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The identity known today as Muhajir did not emerge from culture or language. It was born from displacement. The partition uprooted millions, forcing migrants from Hindustan into Pakistan’s fledgling urban centres, especially Karachi. Initially, ‘Muhajir’ simply meant newcomer, a temporary label carrying loss, hope and uncertainty. These migrants were diverse in region, class and background. What united them was not shared heritage but shared dislocation. They arrived in a city transforming under the pressures of migration, rebuilding life amidst trauma and opportunity.
In the early decades, the Muhajir ‘middle class’ occupied key administrative and professional roles, reflecting education, urban experience and the colonial legacy of bureaucratic training. Though, this position was never guaranteed. By the 1970s, policies under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, including job quotas and the Sindhi Language Act, were perceived by the Muhajir ‘middle class’ as threats to their status. Economic pressures, rising competition for housing and employment, and political marginalisation fueled a collective grievance, transforming the sense of survival into the language of entitlement. Identity hardened not as heritage but as response to material insecurity.
Political mobilisation followed. Leaders offered simplified explanations for complex economic shifts. Scarcity and uncertainty were blamed on ethnic “others”, while structural failures were recast as conspiracies. Original experiences of loss were repurposed into rigid claims, turning the city into an imagined exclusive homeland and language into a boundary. Violence, from the Latifabad riots to recurring urban clashes, revealed the deadly consequences of weaponised identity. Those who once shared displacement now stood divided, while structural inequalities remained unchallenged.
When Pervez Musharraf introduced privatisation and market liberalisation in the early 2000s, reopening avenues for private accumulation and expanding municipal influence through local government reforms, the urgency of rigid ethnic mobilisation noticeably softened. As new economic channels emerged and segments of the urban middle class regained access to opportunity, identity lost some of its combustible edge. This suggests a difficult truth: much of what was framed as existential ethnic struggle was deeply tied to shifting access to privilege. When economic doors reopened, the rhetoric of siege became harder to sustain.
Muhajir consciousness, in this light, is both historically real and politically mutable. It emerged from displacement, economic change and bureaucratic opportunity, but hardened when material insecurity intersected with political neglect. Its transformation into an exclusionary identity mirrors the very hierarchies and oppressions it initially resisted. Karachi’s plural urban reality, its diverse labour, constant migration and multiethnic population contradict claims of ethnic ownership. No slogan, party or wall can freeze a city in myth. Its lived identity is shaped by labour, struggle and negotiation.
Today, Muhajir identity stands at a crossroads. It can remain an instrument of division, or it can be reclaimed as a historically grounded experience, fluid and open to transformation. Urban politics must centre work, housing and democratic control of resources rather than symbolic assertions of belonging. Solidarity across communities, Sindhi, Pashtun, Baloch and Muhajir alike, offers a path to confront inequality and exploitative structures, redirecting grievances from ethnic resentment towards collective justice.
The crisis of Muhajir identity is a crisis of imagination, the inability to see beyond imposed labels to the shared conditions of struggle. Recognising the historical and material roots of identity allows for a politics that unites rather than divides, transforming the legacy of displacement into a foundation for solidarity, equity and shared collective life.
