In a nation supposedly created as a homeland for Ashraf Muslims, the very architects of Pakistan – the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs – have become its most persecuted and abandoned minority.

What began as political marginalisation has evolved into a state-sponsored campaign of violence, exclusion, and erasure. Nowhere is this more brutally evident than in the military police crackdown during the infamous 1992 ‘Operation Clean-Up’, which left thousands dead and millions terrified. Cities like Karachi and Hyderabad were effectively turned into open-air prisons for an entire ethnic community.

The Urdu-speaking Ashraf Muslims who migrated from India to Pakistan during the 1947 Partition – collectively known as Muhajirs – were instrumental in building the foundations of the Pakistani state. They led the bureaucracy, judiciary, media, and education sectors in the country’s early decades.

Yet, as political power became centralised in the hands of the Punjabi military elite and Sindhi political class, the Muhajirs found themselves increasingly sidelined. The emergence of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in the 1980s was not an act of terrorism, as the state portrayed – it was a political reaction to systematic exclusion, land and job discrimination, and ethnic profiling.

Today, nearly 16 million Muhajirs – approximately 7.6 per cent of Pakistan’s population – reside in urban Sindh. Yet, they remain politically voiceless, economically deprived, and culturally vilified.

The repression of Muhajirs reached a gruesome climax in June 1992, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s administration, under military command, launched Operation Clean-Up. Ostensibly a campaign against crime, this operation rapidly mutated into a genocidal mission targeting MQM sympathisers and the broader Urdu-speaking populace.

According to reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, between 2,000 and 3,000 Muhajirs were killed in 1992 alone. Over the next seven years, the total number of those killed, disappeared, or........

© News18