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IN our wonderful land, hope can hit a peak and a trough all in a matter of moments, as was experienced when towards the end of this week two developments were more or less juxtaposed on the pages of this newspaper.
The first of course was the headline that the country’s premier intelligence agency informed the Supreme Court via ‘a sealed envelope’ the number of telephones, some 7,000, that it tapped during the month of May this year.
Please don’t get me wrong. The positive isn’t in the tapping of so many phones when it’s a safe bet the privacy of many citizens must have been invaded for no good reason side by side with those being legitimately monitored as potential threats to state security.
What was pleasing was that the agency which is known to perform as if it were a law unto itself, felt compelled to furnish the court with the details. Although a very small step, it was one in the right direction. Not just that, the following day an ISI official was also slated to brief the bench members in chambers, possibly providing flesh to the bare stats.
Even if it comes in humble steps, such accountability will always be welcome for, no matter how subtly, it does bring in a realisation to those at the agency that they are answerable to the courts for their conduct. In turn, over time, this may also manifest itself in fewer transgressions of the law.
This development came simultaneously with a vote on legislation in the United States which sought to limit invasion of privacy by state agencies in the name of security in the wake of former CIA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scope of (electronic eavesdropping) snooping around the world by the Americans where even world leaders viewed as key allies weren’t spared.
The vote was a far cry from the time the draconian Patriot Act was given a walkover in the US Congress and curtailed individual liberties sharply following the Sept 11 attacks by terrorists on US mainland targeting significant ‘economic and military’ symbols such as the World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington DC.
The threats to Perween Rahman’s family to withdraw the murder case are being attributed to unnamed police officers.
The US Freedom Act, the new legislation, incorporates many provisions of the now expired Patriot Act but does indeed limit the scope of monitoring of phone records by the National Security Agency that it enjoyed under the old law; a small but nonetheless welcome move towards safeguarding individual liberty.
But individual liberty means different things in different societies. What does it mean in ours? Very little has to be the honest answer. This brings me to the other story in the papers this week about how the family of the assassinated director of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) Perween Rahman is being threatened to withdraw their murder case.
Having read the headline, one would have been forgiven for assuming that the threats were coming from the members of the land mafia which is so well-entrenched in the area where the OPP has been delivering yeoman service for the provision of basic infrastructure for sewerage and water supply etc to an extremely poor population, incredibly on a self-help basis.
With one million inhabitants, Orangi was said to be one of the biggest katchi abadis in the world when in 1980 the project was initiated by Akhtar Hameed Khan. Khan Sahib’s dedication and commitment and the fantastic team he built made this into a success story with few parallels. It is beyond the scope of this column to detail what the project is today but the reader who may not be aware of this may wish to read up on it to be filled with a sense of marvel.
This was the project to which the incredibly tenacious woman architect was committed, despite receiving threats from all manner of land grabbers who resented her work, one suspects, particularly in simplifying land registration records and other areas which impeded their loot and plunder.
A little over two years ago, while returning home from work, Ms Rahman was shot and killed in the very area she worked with the community on a project owned by it to provide the burgeoning local population, mostly poor, with a chance to live a life not blighted by sewage, contaminated water and consequently afflicted by disease, among many other positives.
Recently, news came that threats have meant that the offices of the OPP have to be relocated and most of the project work seriously affected by the insecurity. One assumed the origin of these threats were the militant groups both ethnic and religious operating in the area. It isn’t clear whether this is actually the case.
The tragedy is that the threats to Perween Rahman’s family to withdraw the murder case are being attributed to unnamed police officers. That Karachi was being run as a criminal enterprise for years is a fact known to many citizens.
Those who run this criminal underworld appear in many cloaks. Sometimes they appears in a politician’s garb, sometimes as the champion of this ethnic group or that religious/sectarian party, on other occasions in a police uniform, or in a uniform seen as far more credible than the police attire. But make no mistake in flesh they have a common denominator: greed.
Yes, greed: endless, boundless, insatiable. And if a Perween Rahman is an obstacle, mow her down. If her family members are the cause of ‘inconvenience’ or more appropriately if the FIR filed by them is causing you the slightest of discomfort, go and threaten her sister and aging mother.
Who knows what these thugs are capable of if their threats don’t work? Welcome to the city of lights. It now stands condemned to darkness. Who wants to let go of hope? But tell me how can one cling on to it when these horrors, these nightmares, unfold each day?
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, June 6th, 2015
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