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THEY said he was a quiet, soft-spoken man and a committed academic. His assassins, two burly young men who accosted his car and shot at it with bullets, did not care. It was broad daylight when it happened. That did not matter either; every hour in Karachi is the hour of death, and killing is a round-the-clock operation.
Dr Javed Iqbal Qazi was the head of the Department of Pathology at the Karachi Medical and Dental College, and Dean of Medicine at Karachi University. On Feb 17, 2014, he lay dead in his car. An autopsy revealed he died of bullet wounds.
When he died, Dr Qazi was also the top candidate for the position of principal at Karachi Medical and Dental College. He served also on an examination committee that was responsible for supervising the medical and dental examinations to be conducted under the auspices of the KMDC. As they do following most targeted killing operations, police shrugged and promised some answers. And as is the case with so many of the questions attached to Karachi’s killings, none were forthcoming.
One week after Dr Qazi’s death, doctors in Karachi went on strike to protest his murder. They shut down outpatient departments in the hope of pushing the authorities to do something, to make the death of this doctor mean something amid the deaths of so many.
Days after Dr Qazi was killed, Prof Taqi Hadi Naqvi, a religious scholar and a man known for his equanimity, was targeted. He had come to Pakistan with the hope of those who had fought for it, leaving all behind. In the moments before he died, he had hailed a rickshaw outside the office of the Board of Secondary Education in Karachi. He had asked the driver to take him to his home in Buffer Zone. A simple man, a learned man without bodyguards, without a body armour, he was an easy target. A shower of bullets killed him. The killers fled like they always do.
He was among other members of the Shia community to be killed in the span of 72 hours. As has been the case in the tragedy with doctors, the investigation of the deaths of religious scholars, particularly those belonging to the Shia sect, follow the familiar pattern of shrugs and nods and few answers.
Even after the three-day mourning period announced by the Majlis-i-Wahdat-i-Muslimeen, there were no answers. Prof Naqvi had often appeared on television and attempted to speak of tolerance in intolerant times; his death fell into the oblivion of perished souls that are Karachi’s targeted dead.
In war-torn Pakistan, and particularly in bullet-riddled Karachi, we have many ways of categorising death. These classifications, varied and multifarious, aim perhaps to provide some order to what is otherwise a massive, meaningless collage of death. The boxes of sectarian, political, criminal, extortionist, ethnic, are in this sense file folders that attach some semblance of meaning to the killing of a person.
To the ever-silent majority, they also provide rationalisations. If one is not embroiled in any ethnic or political intrigue, if one is not Shia, if one is not a doctor, if one is dutifully paying the mafias, then possibly one can be assured of continued life, of knowing that the gun-wielding assassins will not come for you.
It is by virtue of the existence of these very categories that we would not pair the deaths of Dr Javed Iqbal Qazi and the death of Prof Taqi Hadi Naqvi. The first was a doctor, a dean, targeted, perhaps, by academic politics turned lethal. Prof Naqvi, the laws of categorisation would hold, was killed because he was Shia and publicly so. In separate reasons lie separate solaces, and in a city and country where there will be no answers, no conclusion provided by justice or procedure, they are all that is present.
Easy categorisations, however, can also hide new patterns of victimisation. In this case, both men killed were professors. As is the task of any professor, they occupied positions more public than the rest of the world. In this sense, while the substance of their teachings may have been markedly different, the fact that they brought them into contact with a wide variety of people, who may have held similar or different views, was common to both.
By occupying this role, they stood vulnerable to being judged by scores more than most; in being teachers, they were also made most vulnerable to the excesses of an intolerant age.
Knowledge is power, they say. In Pakistan, power lies not with those who possess it, but with those who wish to eliminate it. Arguing for the relevance of counting dead professors as a category, not filing them in the separate boxes of sectarian versus political, personal enmity versus criminal mafia, is thus to ask for the assessment of the death of knowledge-production and dissemination in the country.
The failure to count dead scholars as a total of its own hides this cost. It further allows for the disregard of losses attached to the corpses of professors. When scores of the learned are killed, several others will leave. The loss of these, to death or exile, is incurred by those left behind — left to a world not only darkened by death, but also diseased by ignorance.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
