Who really destroyed Karachi?

From Hyderabad to NED to Jamaat-e-Islami

The episode opens with Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman tracing a personal arc that is itself a compressed history of the Pakistani middle class. Born in Hyderabad to a family that migrated from India at Partition, he describes a household built on sacrifice and discipline — his father pushed all the children through education, one brother became a doctor, he became a civil engineer from NED University. He later added a Master’s in Islamic History from Karachi University, a credential he notes most people do not know about.

His professional life ran in parallel with his political one. He worked in water treatment — designing, engineering, manufacturing, and commissioning industrial effluent treatment plants and RO systems — through a Lahore-based private limited company. That technical background, as the conversation unfolds, turns out to be directly relevant: he speaks about Karachi’s water crisis not as a politician reaching for talking points but as someone who has built the plants that treat the water.

The death of student politics and what it cost Pakistan

Hafiz Naeem entered student politics in 1988 through Islami Jamiat Talaba (IJT), drawn by the organisation’s energy — book fairs, sports galas, training sessions, a culture of co-curricular engagement. But the broader context he describes is one of deliberate suppression. Student union elections were banned in 1984, and by the time of this conversation in 2022, nearly 38 years had passed without a single union election at any Pakistani university.

“Pakistan mein jo grass root hai — yani samajh lein nursery hai democracy ki — us par koi bhi democratic party kaam nahi karti,” he says. (In Pakistan, the grassroots — the nursery of democracy — is something no democratic party works on.) The reason, he argues, is straightforward: genuine student leadership would produce genuine politicians, and genuine politicians would threaten the electables that every major party depends on.

He was expelled from NED for raising questions about the deteriorating university transport system — a charge sheet that listed “displaying placards” as a punishable offence. The episode is not just an anecdote; it is a template for how the Pakistani state responds to organised civic pressure at every level.

Against this backdrop, he makes a striking claim about IJT: since 1947, the organisation has held annual elections for its central president, provincial presidents, and executive bodies at every level, in every city and town, without a single year’s interruption except during Ayub Khan’s total ban on political activity. “Aisi koi democratic party Pakistan mein exist karti nahi hai,” he says flatly. (No such democratic party exists in Pakistan.)

The feudal mindset that moved to the city

Muzamil raises the question that hangs over every conversation about Pakistan’s structural problems: everyone can identify the disease, but where is the cure? Hafiz Naeem’s answer is more diagnostic than prescriptive, but it is precise.

The feudal system, he argues, has not been replaced by urbanisation — it has been absorbed by it. In rural Sindh, a peasant’s entire life — medical care, legal protection, employment, land access — runs through the local wadero. That dependency is not incidental; it is the architecture of control. But the same architecture has now been reconstructed inside cities, where industrial capital plays the role the landlord once played.

“Yeh feudal mindset poore capitalist mindset ke saath milkar ab shahron ke andar bhi karfarma hai,” he says. (This feudal mindset, combined with the capitalist mindset, is now operating inside cities as well.) Land reform, he notes, is no longer even the right frame: a landlord who once needed thousands of acres now needs a small industrial plot and a supply chain, and from there controls the same system with the same impunity.

Muzamil pushes on whether any political party has a credible answer. Hafiz Naeem is sceptical of cash-transfer programmes — whether Ehsaas or the Benazir Income Support Programme — not because he doubts the intentions behind them but because he sees them as treating symptoms. His preferred frame is infrastructure: if the government had invested subsidy money in IT capacity, in public transport, in functional schools and hospitals, the chains of dependency would have been cut structurally rather than temporarily relieved.

Three levels where democracy does not exist

One of the sharpest arguments in the conversation is Hafiz Naeem’s claim that democracy in Pakistan fails at three simultaneous levels: inside political parties, in student unions, and in local bodies. All three are suppressed for the same reason — any genuine devolution of power threatens the people who currently hold it.

Local body elections, he points out, have historically happened more often under military dictators than under elected governments, because dictators use them to cut political parties down to size while elected parties use their time in power to consolidate upward. The KP local government system, which Jamaat-e-Islami helped design during its alliance with PTI, was a partial exception — but even there, he argues, real authority was left with deputy commissioners rather than transferred to neighbourhood and village councils.

The PPP, which governs Sindh, comes in for sustained criticism. Hafiz Naeem acknowledges the party’s historical sacrifices but is direct: “Unhon ne jamooriyat ko panpne nahi diya — na party ke andar, na local bodies mein, na student union mein.” (They did not let democracy grow — not inside the party, not in local bodies, not in student unions.)

The census fraud and what it means for seats

Later in the discussion, Muzamil and Hafiz Naeem move into the mechanics of how Karachi is politically marginalised, and the census becomes the central exhibit.

The 2017 census was contested. A Council of Common Interest decision required 5% of blocks to be reopened for random checking, with a redo if errors were found. That never happened. When the 2018 elections came, PTI swept 14 National Assembly seats from Karachi on a massive wave — but the underlying delimitation was still based on undercounted population figures.

Hafiz Naeem’s argument is that if Karachi’s population were counted correctly, the city’s National Assembly seats would rise from roughly 44 to 65 out of 130 in Sindh. That shift would make it mathematically possible for a Karachi-based politician to become Chief Minister — which is precisely why, he implies, it has not happened.

He goes further into the voter list data. In the 2018 election, Jamaat-e-Islami analysed specific constituencies block by block. In 21% of enumeration blocks in one NA constituency, the recorded population was lower than the number of registered voters. In other blocks, the voter-to-population ratio reached 70%, 80%, even 90% — far above the 50–55% that is the global norm. Some blocks showed zero population with substantial voter rolls.

“Aisi duniya mein kahan hota hoga?” he asks. (Where in the world does this happen?) His conclusion is that the problem is not administrative sloppiness but deliberate policy: a rule requiring voters to be registered at their permanent address rather than their actual place of residence effectively disenfranchised the millions of internal migrants who have lived in Karachi for decades but whose ID cards list addresses in other provinces.

Water: the arithmetic of a city dying of thirst

Hafiz Naeem’s technical background surfaces most clearly in the water section. Karachi’s current requirement, he says, is approximately 1,650 million gallons per day. Current supply is roughly 550 million gallons per day — a shortfall of more than two-thirds. The Hub River allocation, which should deliver 100 million gallons, is delivering only 60–65 million because reservoir levels have dropped and the pipeline is in disrepair.

The 1991 Indus Waters Accord allocated Karachi 1% of the river’s flow plus 100 million gallons from Hub — a figure set for a city a fraction of its current size, and never revised.

The K-IV project, designed to eventually deliver 650 million gallons per day from Keenjhar Lake, was supposed to be operational by 2020. It is not. The Kotri Barrage to Keenjhar feeder — the upstream infrastructure that K-IV depends on — has received no meaningful investment from either the federal or provincial government.

His proposed solutions are layered. First, mandate RO plants for every high-rise building, using the brackish groundwater that exists under the city but is currently unusable. Second, build effluent treatment plants for industrial users and require water recycling — his own company has installed such systems in 20–25 industries, each recovering four to ten lakh gallons per day, but five planned municipal ETPs have sat in the budget unfunded for a decade. Third, fix the distribution network so that tanker mafias cannot extract rents from a broken system. Fourth, complete K-IV.

Transport: a city that had trams, then lost everything

Karachi had trams in the 1950s and 1960s. It had a circular railway from the 1980s that became, by Hafiz Naeem’s account, Pakistan Railways’ most profitable project. It had the Karachi Transport Corporation running 125 buses from Karachi University alone. All of it is gone.

The circular railway ran until 1999. When it was shut down, MQM held the transport portfolio — in both the provincial and federal governments. When the KTC was wound up, MQM again held the relevant ministry. Hafiz Naeem does not present this as coincidence.

A Japanese JICA-backed project to rehabilitate the circular railway stalled because the Peoples Party government refused to produce a resettlement and rehabilitation plan for families living on the track. He contrasts this with the Lyari Expressway, where — in the same city, in the same era — each affected family was individually surveyed, given a cheque, and relocated to a purpose-built housing society with roads, water, and electricity. “Izzat ke saath muntaqil kiya.” (They were relocated with dignity.) The circular railway rehabilitation required the same process and it was never done.

A later mass transit proposal — an underground and elevated corridor system — was eventually reduced to a project serving 20,000–25,000 people rather than the city’s millions. Muzamil and Hafiz Naeem agree that the scale of ambition consistently shrinks to match the scale of political will, which is very small.

What Jamaat-e-Islami is promising — and what Hafiz Naeem thinks will happen next

By the end of the conversation, Hafiz Naeem makes a direct pledge: if Jamaat-e-Islami’s candidate becomes mayor of Karachi, the party will not complain. It will govern with whatever authority the local body act provides — water, sanitation, solid waste — and demonstrate what competent municipal administration looks like. He points to Nematullah Khan’s tenure as a historical benchmark: 32 colleges built in four years, a solid waste system that worked when petrol theft was stopped, a water supply that reached 74–75% coverage before PPP governance brought it down to 21–22%.

On the broader political moment, he is measured. He does not want to extinguish the hope that PTI’s wave represents, but he is clear-eyed about its limits: “Imran Khan ke paas woh team nahi hai Karachi mein jo Karachi ka masla resolve kare.” (Imran Khan does not have the team in Karachi that can resolve Karachi’s problems.) He predicts a significant political and social vacuum opening up over the next four to five years as people work through their current experience — and he believes that when it opens, a more serious politics becomes possible.

Muzamil closes by asking the city’s young people directly, in the comment section, what they see when they look at Karachi — whether they are hopeless, whether they can identify the problems, and whether they have any solutions. It is a small gesture, but it fits the logic of the whole conversation: the first thing a city needs, before it can fix anything, is people who understand what is actually broken and why.