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POLITICAL POSTERS IN KARACHI,19881999Iftikhar DadiVersion of record first published: 26 Mar 2007.

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Iftikhar Dadi

POLITICAL POSTERS IN KARACHI,

19881999

This article examines the circulation of political posters and painted images in Karachi,Pakistan during the democratic interlude of 19881999 by reading images of key political players General Zia, Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto, and Altaf Hussain.Popular imagery in part drew upon existing nationalist visual tropes, but activities of diverse non-state actors gathered significant momentum during this crisis-laden period,and political images also acquired a fluid and dynamic character. These imagesinstantiate contestations and cross-linkages between the popular visual realm and thewider social fabric, and cannot finally be folded into a singular hegemonic national idiom. By looking beyond the screen of politics proper to examine closely the visual textureof everyday politics, this article demonstrates that effects of these ephemeral and largely unstudied transformations in the popular realm persistently intersect with organized civiclife, creating unanticipated and dynamic sites for new forms of text and image-based popular politics.

Introduction

This essay discusses the circulation of political posters and painted images in Karachiduring 19881999. This period is bracketed by two long periods of military rule: theend of the General Zia-ul Haq era in 1988 and the coup by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999. During this decade, Pakistan attempted to return to parliamentarydemocracy, but this experiment was persistently undermined by systemic crises. Anextraordinary game of political musical chairs ensued, when the Pakistan PeoplesParty (PPP) led by Benazir Bhutto was elected in 1988, to be followed in 1990 by the

Pakistan Muslim League (PML) headed by Nawaz Sharif. The PPP returned to powerin 1993, followed yet again by the PML in 1997. Strikingly, none of thesegovernments completed their term, but all were dismissed during midterm by thevarious Presidents acting at the behest of the military-bureaucratic complex underpowers inherited from the Zia era. However, general public perception of corruption,cronyism, and mismanagement by the democratic governments had also reached sucha level that even many progressive and reformist intellectuals greeted the coup byGeneral Pervez Musharraf in 1999 with a palpable sense of relief.

1

There are numerous reasons for the stillbirth of the democratic experiment duringthe 19981999 decade. Institutional frameworks for governance and representation,

already ill formed, fragile and dependent upon partisan patronage during the 1970s,were further undermined by interference by the Zia regime. Industrial, financial, and

South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 5, No. 1, April 2007, pp. 11-30ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online 2007 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14746680701210352

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educational institutions greatly suffered under the rule of the generals during the 1980s.The powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), many of whose ideologues promoted anexpansionist Islamist worldview, oversaw the Pakistani intervention in Soviet controlledAfghanistan.

2Working in tandem with the Saudis and the Americans, this promotion of

jihad , during the period that Mahmood Mamdani has termed the late Cold War, furtherundermined Pakistani civic institutions, creating a shadowy underworld funded byheroin and arms trade.

3The democrats thus inherited an intimidating economic

landscape, characterized by long-term structural weaknesses, along with a chronicunderdevelopment of human capital, and generally a highly depressed economyincreasingly under the draconian dictates of the IMF and the World Bank.

4Moreover,

public expectations, especially during the first two elections, were very high:democracy was expected to resolve all social ills magically. These intertwined sets of issues would have been daunting for even a strong, competent government to address,which the PPP and the PML governments emphatically were not.

Karachi is the largest and most diverse city in Pakistan. Its citizens have relocatedthere from virtually all regions of present-day Pakistan, and a large fraction of itsresidents originates from migrant communities from areas that lie in present-dayIndia. During the 1980s, Karachi witnessed the growth of the Muhajir QaumiMovement (MQM), a political group headed by Altaf Hussain, which arose out of thefrustrations of lower middle class and poor urban dwellers from communities formedby migrants from India. The term Muhajir hails back to 1947,

5but its connotations

shifted since the 1970s in relation to overall national identity and to provincial andregional ethnic identities. By the late 1980s, Muhajir ethnicity was arguably largelyconstructionist and post-national. The MQM was a coalition member of the first PPP

government, was accused of fomenting ethnic strife, corruption, and strong-armingthe administration, and it soon became a target of repression by the army and thepolice. The Nawaz Sharif government and the army launched Operation Clean Up in1992 to dismantle the hold of the MQM over Karachi and other urban areas of Sind,which led to widespread extra judicial killing and abuse for much of the decade. Bythe early 1990s, Karachi had become a very bloody battleground for ethnic andpolitical strife. Virtually every issue of my collection of the daily evening tabloids Awam and Awami from the mid-1990s is filled with photographs of tortured bodies,similar perhaps to what Baghdad has been facing since 2003 on an even larger scale.

The democratic interlude was a failure in numerous ways, but as I show through aclose reading of selected images, this period also experienced social and aesthetictransformations in the popular realm that require scholarly attention. This essayperforms readings of images from the main players in Karachi, the legacy of the Ziaera, the PPP, the PML, and MQM, based on a collection of several hundred images inthe authors collection. Due to space constraints, I omit discussing other importantpolitical groups, such as the Jamaat-i Islami, the Awami National Party, and Sindhinationalist groups in the discussion that follows.

Social Economy of Image Circulation

Ahmad Shah Bukhari Patras remarkable essay, The Geography of Lahore, publishedin his collection of satire in 1927, evokes a hallucinatory, larger-than-life urban map of

12 S O U T H A S I A N P O P U LA R CU LT UR E

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Lahore. In the section titled Sightseeing Locations, Patras describes the everydaystreet architectonics of the city:

Finding notable places for sightseeing in Lahore is difficult. The reason is that the

external walls of every building in the city are doubly constructed. The wall isinitially erected with brick and lime, over which a plaster of advertisements isplaced that slowly continues to increase in thickness. At first, small and obscureadvertisements are pasted on it, for example, Good news for the residents of Lahore, and Cheap and durable goods. The next layer is made up of advertisements addressed towards those possessing education and taste, such asGraduate Tailoring House and Novel opportunity for students. Slowly, theouter walls of the house acquire the status of a veritable and complete directory.Over the doorway one finds an advertisement for boot polish. Towards the right,the address of a shop selling fresh butter is visible. On the left, a description of

digestive pills. Above the window, an announcement of the gathering of theAnjuman-i Khaddam-i Millat is found. On another window, the private affairs of afamous leader are narrated in candid detail. A list of all the animals in the circus isenumerated on the rear wall. And over the door of the stables, the photograph of Miss Naghma Jan and the charms of her film are outlined. These advertisementsare refreshed very frequently. Announcements of latest inventions, opportunities,and portents of impending revolution that assault the eyes, are pasted on virtuallyevery immovable object, creating such constant variation in the appearance of buildings that it becomes very difficult for even the city residents to situatethemselves.

6

Despite satirical exaggerations, Patras inventory of Lahores posters clearlyshows that a sort of print capitalism was already in full swing by the 1920s. Few of Patras signs address politics via images, the majority of his handbills being devoted totextually advertising products or services offered by the petty bourgeois, with theoccasional notice of a religious meeting. By contrast, the 19881999 period examinedin this essay is saturated with political images that frequently overlay commercialsignage, not only adding another dense layer to Patras palimpsest, but also alteringthe mutual relationship between the realms of commerce, entertainment, and politics.

While fieldwork on production and circulation of political images during the19881999 period is necessary for a fuller account, I venture tentative remarks here.The political images examined in this essay are circulated in printed form in postcardsize and in larger formats, and as painted hoardings commissioned by various politicalgroups. They are typically distributed at political rallies, but many are sold onpavements by vendors selling calendars, sceneries of Swiss vistas, religious images,and posters of film stars. So far as I have been able to determine, postcards are hardlyever mailed; rather, they function as mini posters. Religious postcards and posters arefrequently mounted on hardboard and glass, framed on the side with colouredelectrical tape, and displayed in shops the size of the postcard is ideal for display inthe space of a small kiosk. Printed political images may be commissioned andsubsidized by political parties, but may also be independently printed by printingestablishments for general sale. The posters and painted signs are created by specificprinters and ad. agencies emerging from artisanal backgrounds. In many cases, one

POLITICAL POSTERS 13

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finds the signature of the artist and the name of the press on the poster, althoughposters produced for politically sensitive issues may omit these.

7The context of their

production is probably similar to Kajri Jains description of artisanal production inMaharashtra, although she addresses a much earlier period.

8

Methodological Considerations

Kajri Jains suggestive theoretical approach deploys the Deleuze-Guattari articulationof a rhizomatic network to delineate links between a variety of otherwise seeminglydisparate practices of production, circulation and reception and between aesthetics,the economy, and politics. Jain usefully introduces the idea of the sub-national andargues for its myriad linkages with the transnational, suggesting that both nationalismand capitalism re-territorialized this network of images, creating a compact with

absolutism in India.9

Jains conception also allows for a more complex reading of thedevelopment of capitalism in Pakistan in relation to printed imagery. Rather thansimply seeing Pakistan as a transitional society fitfully entering a fully formal capitalistmode, one can postulate an ensemble of spectacular capitalisms that diffract over thespectrum of the popular urban visual. On the one hand, national and transnationalcapital transforms the city formally through large billboards and controlled signage,and by its legalized manipulation of urban visual space. On the other hand, a vigoroussubnational visual regime, which has existed at least since the 1920s, enacts its ownurban re-territorialization in less prestigious areas not already occupied by bigcapital.

10Political and religious signage, however, overflows both domains, a

phenomenon that increased in intensity during the democratic interlude. Examples(not shown here) include defacement by religious groups of revealing female flesh inbillboard advertisements, the covering-over of film hoardings during the month of Ramadan, and the invasive pasting of political posters over formal and informalsignage.

In the discussion that follows, I find it also useful to deploy the notion of spectacle, a term that evokes Guy Debords formulation. Debords comments onthe spectacle, while addressed to a fully post-industrial and advanced capitalisteconomy, nevertheless are also suggestive in the context of Karachis capitalist andpolitical theatres. I have already noted how the urban fabric is spatially divided intocompeting capitalist realms, yet is persistently threatened to be overlain by thereligious and the political. Debords formulation in so far as it stresses a totalizingand unifying instrumentality cannot be simply transposed here, due to the veryweakness of national politics and the constant attempts of transnational capital todistinguish itself from an ever-threatening encroachment of lowbrow desi religious,political, and capitalist imagery. Alternatively, his contention, The spectacle is not acollection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images, isclearly salient in a context where the urban dweller is intensively addressed via atheatrical visual political representation.

11

Finally, we need to consider the salience of the term popular as an incisivemethodological concept in the analysis of these images, a term I have discussedelsewhere in relation to the ideas of Fredric Jameson and Garcia Canclini.

12Here I

engage with Stuart Halls essay, Notes on Deconstructing the Popular, which points


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overt religious icons, creating a hegemonic popular spectacle of continuity. Theposter, by posthumously incorporating the deaths of Zia and Akhtar Abdur Rahmaninto a heroic nationalist continuum, attempts to resolve a persistent problem facingthe Armys public image after the disastrous 1971 war, namely the lack of discernable

heroes. The Pakistani military has indeed accomplished much after the 1971 debacle,but an image of heroism or victory against an external enemy has been clearly missing,and the militarys continual suppression of Pakistans own citizens cannot obviously beacknowledged by supporters of the establishment. While Zias supporters credit himwith achieving nothing less than the unravelling of the Soviet Union itself, Afghanistanwas a proxy war for Pakistan, which created no specific Pakistani icons of bravery.This poster also links the achievements of the Jinnah-led Muslim League, disbanded byAyub Khan in 1958 along with all other political parties, in creating Pakistan with therevived Pakistan Muslim League under the patronage of Zia in 1986 and then underNawaz Sharif during the 19881999 interlude. The revived Muslim League of 1986bears little resemblance to Jinnahs party, but this is precisely the gap the semioticlinks of this posters imagery seeks to overcome. The chain of signification links Jinnahto the founding of Pakistan, and to the heroic efforts of military rulers to defend anduphold Pakistan and Islam, creating a spectacular establishment-driven narrative,which papers over otherwise blatant historical and ideological disjunctures.

Figure1 (bottom) links Zias mission with Islamic values even more overtly. Zia isagain seen praying in profile in the same posture, now in civilian clothes, with imagesof the Kaaba and the Prophet Muhammads tomb in Medina. The text proclaims himas

shaheed of the jihad in Afghanistan;

shaheed of Islam, the President of Pakistan;

May Allah protect Pakistan, for the sake of the pak (pure) Prophet (sadaqa-i nabi-i pak)

The double-entendre on the word pak continues the association of religioussentiment of purity and the nation-state of Pakistan with General Zia. The ability of Zia to maintain his lengthy rule (19771988) depended in large part on public

perception of his personal piety and modest lifestyle, which this image posthumouslyunderlines. Saadia Toor has pointed out, however, that rather than seeing ZiasIslamization project as simply one of dominance imposed by his own idiosyncraticcharacter, it is better seen as a hegemonic movement to cultivate consent at abroader level.

15In this reading, Zias Islamization project owes its success due to

participation by the progressive bourgeois. Effects of Islamization thus continuedpast the death of Zia, playing out in the popular realm during the democraticinterlude, especially as popular posters and graphics themselves depend upon astructure of repetition for their effect and legibility.

16Depiction of piety is especially

prominent in the post-1988 images of Benazir Bhutto, but Nawaz Sharifs persona alsoinitially drew upon Zias establishment genealogy for popular legitimation. At this juncture, Pakistani leaders were negotiating with the legacy of fundamentalism, evenas everyone understood that neither Benazir, nor Nawaz Sharif, nor Altaf Hussain


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were fundamentalists or even personally pious. However, their popular personasrepetitiously deployed the imagery of the Zia years in a rather overt performativemanner.

Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan Muslim League

Belonging to a Punjabi industrialist family, Lahore-based Nawaz Sharif was initially aprotege of Zia, and served as the Chief Minister of Punjab during part of the Zia era.In his initial career as a national politician until the mid-1990s, posters and hoardingsexplicitly link Sharif to the reinvented Muslim League lineage. This is evident inFigure 2 (top) that shows a series of painted signs in Karachi during 1990. The line-upexhibits the oversized faces of Zia, followed by Jinnah, Nawaz Sharif, and AbdulKhaliq Allahwala a Karachi-based politician contesting for the Sind Provincial

Assembly in alliance with Nawaz Sharif. Figure 2 (bottom) shows the defacement overa few weeks of a wall portrait painted with the electoral message of Mr Allahwala,whose election symbol was (perhaps inappropriately for a politician), a chair (kursi),which connotes lust for power in popular Urdu usage.

17Fragments of printed texts of

handbills by an apolitical religious gathering by the Ahl-i Hadith carefully cover theface and moustache of Mr Allahwala on the bottom right of Figure 2, showing howeven peripheral and everyday acts and encounters with visual idioms on the streets arelaced with theatre and contestation.

Nawaz Sharif also styled himself as an industrialist determined to modernizePakistan, as reflected in Figure 3 (left). His face morphs into that of a lion (sher ),

which served as the election symbol of the Pakistan Muslim League, and whoseconnotations Sharif fully exploited the text of the poster reproduces the famousquotation in Urdu attributed to Tipu Sultan, To live for one year [one day, accordingto Tipu Sultan] as a lion is better than the living for a hundred years as a jackal.

18

Other images in the poster include his yellow taxi and yellow tractor schemes vehicle import schemes announced with great fanfare ostensibly to modernize thecountry and increase employment as well as the new airport terminal at Karachiairport and modern docks. Nawaz Sharifs ostentatious public spending on glamorousinfrastructural and consumerist projects, such as highways and aviation, were widelyperceived as being riddled with corruption and nepotism and as a projection of hisown proclivity for speedy travel.

Nawaz Sharifs image also deftly exploited existing paradigms of imaginingeveryday life of rural Pakistanis. Despite his wealth and position, Sharif did not projecthimself in a Westernized persona, but as a leader who emerged from a traditionalextended family that exalted conservative rural values. His love for rich desi food wasa subject of popular gossip, for example. Figure 3 (right) transforms this appeal intoone addressed to Sindhis. Sharif appears with a Sindhi cap and an ajrak (block printedfabric that denotes Sindhiness) draped over his left shoulder, embracing a peasant,and greeting rural-looking Sindhis by feeding them mithai (sweets), suggesting perhapsthat his hearty Punjabi appetite also serves as a sumptuary force uniting thedowntrodden Sindhi population with the mainstream Punjabi ethos. The iconographyof the Punjabi farmer as a more authentic bearer of Indian tradition and as a robustmasculine figure owes its genesis to the British colonial period, and as these images


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FIGURE 2.


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puppee [quick kisses]. Hmmph! Looking so bhola [innocent]. Hmmph! Nowsuddenly enema No 1 has become hero. I was responsible for Kargil, hain ji?! Myangels were not even having news of where Kargil is. When Fauji [Musharraf] fustmentioned to me about Kargil, I said which car? and I only gave permission

when Shbaz Saab [Sharifs influential brother] killed eye at me and said Bhaijan,break fast of harisa will be had in Srinagar, Inshallah. Oye, leave it, Vajpayee Saab,you are a turn goat. Abbaji [Sharifs father] was right. He sad Lalas are againLalas. Lalay phhir bhi Lalay hain. As far Fauji, he is snake of sleeve. To think thathe will now be going to Dili and Agra and touring Taj Mahal with his begumsinging songs from Mughal-e-Azam and taking photoos. Hai, hai. My heart hasbeen burnt to a Cinderella. As late Madam Nurjehan wrote in her song Raqeebsay: Aa kay vabasta hain us husn ki yaadein tujh say, jiss nay iss dil ko pareekhanabana rakha thhaa.

21

Your bhabi [Sharifs wife] has been v angry since she hud of Fauji and Begum Faujigoing on romantic stroll of Taj and doing shopping in Janpath, Ritus Boutique,Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri and Mahesh Jeweller. I said to your bhabi: Doyou think my heart is not wanting gol gappas and bhatooras of Bengali Markeet?Do you think water is not coming in my mouth for kaju ki barfi made byHaramdas Shurlidhar? No, begum, I told her, I am just more sabir than you andthe fruit of patients is sweet.

22

From these images, Sharifs persona emerges as the most mainstream out of allthe other major political figures of the period, based upon the hegemonic view that

construes Punjab as fully Pakistani. Since the 1970s, however, Punjab itself wasbecoming more accepting of its suppressed vernacular currents even while extendingits hold in a more intensified fashion on the national level, as I have arguedelsewhere.

23Nawaz Sharifs persona with its rural Punjabizied mannerisms, its

references to Urdu, and its desire for rapid development, addressed a wide audiencefrustrated by general economic stagnation and decline. By contrast, Benazir Bhuttofaced numerous difficulties in transcending her persona as a woman, as an ethnicminority, and as a member of the Westernized elite, in order to project herself as anational figure.

Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Peoples Party

The unexpected death of Zia dramatically transformed the national political landscape.Zia had earlier sanctioned the death penalty of Benazir Bhuttos father Zulfiqar AliBhutto, and ordered her to be placed under house arrest during his regimes earlyyears. By 1986, however, after Zia formally lifted Martial Law from Pakistan,Benazir, as the leader of PPP was campaigning publicly for full restoration of party-based democracy. In an election held soon after Zias death, Benazir Bhutto won thelargest number of seats in the 1988 elections, formed a coalition government, andbecame Prime Minister. She faced numerous hurdles in the management andprojection of her image as a national politician, despite the legacy of populism herfather had pioneered. Her inexperience in the complexities of Pakistani politics, her


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Figure4 (right) renders Benazir in the familiar supplicating posture, surroundedby the symbols of the Kaaba and the green dome of the Prophets mosque in Medina.However, unlike Figure 1 (top), which places Zia in the constellation of nationalistand military history, here Benazir is surrounded only by her own nuclear family,though the message of piety, motherhood, and familial duty is somewhat undercut bythe tarnished reputation of her husband, shown here in his feudal garb. A very similarposter (not shown) reproduces much of the same imagery as Figure4 (right), omittingimages of her husband and children, and replacing them with a pious formula and aprayer-poem. Both added texts also betray numerous anxieties. The formula inscribedon the top left, It is only due to your grace O Lord/That matters continue to remainin balance, had become almost notorious due to its association with the ideology of Zias reign, and its repetition here is oddly unsettling. The prayer-poem on the lowerleft compares Benazir to an oppressed woman in Husains group at Karbala, and seeksher deliverance from conspiracies (sazish) of Yazids army, clearly a metaphor forBenazirs own political predicament. Painted signs in Karachi (not shown) during theDefence of Pakistan Day in the mid-1990s also attempted to insert Benazir within thenationalist legacy by juxtaposing her image with portraits of war heroes. Again, lack of gesture and connection serves merely to emphasize the superficiality of the linkbetween her and nationalist iconography, as Benazir and the martyred jawans appear asbeautiful people, reminiscent of film star images, without any sense of resonanthistorical or ideological signification.

Clearly, the Punjabi dominated army-bureaucracy complex and Nawaz Sharif colonized the norm by aligning themselves with the image of Jinnah and Iqbal,

FIGURE 4.


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rendering other ethnicities and affiliations marginal and suspect. The MQM, however,inverted this relationship by embracing its marginality, creating a new politico-ethnicidentity formation in the mid-1980s. In a dramatic process of role reversal, theMuhajir, who had borne the status of the exemplary national subject in Pakistans

early years, now proudly celebrated its role as a citizen-under-suspicion, a roleformerly borne by other ethnic minority communities. The MQM was also distinctivefor deploying spectacular politics more intensively than other groups, and wasroutinely accused of deploying fascistic repressive manoeuvres during the late 1980sand early 1990s.

Altaf Hussain and the Muhajir Qaumi Movement

The MQM built upon student movements among Muhajir students, and quicklygained a great deal of political and symbolic capital among the disaffected middle andlower middle class urban Muhajirs largely Urdu-speaking youth in Karachi,Hyderabad, Sukkur, and other cities in Sind that are home to large numbers of migrants from India. The word muhajir denotes a migrant; significantly, it also denotesthe hijrat of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions from Mecca to Medina, anevent that changed the fortunes of the Prophet from being persecuted in Mecca toassuming the position of leadership in Medina. The hijrat to Pakistan is thus doublyfreighted, with the Prophetic event, and with the memory of sacrifice of lives,property and home in India by the Muhajirs. By the 1980s, Muhajir identity developed

as an imagined ethnic community with no land-based or organic connection with thesoil whatsoever, and whose sense of self was mobile and self-consciously urban-modern, but based on a memory of original sacrifice and of continuous diasporic angstunder the Punjabi and Sindhi establishment. These self-conceptions gathered forceespecially since the 1970s, when affirmative action quotas were perceived as not onlydenying the Muhajirs admissions and employment opportunities, but the state was alsoseen by many Muhajirs as attempting to erase their cultural presence within thePakistani ethnoscape.

In a detailed analysis based on fieldwork, Oskar Verkaaik has shown how theMQM developed in a highly dynamic and creative manner, relying upon the tropes of

ludic play and fun. For example, Altaf Hussain during the early 1990s celebrated hisbirthday by cutting a cake several meters high with a sword, by hanging from aconstruction crane. The MQM formed affiliative links amongst its cadres bycelebrating events that were characterized by self-mockery and play, to the extent thatAltaf Hussain was declared as a pir (Sufi guide). The MQM also constituted its identityby foregrounding an image of violence and dahshat gardi (terrorism). Armed urbanyouth, labelled as terrorists in the early 1990s by the army and the police, adoptedthis label connoting danger with masculinist self-pride. This is, of course, in pointedcontrast to Benazirs images, as seen earlier. As such, the MQM did not follow an apriori ideological program but charted a mutable and evolving performative agenda.

26

Adding to Verkaaiks analysis, I argue that to the extent that the MQM has heldtogether for over two decades now, the master signifier for its coherence is providedby none other than the persona of Altaf Hussain himself as the Muhajir everyman, who


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is careful never to adopt a sophisticated elite aesthetic. Unlike fixed traditionalsymbols such as the ajrak that denote Sindhiness, strikingly there is no generic Muhajirsymbol for the MQM other than Hussains image-self.

MQM posters and painted signs were thus structurally conditioned to highlight

the persona of Altaf Hussain in numerous guises. Verkaaik reproduces a striking imagefrom Hyderabad of Altaf Hussain dressed as an Arab Sheikh,27

and this hyperbolicimage was not unusual. I recall driving in MQM dominated areas in Karachi duringthe early 1990s and seeing oversized billboards of Altaf Hussain in varied styles of dress, depicted in varying painterly techniques, pointillist, expressionist, etc. Altaf Hussain thus playfully performed his own self in this iconography. An early postcardimage of Altaf, probably from the mid to late 1980s, depicts him wearing an ajrak onhis shoulders and a Jinnah cap, reconciling the Sindhi with the Muhajir, a feat whichAltaf Hussain later accomplished as the individual indexing the Muhajir condition by marrying a Baloch Sindhi woman in 2001.

28More common are the images of Altaf

bhai (brother) in sunglasses against the MQM flag colours, or delivering animpassioned speech facing the microphone as seen in Figure5 (top). The kite was theelection symbol of the main MQM group, the Haq Parast (Follower of Truth) party to be distinguished from the establishment-supported splinter MQM-Haqiqi(Righteous) group formed in 1991.

During the 1980s, the MQM had grown in Karachi by successfully divertingmuch of the public support that the Islamic parties had formerly enjoyed. By theearly 1990s, the gruesome daily results of torture and extra judicial killings bythe army, the police, the MQM, and other political groups were on display inthe tabloids, and frequently it was unclear whom the perpetuators of torture wereon the mutilated bodies found in the streets. Figure 5 (bottom) shows handbillsprinted by the student group Islami Jamiat-i Talaba that accuse the MQM, theprovincial administration, and the US (from behind the scenes), for causing Karachiseducational institutions to degenerate into hotbeds of ethnic strife and bloodshed. Thetexts on the posters on the left appeal to the unity of the ummah, and disparage the useof linguistic divisions.

29The language deployed abounds in poetic flourishes. One

statement claims that the MQM is bestowing death as a gift (lashon kay tuhfay ) uponbeloved ( pyara) Pakistan. Another line of text recalls the famous poem by Faiz AhmedFaiz, Hum Dekhen Gay ,

30and rhetorically reviles the MQM, We will eventually

witness your humiliation in full view at the worlds bazaar (sar-i bazar-i alam). Eventhough Faiz is generally considered a leftist poet, this particular poem by him borrowsQuranic apocalyptic and eschatological imagery, and thus it might have been moreacceptable to reinterpretation by an Islamic political group. The posters are alsographically innovative. The word blood (lahu), repeated twice on the top left, iscalligraphed in a pop script mimicking drops of blood, and the Urdu letters,fashioned with daggers with bullets serving as diacritical marks, spell MQM that canbe read both in Urdu and in English. The difference between these contemporarylayouts, and those used in the Khilafat Movement (19192424) that are characterizedby a simple calligraphic layout, is stark. These posters are thus also emblematic of the

wider revolution in design, calligraphy, graphics, and publishing at vernacular andnon-elite levels in the democratic interlude of 19881999, which merits detailedseparate study.


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FIGURE 5.


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Conclusion

The 19881999 democratic interlude might justifiably be labelled a failure, in thegenerally corrupt and disappointing performance of the major political parties,

yielding to yet another lengthy military rule. The failures of the era are undeniablystark, and include the deterioration of formal politics, corruption at an unprecedentedscale, continued degeneration of state and civic institutions, and persistent economiccrises. However, in the realm of popular culture, coming after the Zia years whenpress censorship and political expression was curtailed, this period was fertile andproductive. To a much greater degree than before, Karachi after 1988 was plasteredwith political posters, hoardings, political advertisements, flyers, and stencilled textand silhouettes, in addition to the ubiquitous commercial advertisements and religiousannouncements. Specific political groups sponsored many of the more spectacularpolitical signs and posters, and it might be argued that this emergent popular visual

sphere was not disinterested. However, the existence of multiple and competingforces, and the amplification of visual production before each election and during thevarious crises of the 1990s meant that the struggle for representation acquired a fluidand dynamic visual character. While the spectacle of election imagery was most vividin the first two elections, and somewhat lacklustre in the last due to the exhaustion of the public with the whole rigmarole, what this theatre enabled was visual andperformative participation by interested sections of the public in an arena of competing images in the popular realm. The democracy decade lifted the stifling andboring atmosphere of the Zia years and allowed activities of diverse non-state actors togather significant momentum in the popular realm.

Tropes of domination and resistance do not capture the polysemy of this populartheater of images. The structural weaknesses and short-lived duration of the electedgovernments, each lasting only about two years, meant that the central governmentwas unable to extend its hegemony over the public space of the nation-state. Evenwhile the streets were witness to a contest between political parties jockeying forpower, this spectacle was constantly supplemented by a pluralizing and diverseensemble of other projects religious gatherings, advertisements by the petty-bourgeois, slogans by soccer clubs, to name a few whose rich presence was attestedto by Patras in Lahore as early as 1927, but which had by 1988 acquired far greaterpolitical density as visual representations. This popular participation cannot be foldedinto a single dominant or hegemonic national sphere, as it instantiates contestationsand cross-linkages between the popular visual realm and the wider social fabric. Theexample of the defacement of Mr Allahwalas image by the Ahl-i Hadith describedabove is such a case in point.

The wider achievements of the era include much greater vibrancy of non-stateactors in multiple arenas such as education, media, and healthcare, and an unshackledpress and public opinion, but also the more silent vernacularization and pluralizationof identity and expression. This essay has attempted to look beyond the screen of politics proper to examine more closely the texture of the everyday in public life toargue that the effects of these ephemeral and largely unstudied transformations in thepopular everyday sphere persistently intersect with organized civic life, creatingunanticipated and dynamic sites for new forms of text and image-based popularpolitics.


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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Vinay Lal, Gita Rajan, and Kamran Asdar Ali for their incisive andhelpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I am grateful to Gail Minault for

kindly sharing images of the Khilafat posters from her personal collection.

Notes

All translations from the Urdu are by the author, unless otherwise noted.1 Accounts of Pakistans political developments that cover this period includes Ian

Talbot; Shahid Burki. This refers to the entire set of books of lan Talbot and ShahidBurki.

2 Eqbal and Barnet, 15394.

3 Mamdani.4 Talbot, 288.5 Sarah Ansari, 910 and passim.6 Patras, 2001.7 On the shadowy circulation of images of Saddam Hussein in Karachi during the First

Gulf War of 1991, see Khan, VIII. These images are also discussed in Dadi,Ghostly Sufis and Ornamental Veils..

8 Jain, 7089.9 Jain, 88.

10 Dadi, 14253.

11 Debord, 42.12 Dadi, Ghostly Sufis.13 Hall, 238.14 Epstein, < http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/zia.htm > .15 Toor, 114.16 For a more detailed treatment of the structure of repetition in popular Pakistani

imagery, see Dadi, Ghostly Sufis.17 I have been unable to verify the mechanism through which election symbols are

allocated to political parties. However, it is safe to state that powerful parties wouldtry to have a meaningful symbol assigned to them. A chart of party symbols fromLahore of the 1997 election in my collection shows 96 separate election symbols.Unfortunate allocations would clearly include the lota (water jug used for personalhygiene), which, by the early 1990s, became associated with horse-trading andbought loyalties in the national and provincial assemblies.

18 The symbol of the sher was not limited to posters alone. I witnessed a live tiger in acage mounted on the back of a flatbed truck in Karachi during the mid-1990s as partof the PML election sloganeering. Popular usage of the Urdu word sher encompassesthe sense of both lion and tiger, an ambiguity that Sharifs campaign richlydeployed.

19 On the Punjabi tradition, see Lal.20 Go away O faithless one! You dont realize what the true meaning of sharafat

[decency] and love is. Sharafat here also indexes the name of Nawaz Sharif himself.21 Come, for memories are linked with you of that beauty/Who turned this heart

into a fairy-house, translation by Victor Kiernan. In Faiz, 44. The poem was


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written by Faiz, but performed by the popular singer Noor Jehan, whose recordingis available on accompanying CD no. 1.

22 The Friday Times, 1319 July 2001.23 Dadi, Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 70s.24 Rouse Essays, pp. 5370.25 Shaheed, 147.26 Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2004.27 Verkaaik, 113.28 Numerous photographs of the Altaf Hussain wedding are available on MQMs

website, < http://www.mqm.org/ > . According to my reading, the surfeit of thesefamily photographs on this website, which include childrens birthdays and otherfamily events, are intended to continue to project Altaf Hussain as the mastersignifier of Muhajirness.

29 Following popular understanding, the ummah here denotes the community of Muslims built upon solidarity that transcends ethnic, regional and national borders.

30 For a translation of this poem by Daud Kamal, see Faiz, 112. Online translations areavailable at< http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/ahl-e_wafa.html > ;< http://pakistaniat.wordpress.com/2006/06/24/translation-hum-daikhain-gay/ > . Amusic video by Adil Najam based on this poem is available at < http://pakistaniat.wordpress.com/2006/06/11/adil-najams-pakistan-the-video/ > .

References

Ansari, Sarah. Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 19471962.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Burki, Shahid. Pakistan: Fifty Years of Nationhood . 3rd edition. Boulder Golo: WestviewPress, 1999.

Dadi, Iftikhar. Plastic Toys and Urban Craft in South Asia. Spec. issue of Prince Claus Journal , 10a (2003): 14253.

Dadi, Iftikhar. Ethnicity in 1960s and 70s Pakistani Cinema. Crisis: Ethnicity in PakistaniCinema of the 1960s and 70s. Ed. Naveeda Khan. New Delhi: Routledge,forthcoming.

Dadi, Iftikhar. Ghostly Sufis and Ornamental Veils: Spectral Visualities in Karachis

Popular-Public Sphere. Re-exploring the Urban: Citiscapes in South Asia and the MiddleEast. Eds. Kamran Ali and Martina Rieker. Karachi: Oxford University Press,forthcoming.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red Books, 1977.Eqbal, Ahmad and Richard J. Barnet. Bloody Games. The New Yorker 11 April 1988.

Reprinted in Eqbal Ahmad, Between Past and Future: Selected Essays on South Asia. Eds.Dohra Ahmad, Iftikhar Ahmad and Zia Mian. Karachi: Oxford University Press,2004. 15394.

Epstein, Edward Jay. Who Killed Zia? Vanity Fair , September 1989. < http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/zia.htm> .

Faiz, Faiz Ahmed. Requiem for an Unsung Messiah: The Great Interpreters. Karachi: PakistanHerald Publications, 2004. (With four companion audio CDs.)

Hall, Stuart. Notes on Deconstructing the Popular. Peoples History and Socialist Theory .Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. 227239.


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political posters in karachi, 1988-1999

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