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IMRAN Khan was mocking Asif Zardari’s so-called political reconciliation policy and slamming the former president’s avowed philosophy of there being ‘no last (final) word’ in politics.
But, in a televised discussion, he mispronounced ‘harf-i-akhir’ as ‘harb-i-akhir’ (last war/battle). As the context was the state of the nation, with an emphasis on the dire straits Karachi is in, the slip-up was poignant.
For in reality, it appears that there will never be a final round (then peace) in the conflict that has ebbed and flowed in a city everyone calls the country’s heart and yet no one stays the hand that appears hell-bent on plunging a dagger into it.
Whether we live in Karachi or happen to be far from it, our love for the city doesn’t wane.
Whether you live in Karachi or happen to be far from it, as I currently am, your love for the city doesn’t wane. You feel its pain as it suffers. When it bleeds you are overcome by a debilitating nausea which only freshly shed blood can induce.
Images of nameless victims wrapped in white shrouds stamped with the Edhi emblem fill you with a sense of profound loss, grief. Even more tellingly these images fill you with rage. Yes, rage albeit idle and helpless.
What you feel at a distance is not too dissimilar to what most Karachiites describe they feel in the heart of the city itself. Of course, for those who are away this rage is not accompanied by a sense of immediate personal danger, of a threat to life and limb.
But the helplessness is shared. We cannot even name the perpetrators of this mayhem. We make oblique references to this political group and that. We also talk about the role of the security ‘agencies’ in fomenting the unrest as they’d like nothing better than to see the elected set-up perpetually in a soup.
And of course, the mother of all evil, the foreign hand, is never far away. Sitting smugly many, many miles away it would be easy for me to start naming, speculating about those who have plunged my city into this mind-numbing orgy of violence, more bloody and gory than the most outrageous of Tarantino’s fictional plots. I won’t.
All I’ll say is that perhaps for the first time in my life I agree with Imran Khan, the politician. It is with clichéd irony that I do so as his words were, in all probability, a slip-up. As we speak the only commitment we see is to more and more bloodshed.
In a city where political dominance and ascendancy are seen mainly as accruing to demographics, any shift in the delicate balance whether real or perceived, whether due to normal, natural factors or forced is viewed with not just huge suspicion, it is to be resisted tooth and nail. And if violence needs to be a weapon so be it. Unfortunately, violence begets more violence unless of course one of the practitioners of this dangerous game has the capacity to overwhelm and even annihilate the lesser players.
All major parties have armed wings. And the bigger the support for a party in the city the more violence and more thugs it deploys. It is sad that all this murder and mayhem is resorted to mainly to retain and consolidate or create constituencies which can ensure electoral supremacy.
Perhaps, one party took a leaf out of the country’s most well-organised political entity in opting for a large armed cadre because such a force allows one to dominate the scene totally, at least for a while. But ethnic politics is a zero-sum game and tools of terror cannot be monopolised so others started playing catch-up.
The Musharraf years are credited with having seen amazing and unprecedented calm and peace in the metropolis but few bother to acknowledge the larger, and fuller, picture where one party dominated the scene and resources largely to the exclusion of others at least in Sindh.
It would be foolish to suggest that the near total breakdown of law and order in the burgeoning metropolis of between eight to 15 million (depending on whose politicised population figure you believe) has not made it the equivalent of a paradise on earth for armed gangs of common criminals.
But inevitably it is the political dimension that means that 35,000 police backed up by 20,000 paramilitary Rangers appear helpless in restoring even a semblance of order to its streets. This failure perhaps explains the demand by certain quarters for the army to be called out.
One may not agree with this demand, given past experience, but one can understand where it is coming from. Despite having its own long-term political agenda, it is assumed the army would be neutral in terms of the various forces vying for supremacy in the city at this time.
If you were to ask me, I’d say the police remain the safest bet. Many journalists who have covered the ‘crime beat’ will tell you the police are the most well-informed force and that police station staff know almost every nook and cranny and criminal in their area of responsibility or jurisdiction.
The police need to be reinforced and empowered, with judicial oversight ensuring civil liberties, and freed of political influence and interference if the law and order mess has to be sorted out in the country’s financial hub and elsewhere on a lasting basis. It isn’t rocket science.
In fact, some of the resources we pump into secretive organisations which are known to wage secret (and dirty) wars even on their own citizens and governments, ought to be redirected to an autonomous yet accountable police force.
The record of legislation by the government is as good as its governance has been abysmal. Would it be too much to expect a little more emphasis on governance now as it is in the second half of its term in office? If only wishes were horses...
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, November 28th, 2015
