Sindh has been ruled by the Pakistan Peoples Party without interruption since 2008. Its record has been disappointing, nowhere more so than in education: in Pakistan's most urbanised province, four in ten urban children are still out of school. But the PPP's failures should not be conflated with Sindhis. The Sindhi-speaking middle class did not emerge because of good governance; it emerged despite difficulties and against the odds. MQM politicians exploit precisely this confusion, misleading their own constituents and pursuing a politics of division and hatred whose roots go back not to the 1970s, as is commonly claimed, but to the end of the 1960s, when the Mohajir Punjabi Pathan Muttahida Mahaz was formed in Hyderabad.
Between 1947 and 1948 Sindh lost its middle class. Around 800,000 Sindhi Hindus — the traders, moneylenders, clerks, teachers and lawyers of a province of roughly five million left for India. What remained was a society dominated by two layers: the feudal and the hari. The space vacated in the towns, the offices and the professions was filled not by Sindhi Muslims but by Urdu-speaking migrants from north India, who arrived educated, urban and connected to the new state. For a quarter of a century, Sindhi speakers were tenants in their own administration.
A major blow came in 1948, when Karachi was separated from Sindh to become the federal capital. The Sindh Legislative Assembly opposed the move. Hashim Gazdar warned that it would cripple Sindh economically and politically and violate the Lahore Resolution's guarantee of the provinces' territorial integrity. Sindhis felt that the migrants they had sheltered were now appropriating Sindh's soil, and even then there were fears of Punjabi domination.
The losses went beyond land. The University of Sindh was moved from Karachi to the less developed Hyderabad, and a new University of Karachi, established in the early 1950s, leaned towards Urdu. In 1957–58 it barred students from answering examination papers in Sindhi. Hyder Bakhsh Jatoi, president of the Sindh Hari Committee, estimated that the rule cost a Sindhi-medium student at least 20 percent of his marks. A language movement that had begun against Bombay's rule now became a Sindhi–Urdu contest. The story of the Sindhi-speaking middle class since the 1970s is the story of how that gap was refilled. It is also the story of a class that fought its way into the state, as the Punjabi and Urdu-speaking middle classes did before it through the army and the bureaucracy. Fifty years on, it has grown from almost nothing into a substantial class.
Unlike Punjabis and Pakhtuns, Sindhis had few routes out. As late as 1998, only about 50,000 Sindhi speakers lived outside the Sindhi-speaking heartland — one in every 375. The 2023 census tells the same story: only three in every 100 Sindhi speakers live outside Sindh, and half of those in Balochistan, their ancestral borderland. There was no army recruitment pipeline, no Bradford, no Gulf remittance economy on the Punjabi or Pakhtun scale to build a middle class from outside. Sindhis would have to build theirs at home.
Under One Unit (1955–70) the barrage lands opened up in the Ayub era were parcelled out to Punjabi farmers and to civil and military officers. When One Unit was wound up in 1969–70, some 17,000 Punjabi government servants were absorbed into Sindh's provincial services. The pattern was old: in April 1952, of 91 federal secretaries, joint secretaries and deputy secretaries, 40 were Punjabi, 33 Mohajir and one Sindhi. Karachi's municipal corporation adopted Urdu as its official language; Sindhi schools in the city were converted to Urdu-medium. The Sindhi landlords had their own reasons to accept this. As the urbanist Arif Hasan argued in the late 1980s, a Sindhi-speaking middle class in the countryside was the one force that could challenge their power.
Resistance came from the thin educated layer that did exist — schoolteachers, writers, students. Sindhi intellectuals founded the Sindhi Language Society in 1959. Julien Levesque, a researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, has shown how the Sindhi student organisations of the late 1960s, born in the agitation against One Unit and Ayub Khan, planted the seeds of the Jiye Sindh movement. The Sindhi middle class was political before it was economic. It existed as a grievance before it existed as an income bracket.
The opening came through the ballot. Until 1971 Pakistan was governed by its civil and military bureaucracy. The general election of 7 December 1970 was the country's first held on adult franchise. For the first time since independence, Sindhis chose their own representatives, and they chose the PPP, which took 18 of Sindh's 27 National Assembly seats and the provincial assembly. The language Act, constitutional cover for the quota and the expansion of public employment were what that mandate delivered.
When students from Tharparkar outscore Karachi in an open examination, the lesson is not that one community has lost. It is that a class built from almost nothing has learned to reproduce itself, and to compete.
On 7 July 1972 the Sindh Assembly passed the Sind (Teaching, Promotion and Use of Sindhi Language) Act. It has to be read with the constitution then in force. The Interim Constitution of April 1972 had already fixed Urdu's status as a national language, and its Article 267 let a province legislate for its own language only without prejudice to that status. The Act cited Article 267 in its preamble and made Sindhi's use in government subject to the Constitution. It did not make Sindhi the sole official language; the phrase "official language" appears nowhere in it. It declared Sindhi the "Provincial Language", made Sindhi and Urdu compulsory subjects from Class IV to XII, and allowed Sindhi's progressive use in offices, courts and the Assembly.
Tension between Sindhi and Urdu speakers predated the Act. Through the 1960s Sindhis grew steadily more alienated, from Ayub Khan's government and from the Mohajir-dominated administration alike. On 4 March 1967 Masroor Hasan Khan, the Urdu-speaking commissioner of Hyderabad Division, ordered the arrest of Sindh University students, and the nationalists found their symbol of resistance. The rift widened in the 1968–69 movement against Ayub. At the end of the 1960s Nawab Muzaffar Hussain founded the Sindh Mohajir Punjabi Pathan Muttahida Mahaz (United Front) in Hyderabad, allegedly at the instigation of Ayub's bureaucrats, to split the anti-Ayub movement along ethnic lines. Masroor Hasan Khan was widely believed to have backed him. The front won only one provincial assembly seat in the 1970 elections, Hussain's own. Yet it was telling that a united front of non-Sindhis was formed in the heart of Sindh. The seeds of divisive, hate-driven politics were sown in Hyderabad in the late 1960s, not in the 1970s, as is commonly alleged.
Karachi and Hyderabad burned during the "language riots" of July 1972; within days the death toll stood at 47. On 16 July Bhutto had the governor issue an ordinance restating that Urdu was a national language: the Act would be applied without prejudice to Urdu, and for twelve years no one could be denied appointment or promotion for not knowing Sindhi or Urdu. The 1973 Constitution kept the arrangement. Article 251 made Urdu the national language and allowed a province to promote its own language in addition to it. The Act's gain was status, not jobs. Sindhi's use in offices and courts stayed "progressive" — slow and partial. The labour-market instrument came a year later.
The quota system helped the Sindhi speaking citizens, though it was not the PPP's invention. Regional quotas in federal jobs dated back to 1949, and were introduced by Liaqat Ali Khan to favour the refugees from India, at the expense of former East Bengal. The division between rural and urban Sindh was introduced in 1970 under Yahya Khan's martial law, on the recommendation of Lt Gen Rakhman Gul, then governor of Sindh. It split provincial jobs 60:40 in favour of rural Sindh. The 1973 Constitution gave the quota cover, and under the July 1972 accord between Bhutto and Mohajir leaders it was to be abolished after ten years. Then came the coup of 1977, and Zia's regime extended it instead. Of Sindh's 19 percent share of federal posts, rural Sindh received 11.4 percent and urban Sindh 7.6 percent. In 1973 rural Sindh held about 300 federal posts in grades 16 to 22 against 1,900 for urban Sindh. By one count, Sindhi speakers held 2.5 percent of Class-I posts; Punjabis held 49 percent and Urdu speakers 30 percent.
The quota needed jobs to fill, and the PPP government supplied them. The Economic Reform Order of January 1972 put 31 major industrial units in ten basic industries under state management. Life insurance was nationalised the same year, the banks in January 1974. The state became the employer of choice for a generation of graduates. Universities followed: Shah Abdul Latif University began in Khairpur in 1976 as a campus of Sindh University and became a full university in 1986. Jamshoro, home to Sindh University, Mehran and Liaquat, grew into a university town that trained the first mass generation of Sindhi engineers and doctors.
Arif Hasan described a new Sindhi-speaking class staffing the banks, insurance companies, development agencies and telecommunication offices spreading across rural Sindh; Sindhi lobbies forming in the bar councils and the engineering and medical associations; Sindhi teachers and students multiplying in the universities; and a Sindhi press reborn after years of suppression. The new class had patrons as well as rivals. The Sindhi landlords did not resist it; they supported it. Under Bhutto the feudals moved from being allies of the bureaucracy to being partners in government, and they understood that sponsoring the new middle class was how they would keep control of the rural vote.
The new Sindhi middle class gained its place at the expense of the Urdu-speaking middle class, not the Punjabi establishment, whose influence in Sindh kept growing. Sindhis saw this as undoing of the injustices done to them since 1947. Urdu speaking politicians complained about unfair treatment, ignoring there was never a level playing field from 1947 to 1971. Two middle classes were set to compete for the same white-collar jobs in the same province. Urban Sindh saw the quota as discrimination. Its anger produced first the PNA street movement of 1977 and then the MQM. General Mirza Aslam Beg, a former army chief, later said in a televised interview that Zia wanted an urban Mohajir force to counter the PPP in Sindh, and that this produced the MQM. Karachi's politics for the next three decades was a mirror image of the Sindhi middle class's rise. MQM’s Mustafa Kamal (now a federal minister) was to regret later that Mohajirs wasted 40 years for a leader who, in his words, was a criminal, and destroyed a generation.
The coup of July 1977 orphaned rural Sindh. The landlords lost power; the middle class lost its patronage. In 1983 both joined the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, and rural Sindh bore the brunt of the repression. The movement failed. The new middle class, blocked in the cities by entrenched Mohajir interests, had no option but to ally with the landlords on a nationalist platform the landlords dominated. That tension — anti-feudal instincts, dependence on landlord-led politics has run through Sindhi middle-class politics ever since.
Hyderabad's ethnic riots of the 1980s split the city. Sindhi families moved to Qasimabad; Urdu-speaking families consolidated in Latifabad. Qasimabad, until then farmland on the city's edge, became the capital of the Sindhi middle class. It is more than 99 percent Sindhi-speaking, and its literacy rate stood at 71.3 percent in the 2023 census.
In Karachi, Sindhi speakers are a minority. In Karachi East the 2023 census counted 1.92 million Urdu speakers and about half a million Sindhi speakers. In Korangi it was 2.2 million against 173,000. Province-wide the balance runs the other way — 33.5 million Sindhi speakers against 12.4 million Urdu speakers but the money, the industry and the private jobs are in the city where Sindhis are thinnest on the ground.
In 1990 the Kazi brothers launched Kawish from Hyderabad. It displaced the older Ibrat and is reported to outsell all its Sindhi rivals combined. In 2002 the group launched KTN, the first Sindhi-language satellite channel. That media also gave the class a shared public identity. In December 2009, after a television anchor criticised President Zardari for wearing a Sindhi topi abroad, KTN's chief Ali Kazi called for a Sindhi Topi Day. It became Sindhi Culture Day, held on the first Sunday of every December. The ajrak and topi are now a year-round fashion statement rather than village dress. Sindhi critics have warned of the folklorisation of a living culture — an identity staged in symbols rather than argued in programmes. Culture Day is a confident class asserting itself in public.
The route that opened the door is now its ceiling. The quota brought Sindhis into the bureaucracy, but it also tied their ambitions to government employment; Sindhi commentators themselves warn of over-reliance on it. Successive governments built little industry in rural Sindh, and Karachi's industrial economy remained largely without Sindhis for decades. Of 1,825 manufacturing units in the province, 1,198 are in Karachi, 98 in Hyderabad and 83 in Dadu district including Kotri and Nooriabad. Beyond the Karachi–Hyderabad corridor, industry means mostly sugar mills and agro-processing. Even so, in 2014 Sindh held only 9.7 percent of federal posts in grades 1 to 22, against about 23 percent of the population; Punjab held 67.3 percent. The quota was due to lapse in August 2013; the federal cabinet extended it for twenty years.
The argument flared again in September 2026. In Sindh's medical entry test, run by IBA Sukkur, five of the top 20 candidates came from Tharparkar, one of the province's poorest districts; none came from Karachi. MQM-P alleged leaks and mismanagement and demanded an inquiry, and its deputy parliamentary leader in the Sindh Assembly called for the quota to be abolished. The district results tell a different story. Karachi's districts had the province's highest pass rates: 71 percent in Karachi East and 69 percent in Karachi Central, against 58 percent for other divisions of Sindh. Tharparkar, at 67 percent, came third. As a commentator noted, even a 71 percent pass rate was being called injustice; MQM's real complaint seemed to be that any Karachi student had failed at all. Tharparkar's students won on open merit, and, as The Express Tribune noted, the resource gap between rural and urban Sindh has not closed: rural students are succeeding despite the system, not because of it.
No survey counts the Sindhi-speaking middle class directly, but the divide between town and country is a fair guide, because rural Sindh is overwhelmingly Sindhi-speaking. On Gallup Pakistan's measure, which classifies households by the assets they own, two in three urban households in Sindh are middle class or better; in the countryside, barely one in five is. The Sindhi middle class has grown, but most of rural Sindh has yet to join it. Recent years have also pushed families backwards: inflation cut the province-wide middle-class share from 49 percent in 2019–20 to 39.5 percent in 2024–25. Nor is a degree a safe passage any longer: nearly a quarter of jobless young people in urban Sindh are university graduates.
Women are the clearest measure of both progress and its limits. The share of Sindhi women aged 15 to 49 with no schooling fell from 76.8 percent in 1990–91 to 54.7 percent in 2017–18. It still leaves more than half with none. Only 18.3 percent of working-age women are employed, against 82 percent of men. More than half of young women are neither in education, employment nor training. Yet the map also shows what middle-class formation looks like when it happens. Larkana, Bhutto's home district, now has an estimated fertility rate of 2.16 children per woman, lower than Karachi's Malir district. Kashmore, in the far north, stands at 6.96. Two Sindhs, a few hours apart: one in which the middle class has arrived, one in which the old order still holds.
In 1952 Sindhis held one of 91 senior federal posts; in 1973, by one count, 2.5 percent of Class-I posts. Half a century later the Sindhi-speaking middle class has its own doctors, engineers, civil servants, academics, lawyers and journalists, a university town at Jamshoro, a self-built suburb in Qasimabad, and the province's most-read newspaper and television channel. Its children now top Sindh's medical entry test. A society stripped of its middle class in 1947 has built a new one within a single working lifetime, through the ballot box and the classroom. That is one of the most significant social changes in Pakistan's history.
The surest sign of change is the second generation. The children of the teachers, clerks and officers who entered the state in the 1970s have grown up in literate homes, and they are better educated than their parents ever had the chance to be. They fill Sindh's medical colleges and engineering universities, compete on open merit, and increasingly look beyond the government job to the professions and the private sector. Their sisters are studying in numbers their grandmothers could not have imagined: three in ten students at Shah Abdul Latif University in Khairpur are women. When students from Tharparkar outscore Karachi in an open examination, the lesson is not that one community has lost. It is that a class built from almost nothing has learned to reproduce itself, and to compete. That is how a middle class becomes permanent.