Illegal construction and land-grabbing highlight the weakness of the state.— Photo from APP/File

WHAT is common to the murder most foul of Nisar Baloch, denial of security to schools and increase in postal charges? Terrorism? No. Disorder? Again, no! The correct answer is: the rise of an irresponsible state.

Nisar Baloch had signed his own death warrant the day he decided to stand up to Karachi’s notorious land mafia. The administration knew of the risks he ran by opposing the gang that had set its eyes on the Gutter Baghicha land. He was denied satisfaction in a case in which law and morality both were on his side, and he was denied his rights as a citizen.

Narrators of Pakistan’s political history often maintain that the organised loot of the evacuee property sowed the seeds of corruption that prevented the state from acquiring the qualities of integrity and moral propriety.

It is time we stopped referring to land-grabbing in the past tense. The pernicious practice remains a drag on the state to this day. Evacuee property was gobbled up within the first few years of independence; though litigation caused by all kinds of shady transactions has still not ended, efforts to expropriate state/community lands have never ceased. Particularly in Karachi. As the number of the people looking for small patches of land to set up jhuggis grew so did the crop of patharidars and armed gangs who parcelled out land that did not belong to them.

Over the years the small-time crooks have been superseded by well-heeled developers and housing behemoths. They can force the government to sell them for peanuts the land claimed from the sea and make the Land Disposal Act redundant. Now they are reported to be planning to get the bar on change of use of amenity plots withdrawn. Thanks to the convivial attitude of the administration towards them the land-grabbers are literally having a ball.

And not in Karachi alone. The Baloch cannot forget the grabbing of their coastal lands, through force and legal chicanery. The ownership of the Malakand hills, leased out to the British army in the 19th century, has not been restored to the people. In Punjab, the affair of the Okara farms has become a festering sore. The allotment of barrage lands to non-agriculturist speculators constitutes land-grabbing under licence.

We find that the state does not recognise its duty to protect public property and instead uses its coercive powers to crush the peasants, tenants and cultivator-lessees. Such an irresponsible state could protect neither Nisar Baloch nor the activists of Okara’s Anjuman-Muzaraeen. The saddest part of the story is that the custodians of power do not realise that whenever a Nisar Baloch is liquidated the state loses not only a part of its flesh, the justification for its existence also is eroded.

The same is the result of the government’s refusal to make security arrangements for schools. Only a small number of educational institutions have the resources required to provide for reasonable security. Most schools, especially those catering to the needs of the less affluent communities, are located in densely populated lanes and it is not possible to erect barriers nor to leave open space between the outer gates and classrooms. Telling such institutions to fend for themselves amounts to a flagrant repudiation of the state’s obligations.

Such abdication of the state’s primary responsibility to protect the life and property of every citizen has been given a veneer of legitimacy over many years. The process began with the police force chiefs’ declarations to the effect that the population had grown to a level that the police could not protect it. Then came measures such as a Punjab law that requires banks, petrol/gas stations, etc., to hire security guards and make other security arrangements in accordance with official prescription and non-compliance is liable to punishment.

Apart from the fact that the state cannot, under any circumstances, abdicate its responsibility to maintain law and order (for reference read the Quaid-i-Azam’s address to the Constituent Assembly on Aug 11, 1947), it must always bear in mind its stake in children’s education. Schools and schoolchildren have a better claim to protection at state cost than the growing breed of grandees (ministers, parliamentarians, bureaucrats, et al). The plea that these privileged people deserve special care as they are terrorists’ primary targets is only partially valid. In any case it does not justify leaving the ordinary citizens and their little ones at the terrorists’ mercy. When ordinary citizens see huge amounts of money being spent on the security of the privileged while their own security needs are ignored, they will surely be alienated from the state.

Schoolchildren’s safety is the responsibility of the state to a greater extent than that of any group of people. Their demands cannot be cavalierly dismissed. If the state is handicapped by the lack of human resources, it may try to mobilise the community (including schoolchildren’s parents) to form joint police-citizens teams to guard educational institutions and save children’s studies from disruption. The trouble is that ordinary citizens are not visible on officialdom’s radars.

This has also been confirmed by the postal authorities’ decision to raise their tariff. The charges for postcard, postal envelope, registered letter, etc, have been raised by 75 to 100 per cent. The explanation offered for increasing the burden on the poorer sections of society may satisfy a junior accountant’s desire to balance credit and debit statements but is unworthy of any authority that cares for public interest.

Not very long ago post and telegraph (the latter now, alas, deceased) services were justified as the state’s contribution to the promotion of education and the dissemination of information. Postal tariff could only be revised in the annual budget and it was not easy to increase the postal envelope price by even a paisa. The charges on the postal dispatch of books, magazines and newspapers were kept to the minimum.

Today the state does not want to promote knowledge. Book post charges were raised some time ago and nobody even took notice of the protests made by publishers. Now the charge on newspapers and magazines has been doubled. The issue is not whether the increase is bearable or whether it is unbearable (though for many struggling publications it is certainly unbearable), the issue is the state’s refusal to pay a small price for demonstrating its commitment to the ideal of a knowledgeable and informed society.

The Nisar Baloch murder, the refusal to protect poorer schoolchildren, the increased levy on the dying art of letter-writing and flow of information throw up the image of a state that cannot be described as a responsible entity. The people who should have been at the centre of the state’s concerns have been progressively marginalised. Many of them look no better than corpses in search of their graves.