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VIEW Karachi through the eyes of a dreamer: a metropolis of some 18 million souls, swarming like ants as they go about their daily business, enveloped in a massive, toxic miasma of dust, fumes, and emissions that are thrown up by the churning cogs of the machine.
Zoom in a little and there are the roads being plied by a bewildering array of vehicles: 18-wheelers jockeying for position against two-wheelers, rickshaws, donkey-carts, hand-pushed carts … and an ever-increasing number of cars and jeeps and trucks and vans and wagons and buses.
Every intersection is flooded, and when the light turns red, the vehicles — particularly motorcycles — flow in their momentum past the white line with as much urgency, perhaps, as a wave breaking at the shore: untidy, unruly, and entirely unfettered. Some dart towards the far side, scuttling crab-like through the vehicles now approaching from the perpendicular; others slow down to a halt of sorts, slowly heaving forwards as the hundreds behind them up similarly pile up and apply pressure.
On every side of this boiling mess, horns blare, police mobiles emit ear-splitting wails in the frustration of not being able to part the waters Moses-like, engines roar, and the almost solid ocean of noise is cut with the cries of hawkers and beggars.
They do their best under the most trying conditions.
The traffic in this city is almost entirely lawless, like some deep-sea monster connected to various other colonies of its ilk through a hive mind. In 2015, the Motor Vehicles Inspection and Driving Licence Branch of the Capital City Police, Karachi, told us that a little over 900 new, private vehicles were being added to the city’s roads every single day, and that only 1.2m licences had been issued against the 3.8m registered vehicles then estimated to be plying the city roads. (Aside: the key word here is ‘registered’. This number did not include the uncounted hundreds, possibly thousands, of vehicles that were either unregistered or registered in places other than Karachi.)
That was then. Last month came a new figure, this time from officials of the Anti-Car-Lifting Cell which produced before a Sindh Assembly meeting data regarding the number of vehicles in Karachi and the nature of crimes committed in this context. They quoted the excise and taxation department as saying that some 700 new motorcycles are being registered in the city every single day. It seems that back in 2007, there were nearly 800,000 registered motorcycles in the city; today, there are about three million. And this is not counting other vehicles of the sort listed above, from cars to lorries to vans to buses.
Amidst this churning, seething chaos stand the men in white, puny defenders of the rule of law and order, doing what they can to keep the threatening tsunami at bay. They man the crossings, at the busy ones sometimes three or four men on each leg, braving the impunity and aggression with which law and even plain common sense is flouted, braving the noise, the poisoning pollution, and do what they can to turn the ever-intensifying madness into some semblance of a pattern that works, and lets thousands of vehicles go on their way with as little hindrance as possible.
The police in general and the traffic police specifically have acquired the reputation of corruption, crookedness, and inefficiency. This is not entirely unearned; most of us have been at some point or the other victim to the imagined traffic violation, ending in the not-so-veiled demand for chai pani. The young boys on motorcycles have it the worst. (Yet, how many of us follow the law to the letter? Who isn’t guilty of carrying an expired licence or squeezing through the light just as it turns red.)
Even so, through decades of plying the roads in three major cities of the country, I have become sympathetic to the men in white — doing their best at one of the most thankless of jobs, under the most trying of conditions, facing the daily humiliation of being ridden roughshod by the rich and powerful, and the young and wily, alike. They get a pittance as wage, face serious respiratory illnesses because of pollution (there are a few medical studies about this), and even funds for water or facemasks must come out of their own pockets.
At every major Karachi intersection, you can witness them frequently physically jumping in the way of vehicles in a death-defying attempt to get them to stop. When traffic is smooth, no one thanks them; when its not, they’re the ones being cursed.
The men in white could stand for a metaphor for the Pakistani public in general: holding on, keeping the faith, even when everything around them dictates differently. Just like the citizenry as a whole, the state does not do right by them. Yet in them, those that decry the ‘moral corruption’ of the age, might be able to find some inspiration.
The writer is a member of staff.
Published in Dawn, December 18th, 2017
