There is a strong perception suggesting that all provincial governments of the PPP in Sindh have been bad for the province’s colossal capital, Karachi.

Once proudly known as the ‘City of Lights’, and the most modern metropolis of the country, Karachi today looks like the filth capital of Pakistan.

Its traffic follows no rules; its roads and streets are broken; its manholes keep spewing streams of malodourous smut; its walls are covered with the ugliest of graffiti; the lines from its electric and telephone poles are pressed low by their own weight, often just dangling aimlessly in the air; street corners are dotted with stinking mounts of garbage which no one bothers to remove; tiny dunes of sand rest along the edges of its footpaths, that are already anarchically painted with spit stains drained from that terrible indulgence called the paan; and empty plastic bags and random papers sweep to and fro across its roads.

Ever since Pakistan’s creation in 1947, the PPP has been at the helm of affairs in Sindh at least five times (1971-77; 1988-90; 1993-96; 2008-13; 2013-present). The perception that Karachi has fared miserably under the PPP provincial set-ups in Sindh, is not that far from the truth.

The city certainly has been allowed to turn into a chaotic, dirty dump by the last two PPP set-ups in Sindh (under Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah).

Though Karachi is the capital city of a province where the PPP has always been electorally strong, it does not hold much electoral interest for the party where it has never been able to win big.

A peek at how Karachi has fared through different political governments and their agendas

The party has never won more than three NA seats in an election in Karachi. All of its victories here have come in Karachi’s working-class areas, especially Lyari.

Yet, even though Lyari (which also holds one of the largest urban slums in Pakistan) has been returning PPP MNAs and MPS ever since 1970, this area too seems to have gone from being bad to worse!

This year during the local bodies’ election in Lyari, the people of the area returned four PNL-N candidates. This was a clear indication that the new generation of Lyari voters may just have had enough of the PPP.

Lyarites fondly remember the first chairman of the PPP, Z.A. Bhutto. They say that even though the Z.A. Bhutto regime (1971-77) did not do much for the area, he did give them a sense of self-worth and political consciousness.

Some also praise Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, who, during her two stints as PM (1988-90; 1993-96), did initiate some infrastructural and sporting projects in Lyari, but not much was done here after 1996.

Indeed, there is enough evidence to suggest that PPP regimes in Sindh have treated Sindh’s capital rather callously. But was Karachi any better during the periods when Sindh was not in the hands of PPP chief ministers and MPAs?

In the 1950s, Karachi was Pakistan’s capital. It was largely run by civil servants who were mostly from the city’s majority group, the Urdu-speakers (Mohajirs).

Though the city was swamped by the huge influx of refugees arriving from India after the creation of Pakistan, Karachi managed to blossom as an impressive metropolis.

Author Riffat Chaudhry in her book, Shadows of my Memories, writes that (in the 1950s) the streets and roads of Karachi were regularly washed with water hoses!

In the 1960s, during the Ayub Khan dictatorship, the capital of the country was gradually shifted from Karachi to the newly built Islamabad in the north.

But it was Karachi which enjoyed the largest share of the rapid industrialisation that took place in Pakistan under Ayub.

On the one hand, the city thrived as an economic and social hub. Dozens of factories and stylish buildings sprang up, and the city radiated a glowing nightlife.

On the other hand, the fading political and economic clout of the Mohajirs created an antagonistic gap between the Ayub regime and the Mohajir majority of the city.

The swift industrialisation (mostly achieved through so-called ‘crony capitalism’), magnified the growing economic disparities between the classes. Between 1967 and 1969, this manifested itself into becoming a widespread students and workers movement. The movement was strong in Karachi. It forced Ayub to resign.

Karachi became the capital of Sindh in 1970 and Sindh saw its first PPP regime in 1972.

The left-leaning populist, Z.A. Bhutto (a Sindhi), became Pakistan’s PM. Even though his party, the PPP, could only win two NA seats from Karachi in the 1970 election, he promised to make the city ‘the Paris of Asia.’

The Bhutto regime’s first finance minister, Dr Mubashir Hasan, in his book, The Mirage of Power, and Stanley Wolpert, in his detailed biography of Z A. Bhutto, both mention a series of memos that Bhutto wrote to the time’s Sindh CM, Mumtaz Bhutto.

In the memos Z.A. Bhutto lamented that Karachi was becoming dirty and congested. The same memos then urged the Sindh CM ‘to clean up Karachi’s streets and markets’ and ‘make it beautiful again’.

Disappointed with the way Mumtaz was handling the affairs of Sindh, Bhutto replaced him with Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi. Though the population of Karachi continued to grow and so did the city’s infrastructural problems, Bhutto took it upon himself to at least give the capital of his home province a pleasant veneer.

Bhutto initiated a ‘beautification project’ in 1974 which saw the Sindh government built the city’s in fact the country’s first three-lane road from the Karachi Airport all the way to the Old Clifton area, some 30 miles away.

Grassy pavements ran along the road, and it also included large roundabouts that were further beautified by marbled monuments and palm trees.

Bhutto fell in July 1977 to a reactionary military coup. The new military ruler, General Ziaul Haq, initially ordered a cleanup of those areas of Karachi that had slid into disarray and neglect during the last days of the Bhutto regime. But eventually Karachi imploded when a large number of Afghan refugees began to arrive in the early 1980s.

When the influx caused ethnic and sectarian riots in Karachi (from the early 1980s onwards), for the first time important economic forces were quietly allowed (by the Zia regime) to move their businesses from Karachi to the Punjab province. This trend has continued.

Ethnic strife and a three-fold increase in crime in Karachi in the 1980s grievously impacted the politics, economics and sociology of the city. It left the post-Zia set-ups in Karachi completely unable (or unwilling) to stop the city from looking like a disaster zone across the 1990s.

Nevertheless, Karachi began to exhibit some semblance of reclaiming its past glories when the Parvez Musharraf regime (1999-2008), ended a decade-long tussle between the state and Karachi’s largest political party, the MQM.

He handed out an impressive budget to the MQM mayor for the ‘uplift of Karachi’. Musharraf, a Mohajir, wrote in his autobiography, it pained him to see what had become of the city.

The MQM mayor was successful in exhibiting the potential of Karachi of once again becoming a most vibrant economic and social hub in the region but only if handled with an attitude that is willing to take complete ownership of this vast, complex city of various ethnic groups.

But, alas, the fall of Musharraf and the welcome return of democracy in 2008 did not fare well for the city. It began to deteriorate again, with all of its major political players going back to fighting turf wars.

Karachi once again became a neglected playground for avaricious politicians, petty bureaucrats, criminal gangs, religious militants and a bewildered population now only willing to maintain social etiquettes within the four walls of their homes. Outside, it’s a free-for-all for polluters, plunderers and an uncaring, clueless provincial government.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 10th, 2016