing support from historic trans-oceanic kinship networks that connected Baloch communities in the greater region and working on both sides of the law.Footnote 30 For many in Lyari the gangs were, at least for a time, seen as vigilante groups defending the community against the predation of outsiders, which was often the police itself.Footnote 31 However, by the mid-aughts it was also fairly common knowledge within Lyari that the gangs were working closely with the military regime—and had an important role to play in the imposition of the military diktat on the streets of Karachi, especially in the time of the global war on terror.
But what exactly did a gang do in Lyari in terms of its brokerage function? The next section draws on ethnographic evidence to demonstrate the mundane functions through which the gangs delivered the city for their masters. We meet Akram, a ‘gangster’ who cavorted openly and amiably with state officials, police officers, and residents alike, and helped broker order in his little corner of Lyari.
Akram: A gangster brokering order
Akram bhai, a gang underboss I came to know very well during fieldwork, exemplifies the counter-archive I am drawing on. In 2014, when I first met Akram bhai, he was a man who wore many hats. I was introduced to him because he was a flamboyant lieutenant in one of the deadliest gangs in Lyari. Akram commanded a volatile chokepoint in Lyari where his turf met that of two rival gangs. The three gangs recruited from the neighbourhood’s ethnically Baloch, ethnically Muhajir, and ethnically Kacchhi youth respectively. Each gang was in turn patronized by different political parties.
Thus, the primary ‘hat’ Akram wore, in his day-to-day activities during the months I knew him, was that of ‘a party volunteer’ and ‘loyal party worker’ for the political party with which his gang was affiliated. As a party worker, Akram commanded certain resources: he had connections to the city’s municipal bureaucracy, a certain leeway with the local police, and access to funding through the illicit and licit businesses of the gang. His second ‘hat’ was that of gang underboss, and he possessed an arsenal of illicit weapons and ammunition, and a supply of illicit drugs, to sell and to use as a way of driving recruitment. However, it is primarily the former role, that is the connections with city governance, that also allowed Akram to wear the third hat: that of a local community leader. Indeed, this is how Akram customarily presented himself to me during my time in his small corner of Lyari, where he was born and raised.
Akram begins his story when his family migrated to Karachi from Rajasthan, India in 1947. Penniless and helpless, they founded a refugee settlement atop old Hindu cremation grounds in a remote corner of Lyari. Akram lays out the struggles of his forefathers in great detail. His narrative appears well-rehearsed, unfolding through oft-told stories. It is a violent telling. Violence, specifically a blood vendetta against his grandfather, was what drove Akram’s Marwari forebearers to migrate to Karachi. It was not, as Akram argues, nationalist zeal that sent his people to Pakistan. More violence ensued when they arrived in Karachi and tried to settle in Lyari. Afro-Baloch ‘ruffians’, his story goes, harassed the band of refugees that settled in his corner of Lyari. Akram mobilizes racist tropes in this part of the story to stress the African heritage of Lyari’s Baloch. His version of the Marwaris did not have the state police to rely on. They relied on the martial disposition of Akram’s forebears that saw them fight off their adversaries and claim a foothold in Pakistan. Murder, he says, chased his people from India; and murder, he claims, established them in Lyari. In Akram’s telling, his fate as a man of violence was written into his blood as history.
The first few times I met Akram he would recount this origin story to me near verbatim—given his inability to hold his liquor. He had been the target of police raids since he was 13. When the police raided the neighbourhood, he and his gang would hide in the mosques. He boasted of possessing an armoury of sophisticated weapons stashed away in strategic locations throughout the neighbourhood and buried in the graveyard across the highway. He is a vocal cheerleader of his own sexual prowess, yet he is vague and elusive regarding actual details of his more violent exploits.
In the sober light of day Akram is a different man; one well regarded in his neighbourhood. When he rolls about on his bike, people do not scurry away in fear; they flock up to him inquiring about favours he had promised he would perform for them. Belying the reputation he tries to cultivate for himself, there is no sign of that persistent fear and trepidation that the infamous Lyari gangster is supposed to inspire. When asked to consider the role he plays in the ‘community’, Akram fronts both as a strongman capable of ill deeds as well as a servant of ‘his people’. The gangster was antisocial but an integral component of the social order in Lyari.
Akram and his ‘gang’, on a daily basis, were the primary access to a variety of services for the residents of the neighbourhood. They performed these services not in defiance of the state but by complementing it. Akram’s primary quotidian preoccupation was to arrange, produce, and procure different kinds of documentation for the residents of the neighbourhood. This included birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licences, ration cards, identity cards, and documentation relating to leasing agreements and affidavits of myriad kinds. Akram was the gateway that bypassed the dysfunctional and contradictory world of governmental bureaucracies.
Akram’s gang mostly hung out at a community centre nestled on the ground floor of a multistorey residential building indistinguishable from others that surrounded it. These were the unimaginative productions of the ‘builder mafia’ that acquires narrow patches of land at rock bottom prices in his neighbourhood and erects small unit apartment buildings, making millions in the bargain. Yet, the community centre opened onto a small park, lush with green grass and flowering trees. Akram was a key broker in the ‘acquisitions’ phase of the builder mafia’s operation. In turn, he would also be allowed to negotiate discounts on rent for some residents of the neighbourhood; and was able to preserve the small park for the community’s enjoyment. Akram was a key broker of access to stable, affordable housing in neighbourhood.
When I first stumbled into this part of Lyari, Akram had been introduced to me as a ‘community leader’ and a ‘party worker’ for a major political party in Karachi. We usually met at the community centre. Our mutual liaison was a community health worker from Lyari. Akram’s gang had been crucial to a polio eradication campaign in the neighbourhood of which I was a part. His boys were involved in multiple aspects of the public health infrastructure in the neighbourhood. In these campaigns, he would work hand-in-hand with government healthcare employees, state security personnel, and local residents. Akram was a crucial part of the local healthcare infrastructure—and successfully brokered the implementation of the $750 million Gates Foundation-funded World Health Organization (WHO) drive for the eradication of polio.Footnote 32
Everyday projects of neighbourhood upliftment in his part of Lyari, whether the drainage of an overflowing clogged sewer, a free medical clinic drive, or an initiative for women’s vocational training, generally brought together a medley of policemen, gangsters, doctors, teachers, residents, local politicians, and folk representing powerful international NGOs. The usual characters would assemble around the leadership of Akram bhai, found devouring plates of deliciously spicy biryani. Outlaws and lawmen, health workers and trained killers, people ostensibly on opposite sides of violent ‘ethnic’ or ‘sectarian’ strife, could be found engrossed in jokes, flirtations, maybe even relations of friendships and respect in Lyari. These snapshots of everyday life echo across my field-notes and interview recordings, challenging normative frameworks that reduce the problem of Lyari to either straightforward notions of criminality or ethnic strife.
Akram’s gang’s role in these everyday governance processes was not exceptional—it was typical for the gangs of Lyari. During the period of gang ascendancy there was no grand contradiction between law and outlaw, state, society, and those marked as ‘anti-social’ elements. Nor was there a grand conspiracy of clandestine ‘state-sponsored’ extra-legal violent actors. It was all rather mundane, carried out in the open, and permeating the fields of healthcare, housing, sports, and even access to government-issued documents. Gangs performed diverse, often crucial, functions in processes essential to everyday life in the city.
All these actors—state, private, and outlaw—had an interest in maintaining the idea of Lyari as a violent gangland. This was the first and only story about the gang war you heard from Akram himself. My interviews with the local paramilitary Rangers and the police also yielded a version of the same normalizing discourse, filtered through the perspective of law enforcement. Law enforcement and gangsters co-constructed the same discursive social boundaries, positioning themselves on either side of this boundary; and then stubbornly collaborating in policing it. It is through these collaborations that stability was afforded to daily life in Lyari.
Lyari is considered an economically and politically marginal enclave in the centre of the city, abutting the main industrial zone, the financial district, major wholesale markets, and of course, Karachi Port. As such, Lyari, in a sense of spatial character, has come to be referenced as an ‘outlaw territory’ and ‘urban slum’ in contradistinction from the city. Lyari belongs to the worker, the city to Capital. However, contrary to this characterization as being the ‘margin’, millions of dollars flow in and out of Lyari’s historic markets through the bank accounts of the myriad NGOs and entrepreneurs who have made Lyari their pet project and cash cow. Additionally, millions of dollars flow through development funds earmarked by the government for ‘backward’ Lyari. It is an unimaginative science that forgets the relational nature of capital which is only realized in a continuous process of circulation and exchange. The fact that the capital does not stick around in Lyari does not make it an insignificant channel of capital flow through the city.
Sometimes, tipsy after a few drinks, Akram would say that Karachi is a city of riches, plundered by political and economic elites who see it as a frontier to be subdued. Its proximity to the docks, the financial district, and its lucrative protection rackets make Lyari central to Karachi’s political contestations—as it has always been. In these contestations, Akram found his ignominious but crucial calling. But Akram also wielded a certain amount of respect in the locality, running errands for the elderly in his neighbourhood, who would otherwise have no recourse to basic civic amenities, by getting ‘fast track’ access to bureaucratic offices in District South. Elsewhere I have chronicled this aspect of ‘community service’ by the gangsters, who were constitutive of the ‘everyday state’ in Lyari rather than distinct from it.Footnote 33
In the next section I place the gang within a longer lineage of brokers who helped produce and police capital’s order in Lyari so that the reader may get a sense of how unexceptional this mediation was. In past epochs, jobbers, trade unionists, and political activists mediated the city’s reproduction. Pakistan’s enlistment in the American war on terror ushered in a new era—one in which gangs emerged as the state’s preferred intermediaries. In this new conjuncture, Akram and his peers moved alongside security forces, facilitating governance at multiple scales. This included everyday regulation, but also the management—and elimination—of disorder. The same period that elevated the gangs also saw a surge in the killings and disappearances of labour organizers, human rights defenders, and minority leaders—those who posed a threat to the security state’s project because the kind of order they envisioned for Lyari was different from what was useful for the elite in this epoch.
Brokering order in Lyari: History and multiscalar processes
Table 1 outlines how various ‘local’ broker classes in Lyari have historically mediated national and transnational projects of capital and power accumulation. It is immediately apparent that these brokers were not violent. In fact, since the colonial era in which Karachi became a city, the brokers emerged from local community leaders who emerged to speak on behalf of its labouring masses. The rise of gangs to this role in the 2000s coincided with Pakistan’s third military dictatorship—Pervez Musharraf’s regime and its alignment with the American-led war on terror in Afghanistan from 2001 onwards. In Karachi, this period saw the military seize control of key institutions and expand the everyday presence of security forces. Fear spread through erratic, hyper-visible acts of violence, as Karachi was remade into a theatre of militant politics—narrated through the interchangeable frames of criminality, ethnicity, sectarianism, Islamism, or separatism, as per the demands of the extant structures of power.Footnote 34
Multiscalar processes and the dominant brokers that abetted them in Lyari
Table 1 Long description
The table links five historical periods to a transnational process, a national political economy context, and the dominant local broker in Lyari. From the 1860s through the 1940s, colonialism aligns with mercantile capital and the key broker is the tribal chief. In the 1940s and 1950s, decolonization and postcolonial nation-building correspond to jobbers as the dominant brokers. During the 1960s through 1978, the Cold War era is paired with labor extraction and class warfare, with trade unionists identified as the main brokers. For 1978 through 1988, the American Jihad period is associated with neoliberalism and Islamization, but the broker field is blank, indicating missing or unspecified information. From 2001 through 2014, the War on Terror aligns with anti-terror security state formation and identifies gangsters as the dominant brokers. Overall, the sequence suggests a shift from traditional authority to labor intermediaries and organized labor, then to criminalized brokerage in the later period, with one era lacking broker attribution.
Lyari’s gangs, like other actors, struggled to secure a place in a newly militarized order. As Pakistan was framed as a fractured zone in need of control, Lyari’s history of working-class struggle, secular politics, affiliation with the exiled Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and long-term deprivation did not align with the forms of brokerage that the ascendant Islamist right offered in other parts of the city. Furthermore, the Musharraf regime’s insistence on ‘liberal despotism’, at least publicly, eschewed affiliations with the religion right, while charging the American imperium billions in blood money for Afghan misery. In the event, for Lyari, it was the figure of the gangster that proved useful—justifying the deployment of securitizing forces in the name of restoring order. The gangs’ capacity for violence helped subdue and manage the old-city markets abutting Lyari, keeping small merchants and their politically powerful guilds in coercive check. Their reach extended to the Karachi ports, which handled 70 per cent of NATO’s supply route into Afghanistan. Their illicit networks would also eventually help prop up American puppet regimes in Afghanistan that depended on ‘poppy’ exports. The gangs also advanced elite interests in land speculation and its offshoot sectors, helping to funnel the billions in war-related aid Pakistan received into Karachi’s rapidly expanding real estate economy.
While the global war on terror elevated the gangs into a dominant role at that historical conjuncture, Lyari, as its pre-eminent working-class district, had always been central to Karachi’s political and economic life. The gangs were only the latest in a long line of brokers who facilitated national and transnational processes of accumulation and control.Footnote 35 When Karachi was established in the eighteenth century as a fortified trading outpost for a wealthy mercantile firm, Baloch and Sindhi fisherfolk and sailors settled just beyond the city’s walls, offering their labour to the firm that governed the port. Over time, Lyari drew people from western Balochistan (Iran), the Makran coast, Mohana Sindhi sea-king communities, and from Kutch, Maharashtra, and Gujarat—Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jains, and Dalits alike.Footnote 36 As the city grew, Lyari remained a warehouse of cheap migrant labour that fed industry and trade in Karachi.
In the colonial years, the jobber was a central figure in the organization of this labour who operated as an indispensable broker between capital and labour. Lyari’s jobbers hailed from prominent figures from the Baloch Makran, who settled in the city and curated the importation and housing of labouring bodies to build the city. Again, the jobber has been a ubiquitous figure in the development of cities in colonial India; from the mills of Bombay to the docks of Karachi and the plantations of Assam, the jobber functioned simultaneously as recruiter, supervisor, patron, and enforcer. He blended older forms of authority (village headman, artisanal master) with the demands of industrial capitalism, embodying what Tirthankar Roy terms the ‘labour-lord’: a figure who reconciled economic, cultural, and political domains within the workplace.
In Karachi, as Zafar Shaheed shows, similar intermediaries, including local union leaders and federation brokers, emerged to manage the contradictions between militant worker mobilization and the state’s juridical containment of labour. In Bombay’s textile mills, the jobber wielded immense power through informal networks of obligation, controlling hiring, housing, credit, and access to mill jobs—until this system, as Rajnarayan Chandavarkar demonstrates, began to break down by the mid-twentieth century due to its growing incompatibility with industrial discipline and the state’s shifting priorities. While often framed as a ‘precapitalist survival’ structure, the jobber system was in fact a dynamic response to the specific challenges of labour recruitment, control, and political mediation in colonial and neo-colonial economies.Footnote 37
The partition of British India changed everything for Karachi. The city saw a 300 per cent increase in population as refugees from India poured into the nascent nation-state of Pakistan’s new capital. The refugees brought with them cultural capital and skill sets that the new political economy found both desirable and abundant, especially relative to the humble denizens in Lyari.Footnote 38 The Muhajir worker displaced the old blue-collar Baloch and Sindhi-Hindu working class from Lyari.
Not only did the people of Lyari find themselves on the lowest rung of an entirely new social ladder, but they also often found themselves contrapose to the two main aims of the economic and political forces in the young country. First, the elite aimed at promulgating a growing capitalist economy by setting up a robust industrial sector that drew on the ample availability of labour that mostly centred around Karachi. The people of Lyari who constituted a significant pool of the city’s blue-collar workers may be deemed ‘growth-retardant’ in terms of their level of organization and cohesion as workers. Secondly, the new urban elite were invested in Pakistani state-formation, which established a tiny ruling elite’s largely undemocratic control over vast territories appended to the union against their will, including the Baloch peoples of Kalat Khanate, annexed by Pakistan soon after its founding.
Demographic and sociological shifts nullified jobbers and community elders. A new class of brokers emerged: ones that were invested in labour rights and in Baloch nationalism. These new brokers nonetheless drew from similar loci as the old jobbers and elders, now taking up the role of trade unionists and community organizers. Lyari thus became not only a hub of Baloch nationalism, but also leftist political formations, which found a ready support base among the embattled residents of Lyari.
Lyari thus inherited a history of labour organizing around symbols and ideological investments that threatened the dominant order. They had to be eliminated or at least policed or regulated. Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship in the 1960s saw those punitive measures put in place against the people of Lyari: its underdevelopment, the lack of investment in its infrastructure, the withholding of land leases, and its people’s ouster from government jobs only fuelled their refusal to cooperate with the authoritarian order. Savvy to the machinations of the elite, these mechanisms of control had to articulate the process of governance, while appearing to be organically linked to the constellation of social formations internal to Lyari. A class of community leaders, political activists, trade unionists, and labour organizers broadly affiliated with the communist left and Baloch nationalism emerged at this time. We marked above the circumstances under which this class of leftists came to be a force in Lyari and, indeed, this group played its part in the movements for the restoration of democracy during the 1960s.Footnote 39
However, after the humiliation of the Pakistani military and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, Pakistan saw the ascendance of Bhutto’s democratically elected parliamentary government that was nevertheless reliant on the mediation of national and transnational capital. The ‘leftist’ class of brokers in Lyari were broadly aligned with this new parliamentary order, that is, they articulated the power of elite parliamentarians in Lyari. Kamran Asdar Ali’s account of the Karachi labour riots of 1972 describes this well.Footnote 40 The account captures a tenuous moment when, regardless of worker militancy and organization, labour leaders were less interested in militant worker action and more in wielding the threat thereof to establish themselves as a mediatory class between the state and the ‘street’. It was their bid to retain their position within the brokers of control over the workers. The story of the strikes is a violent dance of claims-making as the parliamentary government shed all pretence of allegiance to the working masses and established labour unions as policing mechanisms that ensured ‘order’ among the working classes. This modality of brokerage, however, decidedly articulated parliamentarian rule as opposed to the praetorian rule of the Pakistani military junta and thus made a crucial and partisan distinction between the two large formations within the ruling elite of the country.
Crucial to this brokerage were socialist Baloch nationalists’ putative militant stance against the ‘state’, which masked the functional coherence of state order that worked to consolidate two large-scale processes of government. First, it implemented the rule of the parliamentary order through appeals to democratic control over the means of production. Secondly, it abetted the extraction of labour power by regulating militant tendencies among workers through the dialectic of compromise and conflict. To understand this historical relationship between the political and economic elite and their brokers in Lyari is to realize how seemingly antagonistic social formations reproduced the status quo in the larger antagonism that existed between labour and capital.
Drastic events in the ensuing decades would change this dynamic. First, the 1972 parliamentary government also saw an overtly Baloch-oriented and socialist government claim power in Balochistan. A mass exodus of Baloch progressive, leftist, and nationalist intelligentsia and leadership took place as they left Karachi for Quetta.Footnote 41 The dismissal of this provincial government led to a movement for Baloch rights, both non-violent and violent, that remained centred in Balochistan. Never again would Lyari be the centre of Baloch nationalism.
Then, in 1977, General Zia overthrew the government of Prime Minister Bhutto, hanged him, and began a decade of tyrannical rule that would change Pakistan forever. Zia’s dictatorship saw to the Islamization of Pakistan as the country became embroiled in abetting the American-funded jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Attendant to this project was the dismantling of the socialist and communist left in Pakistan through a systematic programme of murder, disappearance, military operations, repression of free speech, and other coercive measures.Footnote 42
In Karachi, the systematic culling of progressive groups gave way to the language of ethnocentrism and sectarian politics, and the introduction of neoliberal economic regimes.Footnote 43 Furthermore, the war in Afghanistan precipitated the flooding of Karachi’s streets with a cheap and inexhaustible supply of arms and weapons.Footnote 44 Thus, across the 1980s, the old labour and community leaders disappeared.Footnote 45 Indeed, the rise of reactionary violent groups in this period has been widely documented in other parts of the world at this time.Footnote 46 If the 1980s represented the incapacity of Lyari’s brokers to deliver the brand of violent Islamism that national and transnational political processes demanded, the 1990s represents a liminal period as the ‘old’ left was culled and yet nothing new could be born in a highly disenfranchised, discriminated against, and marginalized Lyari. It is in this zone of immiseration and deprivation that the gangs of Lyari were birthed—to make claims in the illicit economies of the city. From there, the war designs of a global imperial hegemon and its client military partners in Pakistan elevated them into a dominant position of power brokers in the key port-adjacent locality of Lyari.
However, if the gang in Lyari was regulating order, then who was the agent of disorder? In the next section we meet the community activist Robin Sharif, who was identified as an agent of disorder by the state and by the gangs, and who took a bullet in the head to prove it.
Robin: Social activism as disorder
There is a restlessness about Robin Sharif every time I go to meet him. He works as a public-school teacher, which he thought would be rewarding—he who owes everything he is to his teachers in a list that includes both the Catholic pastor who taught him the meaning of sacrifice and Karl Marx, whose writings sketched a world worth sacrificing for. But it is not enough. He yearns to return to a life in accord with the ideals he still espouses and tries to instil in his own students. He is tasked with teaching elementary mathematics and English. Every time we meet, he says he survived for something more than just this abominable tedium of bourgeois quietism. He writes for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, but his life of social activism is behind him. His family, for the love they bear him and for his own physical safety, watch over him constantly. In the tiny Christian enclave of the working-class colony in which he now lives, everyone knows him. He feels they are informants for his family. I am sympathetic to his restlessness—a comrade, I. But then, even as we invariably sit across the café table, ignoring our tea, my gaze tracks up his still-young face to the concave left hemisphere of his head, a chilling and inescapable reminder of the gunshot that left him partially disabled. And I understand the lesson of fear his family, like many in my city, have internalized. They remain afraid that someone might return to complete the job should Robin raise his head up again.
Robin’s political activism began with opposition to the gangs of Lyari. He was a proud student of Lyari’s venerated communist community leader, ‘Lala’ Lal Bakhsh Rind. The Lala had been a beacon of progressive politics in Lyari all his life, famously coming out to protest Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship even though a stroke had rendered him wheelchair-bound. For decades he hosted a Marxist study circle at his modest home in Chakiwara that was known as the Leningrad Circle. Robin was among the last cohorts of the Circle. A precocious young man, he carried his political education in left activism to college as a student activist.
The years of his political maturation in the mid-1990s was a time of transitions. For decades, community leaders affiliated with the National Awami Party and PPP had been the locus of political activity and avenues of access to resources in Lyari. By the end of the 1980s, the most progressive among this class of leaders had been dismantled by the army. The subsequent political settlement could align itself with the interests of labour. The days when trade unionists and left activists could elicit significant concessions from the ruling classes were gone.
Yet, their legacy continued to inspire the youth in Lyari. They were incubated in Lyari’s famous ‘street school’ tradition that ran on the principles of ‘each according to their ability to each according to their need’. In the context of drastic state divestment from public education, young folk from the neighbourhood dedicated their evenings to share knowledge freely with neighbours less fortunate than them. Robin was one of these and taught in street schools. Yet, he also felt a greater calling.
Robin hails from the Christian minority community settled in the Musa Lane neighbourhood of Lyari. When Islamization enacted a de jure censure on the sale of alcohol from/by Muslims, alcohol vendors and bootleggers emerged in such ‘Christian’ neighbourhoods all over Karachi. Yet many members of the community in Musa Lane resented their faith community being associated with a social vice. Consumers, after all, were largely Muslims from the more affluent parts of the city. Regardless, the city’s elite frequents Musa Lane where well-networked bootleggers make foreign brands available.
In Robin’s Musa Lane, the distribution of alcohol through a legitimate vendor or theka was managed by Baloch gangs. Elite clientele often formed a stream of cars along the main street nightly, as teenagers from the neighbourhood began running deliveries for meagre tips. Robin was troubled by the encroachment of the neighbourhood by the gangs and their dark economy of illicit substances. Along with a few like-minded comrades from the neighbourhood he took up the cause for having the theka shut down.
Initially, they tried to reason with the illicit operators about the negative effects their enterprise was having on the neighbourhood. They began organizing the residents. The idealistic young men of Musa Lane had the moral support of elders like Lala Lal Bakhsh. They began making a commotion at peak ‘business’ hours to drive wary customers away from the theka. These young Christian men recruited local imams to decry the theka from their pulpits. They asked the operators who, after all, were from the neighbourhood too, to move their theka elsewhere. In response, the ‘gangsters’ of the time sent armed men to rough up Robin and his social crusaders. These armed men were not the infamously murderous ‘gangsters’ or target killers but policemen who had a financial stake in the income they derived from the theka.
Robin surmises in retrospect that if the matter had simply been between the gang and themselves, it could have been resolved amicably. Many of the so-called gangsters had grown up with them and had been their childhood friends. On some level, the ‘gangsters’, as much as he did, saw the community under threat of predatory forces emanating from the city in the form of corrupt government officials, prejudicial policing, and joblessness. Yet, the fact was that it was not a matter of ‘the gang’ and the crusaders. A whole apparatus of social relations had a stake in the enterprise. The gang was just one part of a larger arrangement that had emerged in Lyari at the time.
This was evinced by the fact that it was not the police coming to rough up the crusaders that ended their campaign. Soon it was discreetly communicated to Robin’s father that the consequences for continued disruption of business might get dire. The warning, this time, had come neither from the gangsters nor the policemen on the take: it came from influential community leaders in Musa Lane. In time, the complicity of elders in the neighbourhood had a far greater effect than the threats of physical harm. So intense was the pressure—not just from the gangsters, not just from the police, but from an ensemble of social relations beyond the abstractions of state-society that had an interest in a certain kind of an order for Lyari—that the whole family was forced to leave Lyari altogether, and Robin with them. The theka is still there to this day.
These developments helped Robin understand that he had more to learn about political dissidence, and he decided to train to become a journalist. A few years down the road, in September 2002, at the offices of the Urdu-language publication Jafakash, eight members of that newspaper staff were brutally murdered in their offices. Each of the victims was shot point blank, and professionally, in the head. Jafakash was a progressive publication that focused on issues pertaining to labour and human rights issues that were not covered in the mainstream media. It was affiliated with the Center for Peace and Justice, a platform that provided legal and political support for workers’ rights and minority issues and had a broad and inclusive mandate, despite being co-funded by the Protestant and Catholic churches of Pakistan. Of the eight victims shot in the head, one survived. That was Robin.
Another survivor of the Jafakash massacre was its only Muslim employee, its chief editor, the late and legendary Lala Rahim Azad Baloch, another stalwart of the Leningrad Circle, who had given Robin his job as the librarian and columnist for the publication. Azad, recently deceased in his eighties, spent his life as a poet of the Balochi language, a socialist political activist, a journalist, and a partisan of the Baloch people’s struggle. He considered those who were killed that day as his students, his children, and his comrades in the fight against tyranny. In one of our final conversations, he repudiated the official narrative that his comrades at Jafakash were killed by ‘Islamists’ for being Christian. He added the Jafakash murders to a long history of the political elite’s murderous projects of culling any democratic and progressive impulse in the country.
He intimated that a few days prior to the massacre, a member of the security establishment had allegedly visited the Jafakash offices with ‘advice’ for them to desist from highlighting labour rights, coercive land annexations by the land mafia, and growing religious extremism and its support by the military government. These were the early days of the Musharraf dictatorship and the young activist journalists were slow to consider the threat. The murders, Lala Azad maintained, were retribution for their recalcitrance.
Robin and his comrades proved themselves to be such a threat to order that by his mid-twenties he had been driven out of his neighbourhood, shot in the head, and harassed into silence. Robin, and people like Robin, possess a rare breed of courage. But they are produced by their material circumstances. Lyari produces many Robins, struggling to upend a crushing order that represents it as a chaotic frontier waiting to be tamed by the very forces that destabilize them.
Disorderly elements like Robin must be pacified or eliminated to sustain the unequal and violent order of political subjection in Karachi.Footnote 47 The mediation of extra-state brokers, violent or otherwise, is useful for maintaining this order, such as the gangs were for about a decade. In 2014, the Pakistani army began a deadly military operation, Operation Cleanup, against the gangs in the name of the restoration of law and order in the city. In 2016, when they declared the gangs finally vanquished, they did not leave the city’s streets. New ‘disorderly objects’ emerged for violent state ‘order-making’: social activists, professors, students, parliamentarians, journalists, and rights’ activists. The processes of accumulation and domination that produce and reproduce this exploitative order found new brokers: the paramilitary Rangers took over the violent aspects of brokerage, and a series of NGOs took over the social functions of pacification and mediation that were performed by the gangs for nearly a decade.
Complex processes, such as state-formation, national security, urban development, only stumble from contradiction to contradiction. They entail dispossessions, extractive processes, and periodically violent transformations of societies that achieve a political consciousness. Robin exemplifies this consciousness. It is to rectify these factors of instability, refusal, and resistance that extractive processes articulate through social formations that could, through subversion or coercion, pacify the development of consciousness into organized dissent. Lyari’s socialist, pluralistic ethos was not open to sectarian, religious, or even ethnic fracture such as has been historically deployed for other parts of the city. The gangs as putatively criminological brokers thus emerged in lieu of these other proxies for elite projects. Yet, this brokerage function is time-limited because the broker must continuously absorb the contradictions inherent to accumulation and exploitation. And no one can do that forever, without being broken, distorted. The gang operated as an engine of order-making for a time, but when it could no longer straddle the contradiction, it was purged in the name of restoration of order.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
