THIS is apropos S. Afaq Rizvi’s letter ‘Karachi and Sindh’ (Sept 26).
The writer says it was “the British who established the borders of present-day Sindh in 1937 and made Karachi its capital”. Proper reading of history would show that Karachi’s story starts much earlier than in 1937.
The British started the occupation of Sindh, with Karachi, in 1839, four years before they took Hyderabad.
As is known, it was the Sindh Assembly’s resolution that provided a legal base for the creation of Pakistan. When the new country was born, Sindh, through an act of magnanimity, offered Karachi as its capital and presented its own assembly building for the Constituent Assembly of the nascent state. It is sad that Sindh was ‘rewarded’ for its generosity by separation of Karachi in 1948.
However, Sindhis never gave up and their struggle to break the infamous One Unit succeeded in 1970 when Karachi was reunited with Sindh and made its capital again.
Port cities attract diverse population but their identity is never in question.
London is considered as the centre of the world. It attracts people not only from the constituent units of the United Kingdom (Scotland, Ireland, Wales) but the whole world. Still London is recognised, and called, an English city. No separate ‘Mandate of London’ is claimed, as we hear for Karachi now and then.
As regards the quota system, it is now history. It was the Muslims of the minority provinces of India under the British Raj who first demanded for, and were obliged with, the quota system. In fact, it was the Muslim majority provinces like Sindh, Punjab and Bengal which suffered under the ‘weightage scheme’, as minorities (Muslims as well Hindus) were awarded more representation than their population ratio compared to the majority community. Hence: ‘Merit stood discarded’.
As regards the ‘sense of deprivation’, it is a universal phenomenon that big cities exploit the hinterland and not the vice versa. If the ‘reward’ for generosity, hospitality and benefaction is ‘division and hatred’, then these higher human values will come under question and certainly lose their true meaning.
Abdul Khalique Junejo
Karachi
Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2018
