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 Int. J. Middle East Stud.
37
(2005), 83–107.
Printed in the United States of America
DOI: 10.1017.S0020743805050063
Kamran Asdar Ali 
THE STRENGTH OF THE STREET MEETS THESTRENGTH OF THE STATE: THE 1972 LABOR STRUGGLE IN KARACHI
Why did they kill us? We wanted our rights—bonus, wages, health benefits, why did theykill us? To be honest we all cried, I cried too. —Textile worker remembering June 1972
On10February1972,thenewlyinstalledpresidentandcivilianmartial-lawadministrator of Pakistan, Zulfikir Ali Bhutto, addressed the nation to present the salient features of his government’s new labor policy.
1
As Bhutto laid out the details of workers’ benefits,he also warned them of dire consequences if they did not refrain from participating in“lawless behavior.” He asked the working class to desist from its “
gherao
” and “
 jelao
”(lit.,encirclement and burning) politics;“otherwise,”he raged, “thestrength ofthestreetwill be met by the strength of the state.”
2
A few months later, Bhutto’s government fulfilled his threat. On 7 June 1972, theKarachi police killed several workers when they opened fire on demonstrating laborersin the major industrial area of the city. The next day, the police fired again, this time onthe funeral procession of one of the deceased workers. Press reports indicate that at leastten people were killed on that day, including a woman and child. These killings markedwhatmanyconsiderthebeginningoftheendofoneofthemostprotractedlaborstrugglesin Pakistan’s history. Starting in the late 1960s, this movement was pivotal in shapingthe transition from military rule to democratic forms of governance. Bhutto’s PakistanPeople’s Party (PPP) had itself come to power through the overwhelming support of theworking class, students, and radical left groups, the key participants in this movement.
3
It is indeed ironic and also revealing of Bhutto’s politics that the PPP was instrumentalin suppressing the workers’ struggle.Ask most Pakistanis about the significance of the years 1971–72 and, if they dorecall, they will say that it was the year Pakistan lost its eastern wing. The meta-narrative of the creation of Bangladesh subsumes histories of all other events andstruggles of that crucial era in Pakistan’s national history. Although not a part of theformal educational curriculum, the 1971 war with India is constantly retold in the
Kamran Asdar Ali is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin,Tex. 78712, USA; e-mail: asdar@mail.utexas.edu.
© 2005 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/05 $12.00
 
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Kamran Asdar Ali
press and other publications primarily by former high-ranking army officers who seekto absolve themselves of responsibility for the events that led to the breakup of thecountry.
4
Suchhistories,however,areneverapologiesfortheatrocitiesthatthePakistanimilitary committed against its Bengali citizens. If the past can be reconfigured only inits relationship to the present, these writings provide a space for the various actors in thetragedy to rehabilitate themselves in front of a Pakistani public that still considers themilitary responsible for the 1971 crisis.In his examination of another South Asian event of the early 20th century, ShahidAminremindsushownationalistmasternarrativescaninduceselectivenationalamnesiainrelationtoeventsthatfitawkwardlyintoneatlywovenpatterns.
5
Similarly,eventssuchas the labor movement during the late 1960s in Pakistani society have remained a part of individual memories. Collectively, however, few in Pakistan even remember the seriesofevents thatshapedthoseyears.Theunwrittenhistoryofsuchstrugglesisconnected totheir unremembered status in the national psyche. As participants in these events growold and pass away, they take with them crucial pieces of this past.
6
This past, like thatof many other collective struggles of the Pakistani people,
7
remains buried in the heartsand minds of the actors themselves: it is seldom shared or celebrated by the nation as awhole. For example, it is almost forgotten how the long military rule in the 1950s and1960s, with deep links to industrial and feudal interests, led to a popular mobilizationthat demanded democratic reform, economic redistribution, social justice, and rightsfor ethnic minorities. Indeed, the results of the 1970 elections—with nationalist partieswinning in Baluchistan, North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and East Bengal—isinterpreted by some as an important juncture in Pakistan’s history in which there wasa popular consensus to resolve the nationalities question.
8
In the same vein, although itis rarely remembered or discussed in the national media, Bhutto’s violent reaction canbe considered a watershed event in the history of the nation’s working-class movement.To rethink this particular moment in Pakistan’s history, a major theme of this paper is tocapture the events that convey Bhutto’s response to popular opposition early in his rule.I also pursue the related question of how the trade-union leadership itself perceived thelabor movement of the time.In an article on the relationship between the Indian national movement and the Indianmasses,RanajitGuhaborrowstheGramscianconceptofhegemonytoshowtheprocessesthrough which consensus was built by the nationalist elite leadership.
9
He argues thatthese leaders needed to harness the intuition and enthusiasm of the people so that order could evolve out of chaos. The subalterns’ popular initiatives and autonomy of function,as well as the immediacy of their politics and spontaneity of their actions, needed to bedisciplined by the bourgeois national elite for it to control and hegemonize the nationalmovement. It is within such a framework that I will discuss some of the responses of thetrade-union leadership to the events of June 1972. Hence, in presenting the argumentI will analyze the relationship among the workers, the trade-union leadership, and thePakistani state.Indiscussingthe1972laborstruggle,IfocusonKarachi,theindustrialandcommercialhubofthecountryandPakistan’smostethnicallydiversecity,withalonghistoryoflabor politics. Being the major beneficiary of the Pakistani state’s industrialization program,Karachi was one of the world’s fastest-growing cities between 1947 and 1972, withits population increasing 217 percent during this period.
10
More than half of Karachi’s
 
Strength of the Street Meets That of the State
85growth since the early 1950s is attributed to migration from India and from rural andother urban areas of the country. This population increase linked to ethnic and socialheterogeneity changed the social and political cohesion of Karachi as a functioning city.Academicstudies,whenavailable,concentrateonKarachi’sethnicpoliticsandviolence,on housing, and on resource distribution.
11
Missing in these analyses is a discussion onthe confluence of ethnicity and its relationship to labor and working-class struggles thathave shaped the political and social growth of the city in the past fifty years. Thus,in addition to detailing the labor strife in the early 1970s in Karachi, this paper alsocontributes to the understanding of the social and historical processes that have led tothe substantive decline of labor- and class-based politics and the concurrent emergenceof a politics increasingly shaped by issues of ethnic, religious, and sectarian differencesin contemporary Pakistan.I base this paper on research in public and private archives and interviews with keyparticipants in the labor movement, ordinary workers, and civil and political admin-istrators. In this work I have relied on how the actors themselves recall the events of more than thirty years ago. I heard many versions of the events and multiple analysesof what happened and why. Memories, of course, reflected the interest of the teller, yetthey were highly consistent with how the events were reported in the national media.
12
People differed more in their analysis of the larger political momentum of the time. Topresent a comprehensive understanding of the situation, I will continually add my ownreading of the processes under discussion.
INDUSTRIALIZATION AND LABOR
Pakistan, at its independence in 1947, inherited only 9 percent of the total industrialestablishment of British India. The lack of industrial capital was mirrored by the weak-ness of organized industrial labor and the peasantry.
13
The nascent Pakistani governmentfollowed an import-substitution model to industrialize the economy rapidly. The statealso relied heavily on agricultural exports—specifically, East Pakistani jute—to subsi-dize industrial development in West Pakistan.
14
The state promoted industrialization by providing soft loans and tax holidays and bysetting up the Pakistan Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation in the late 1940swith assistance from the World Bank and foreign capital. Because of lack of responsefrom local merchant capital, the state also formed the Pakistan Industrial DevelopmentCorporation (PIDC), through which it initiated industrial projects that were then trans-ferred to the private sector at bargain prices.
15
The first phase of private industrializationoccurred after the Korean war, when the profits gained by Pakistani traders were chan-neled into industrial investment. Special areas were developed in Karachi—the SindhIndustrial Trading Estate (SITE), and the Landhi–Korangi industrial areas—and landwas sold to construct factories at extremely generous rates. Between 1947 and 1955,774 new industrial units were established in Karachi, representing almost 50 percent of all industrialization in Pakistan.
16
As the state took a role in setting up industrial units,the bureaucracy became intrinsically involved in the control of this expansion. Stateagencies directly financed the industrial concerns or participated in legislating laws tofavorthis growth. The collusion ofthebureaucracy and theindustrialistswas manifestedin facilitating the finances for expansion of industrial houses. At the same time, this
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