The MQM supreme leader, Altaf bhai to supporters, had run the party’s affairs as a capo, brooking no dissent either within the party or media, even as street power, intimidation and a militant operating style maintained the party’s electoral supremacy. The MQM had been the flagbearer of Mohajir nationalism in Pakistan since the party’s founding in 1984 until 2016. The Urdu-speaking segment of Pakistan’s population, whose elders migrated from India during Partition in 1947, are known as Mohajirs, and they are primarily concentrated in urban Sindh. For two years before his death, Farooq had been politically inactive as Hussain marginalised him as serious political differences cropped up between the two. Both had been living in exile in London since the 1990s as criminal cases were registered against them in Karachi, which they claimed were politically motivated. Imran Farooq, 50, was a founding member of the MQM along with Hussain in 1984. More significantly, the court held the MQM’s supreme leader Altaf Hussain responsible for it, having been ordered the fatal hit of the man who once was his trusted lieutenant and the party’s chief ideologue. The court sentenced three men to life in jail for the murder of MQM leader Imran Farooq in London in 2010. On June 18, an antiterrorism court in Islamabad closed a final chapter in the history of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a political party that once represented Mohajir nationalism, lorded over urban areas of Sindh province, including Pakistan’s economic heart Karachi, and was a force to reckon with in national politics.