MONDAY was a spooky day on the streets of Karachi. I had a chance to travel from Abbas Town to the old city area, visit the port and the banks and the Chamber of Commerce building right off I.I. Chundrigar Road.

These were the contrasts that one saw. Abbas Town was swarming with people, media, law enforcement and others driven by morbid curiosity. But Tariq Road and Bahadurabad were tightly shut, and the roads deserted. Even Sharea Faisal was largely deserted at 11am on a Monday morning.

Chundrigar Road had some light traffic, bank head offices were open as were many branches, but many of them were refusing to accept cheques that required clearing.

The stock market was not only open, but kept its nerve, closing only 50 odd points down. The money markets actually strengthened slightly, and government bond yields fell ever so slightly, an indication of confidence in the debt-servicing capacity of the government.

The industrial areas were tightly shut. No labour could show up to work since transport stayed off the roads completely. All day we saw not a single bus. In previous strikes, transporters would often ply a few buses in spite of the danger, and usually later in the day some activity would begin to return.

Not this time. All production remained closed throughout the day and it was genuinely spooky to see the streets of Jodia Bazaar so totally deserted, with only an occasional pedestrian, a stray vehicle here and there, a few policemen.

In many alleys of the old city, we saw large teams of youngsters noisily playing cricket, taking advantage of the emptiness to vent some youthful energy. The noise of their game echoed off the shuttered shops all around, occasionally creating a loud clang whenever the ball struck the metal of the shop shutters.

A few markets were open though. Just off Tariq Road, for instance, we saw a small cluster of shops defiantly selling milk and serving tea and samosas and operating their “cheap stores” of daily use items.

“My expenditures don’t go on strike”, one shopkeeper told us when we asked him why he had defied the strike call, when around the corner from him the entire market was shut. “Three days out of every week there is a strike call in this city,” he continued. “It’ll be impossible to make a living if one obeyed each time. Yes the incident is a big and terrible one, but how does shutting down other people’s livelihoods help anyone?”

The Chamber of Commerce agreed with this view. We met up with the soft-spoken president of the Chamber in his office, where a large screen showed live images of the massive funeral of the victims of this terrible massacre. The cries of “Labaik ya Hussain” coming from the screen filled the office.

“Of course this is a terrible incident, of course there should be a response,” he told us in a measured voice. “But strikes have no outcome, they don’t produce anything that helps the situation.”

This view finds many takers in the business community. It’s a pragmatist’s approach. One view says that if a terrible tragedy has occurred, it is wrong and insensitive to go on with business as usual.

But the other view says the response should be in a form that is of some help to the victims, that helps bring about greater security in the future, that does more than simply register impotent indignation.

Those who hold the first view, that strikes are a way of showing solidarity and expressing our anger at the government’s failure to provide security, need to understand that in this case, the government in fact joined the strike call. The first call for a general strike came from the Shia religious establishment, and from there it was supported by the MQM and then the government of Sindh.

When the government itself is supporting the strike call, clearly the whole exercise cannot be about sending a message of indignation. So we’re left with the solidarity argument.

But does shutting down millions of livelihoods really create solidarity? Is there genuine solidarity in shutting down schools? How does the conduct of our foreign trade deny anyone their grief, or minimise the suffering of those who lost their homes and loved ones in the terrible tragedy that hit Abbas Town on Sunday?

It was strange to see the street economy of Karachi shut down so comprehensively. The port, the industrial zones, the largest bazaars of the country that process most of our non-oil imports all looked like the set of an abandoned movie on Monday.

But what purpose was served by it? Is the government shamed into acting against the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi as a result?

I suppose one could argue that passions were too fired up in the city to risk the large-scale turnouts and mingling that accompanies the conduct of daily business.

But then isn’t a precedent set? Because once the principle has been established that the city should close down to show solidarity, then everyone starts demanding these closures, and you have a situation where “three days out of a week” there is a strike call of some sort by somebody and whatever solidarity there is begins to wither away as people become fed up.

I don’t know what the right public response is to the tragedy that hit our lives on Sunday. But personally I’m fed up with the token pieties, with the strikes, with the impotence of the government.

It would be better if the government showed its ability to shut down not the livelihoods of millions, but the networks of the few as a response to the growing power of armed hate-mongers in our society. The people’s solidarity will find its own voice through it all.

The writer is a Karachi-based journalist covering business and economic policy.

khurram.husain@gmail.com Twitter: @khurramhusain