Political Posters in Karachi

Political posters in Karachi from 1988-1999: a study
Daily Times Monitor: Daily Times, April 18, 2007

KARACHI: The period from 1988 to 1999 in Karachi was saturated with political images, an analysis of which has appeared in the form of a scholarly essay by Iftikhar Dadi in the April edition of ‘South Asian Popular Culture’.

Dadi’s article examines the circulation of political posters and painted images in Karachi during the democratic interlude of 1988-1999 by reading images of key political players - General Zia, Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto, and Altaf Hussain. This period was bracketed by two long periods of military rule: the end of the General Zia-ul Haq era in 1988 and the coup by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999.

The End of the Zia Era: Figure 1 (top) shows a supplicating Zia on the lower right, surrounded by notable characters from Pakistani nationalist and military history, marching soldiers and children, the Minar-i Pakistan in Lahore, and the Kaaba. Recognizable figures include Jinnah, Ayub Khan, Akhtar Abdur Rahman, and the heroes of two India-Pakistan wars, Aziz Bhatti (1965) and Rashid Minhas (1971). Jinnah and Ayub Khan are not labelled, but the other four are identified by their name followed with the appellation of shaheed.

Jinnah’s own political stance was that of a largely secularist civilian modernizer, yet his image is smoothly incorporated here in the company of military dictators and overt religious icons, creating a hegemonic popular spectacle of continuity. The poster, by posthumously incorporating the deaths of Zia and Akhtar Abdur Rahman into a heroic nationalist continuum, attempts to resolve a persistent problem facing the Army’s public image after the disastrous 1971 war, namely the lack of discernable heroes.

This poster also links the achievements of the Jinnah-led Muslim League, disbanded by Ayub Khan in 1958 along with all other political parties, in creating Pakistan with the revived Pakistan Muslim League under the patronage of Zia in 1986 and then under Nawaz Sharif during the 1988-1999 interlude. The revived Muslim League of 1986 bears little resemblance to Jinnah’s party, but this is precisely the gap the semiotic links of this poster’s imagery seeks to overcome.

Figure 1 (bottom) links Zia’s mission with Islamic values even more overtly. Zia is again seen praying in profile in the same posture, now in civilian clothes, with images of the Kaaba and the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) tomb in Medina. The ability of Zia to maintain his lengthy rule (1977-1988) depended in large part on public perception of his personal piety and modest lifestyle, which this image posthumously underlines.

Effects of Islamization thus continued past the death of Zia, playing out in the popular realm during the democratic interlude, especially as popular posters and graphics themselves depend upon a structure of repetition for their effect and legibility. Depiction of piety is especially prominent in the post-1988 images of Benazir Bhutto, but Nawaz Sharif’s persona also initially drew upon Zia’s establishment genealogy for popular legitimation. At this juncture, Pakistani leaders were negotiating with the legacy of fundamentalism, even as everyone understood that neither Benazir, nor Nawaz Sharif, nor Altaf Hussain were ‘fundamentalists’ or even personally pious. However, their popular personas repetitiously deployed the imagery of the Zia years in a rather overt performative manner.

Nawaz Sharif also styled himself as an industrialist determined to modernize Pakistan, as reflected in Figure 2 (left). His face morphs into that of a lion (sher), which served as the election symbol of the Pakistan Muslim League, and whose connotations Sharif fully exploited - the text of the poster reproduces the famous quotation in Urdu attributed to Tipu Sultan, ‘To live for one year [one day, according to Tipu Sultan] as a lion is better than the living for a hundred years as a jackal.’

Other images in the poster include his yellow taxi and yellow tractor schemes - vehicle import schemes announced with great fanfare ostensibly to modernize the country and increase employment - as well as the new airport terminal at Karachi airport and modern docks. Nawaz Sharif’s ostentatious public spending on glamorous infrastructural and consumerist projects, such as highways and aviation, were widely perceived as being riddled with corruption and nepotism and as a projection of his own proclivity for speedy travel.

Sharif’s image also deftly exploited existing paradigms of imagining everyday life of rural Pakistanis. Despite his wealth and position, Sharif did not project himself in a Westernized persona, but as a leader who emerged from a traditional extended family that exalted conservative rural values. His love for rich desi food was a subject of popular gossip, for example. Figure 2 (right) transforms this appeal into one addressed to Sindhis. Sharif appears with a Sindhi cap and an ajrak (block printed fabric that denotes ‘Sindhiness’) draped over his left shoulder, embracing a peasant, and greeting rural-looking Sindhis by feeding them mithai (sweets), suggesting perhaps that his hearty Punjabi appetite also serves as a sumptuary force uniting the downtrodden Sindhi population with the mainstream Punjabi ethos. The iconography of the Punjabi farmer as a more authentic bearer of Indian tradition and as a robust masculine figure owes its genesis to the British colonial period, and as these images demonstrate, its force in the popular realm has persisted well into the postcolonial era.

The rise of Benazir Bhutto herself to political visibility was thus made possible, yet constrained by the larger entry of women in the public arena. It is thus not surprising that the Benazir popular persona had to manage numerous structural constraints not faced by male politicians, and her popular iconography reveals many of these difficulties. For example, an early poster depicts Benazir encased in a jewelled brooch, which is placed next to an arrow (the party election symbol) flying a PPP flag, and captioned simply as ‘Long live Pakistan/Long live Benazir.’

Rather than creating a sense of connection with others, the poster emphasizes her distance, preciousness, and unavailability. Clearly, gender politics of a relatively young and attractive Benazir leading Pakistan in the wake of a long period of Zia’s Islamization project, played a major role in isolating Benazir’s persona from public contact. Figure 3 (left) shows Benazir’s political lineage, now by linking her with her famous father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the PPP. The text at top right evokes paranoia, the father urging the utter destruction of Pakistan’s enemies and promising ultimate victory to an unspecified addressee, but clearly Benazir is the implied addressee here, as the couplet at the bottom glorifies Benazir as a true heir to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto shaheed’s legacy. However, not only does her nationalist lineage terminate with her father, but the very continuity of her father’s socialist policies was deeply compromised by the constraints that neo-liberalism exercised on Pakistan since the mid-1980s. Indeed, Benazir was faced with the embarrassing task of privatizing many of the same industries and banks that her father had nationalized during the early 1970s.

Figure 3 (right) renders Benazir in the familiar supplicating posture, surrounded by the symbols of the Kaaba and the green dome of the Prophet’s mosque in Medina. However, unlike Figure 1 (top), which places Zia in the constellation of nationalist and military history, here Benazir is surrounded only by her own nuclear family, though the message of piety, motherhood, and familial duty is somewhat undercut by the tarnished reputation of her husband, shown here in his feudal garb.

MQM posters and painted signs were structurally conditioned to highlight the persona of Altaf Hussain in numerous guises. One scholar reproduces a striking image from Hyderabad of Altaf Hussain dressed as an Arab Sheikh, and this hyperbolic image was not unusual. I recall driving in MQM dominated areas in Karachi during the early 1990s and seeing oversized billboards of Altaf Hussain in varied styles of dress, depicted in varying painterly techniques, pointillist, expressionist, etc. Altaf Hussain thus playfully performed his own self in this iconography. An early postcard image of Altaf, probably from the mid to late 1980s, depicts him wearing an ajrak on his shoulders and a Jinnah cap, reconciling the Sindhi with the Muhajir, a feat which Altaf Hussain later accomplished - as the individual indexing the Muhajir condition - by marrying a Baloch Sindhi woman in 2001. More common are the images of Altaf bhai (brother) in sunglasses against the MQM flag colours, or delivering an impassioned speech facing the microphone.