THINGS were getting out of control. It seemed as if all departments dealing with the public were left with no choice but to stop working to press for their demands which ranged from improved work conditions to better wages. The students in the city and teachers of private colleges, some of whose members were on a hunger strike, had already made the authorities worried.

Since the teachers had been agitating for quite a while, the issue (apart from their five-point demands mentioned in previous columns) of their unpaid salaries for the past four months had assumed significant proportions. On March 10, 1969 the divisional commissioner of Karachi announced that the government would pay salaries to the teaches of private colleges for two months while for the remaining two months the college managements would be responsible for the same. As per an agreement reached between the commissioner and representatives of the teachers, the fund for two months’ salaries was to be released by March 31.

On March 13, a general strike was called in Liaquatabad to show solidarity with the three students who had completed 120 hours of hunger strike the previous night. The students were demanding compensatory payment for those whose lives and property were affected during the Liaquatabad riots. The decision to go for the general strike was taken at an emergency meeting of the Young Democrats who also chalked out a detailed programme for that particular day.

But the students broke their fast after an assurance given to them that the commissioner of Karachi had asked the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) to seek the government’s approval in respect of the grant for the sufferers of the city’s riot-affected areas, including Liaquatabad. The strike was, therefore, called off.

Now to know the gravity of the situation on the whole, a strike called a few days back by workers (4,000 of them) of the city’s post offices didn’t initially get as much media coverage. But the citizens were getting increasingly anxious about it because their main channel of communication with their loved ones outside the city had been nearly broken. On March 10, dozens of men and women swarmed the post offices in the city to ensure delivery of mail and other articlesas the postal workers’ strike entered its third day. The heaviest push was seen at the General Post Office, which handled mail of the hundreds of business and commercial establishments in and around McLeod Road. People crowded the post office windows and pushed their letters and receipts into the hands of the clerks to get delivery of the mail without losing time. As a result, there was chaos and confusion all around, and many postal articles and letters went into the wrong hands. Heavy rush was also witnessed at the Saddar and city post offices where the staff worked late in the evening. The postal authorities had opened 43 delivery centres in Karachi to facilitate delivery of mail to the public.

Apart from that, the telephone department’s linesmen, nurses of some hospitals and workers of the National Bank of Pakistan, too, had stopped working for certain periods to push for their rights.

Journalists, by the way, were facing the brunt of the situation in equal measure. On March 16, the Executive Council of the Karachi Union of Journalists (KUJ) expressed concern over recent instances in which newsmen and news organisations were subjected to threats and intimidation by various pressure groups. A resolution passed unanimously at the meeting said: “Invariably those threats have been intended to coerce newsmen and news organisations into publishing one-sided accounts of happenings to the exclusion of any other version and departing from objectivity in news coverage. Coercion of this kind constituted an infringement of democracy, freedom of expression and impartiality in the presentation of news. Those persons who have thus sought to exert pressure on the press have unwillingly provided a justification for the government’s policy of suppressing freedom of the press — a policy which almost the entire country has rejected and which the government has now modified to some extent.”

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2019