Altaf Hussain: How a feared power broker controlled Karachi from London

The hunger strikers had been sitting for six hot days outside the Karachi Press Club, sheltering under a canvas tent as fans blew the sticky summer air. The Victorian sandstone pile in the heart of Pakistan’s commercial capital was an easy place to get media coverage, and some organization or other held a demonstration there almost every week. Few, however, could match the scale and reputation of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, the secular political party whose adherents were camped out in August 2016. Since storming to power in the 1980s, the MQM and its leader, Altaf Hussain, had