LAST Sunday, this newspaper carried a memorial notice to honour the memory of Dr Muhammad Saleem Chaudhry who was gunned down in his car earlier this year. I was in London when the murder took place, but read about it on the Internet.
Since then, the victim’s family has been shuttling between the offices of various police officers and city officials, trying to galvanize and shame them in pursuing the investigations. Thus far, they have been unsuccessful in their quest for justice. The message in the memorial notice read: “We are sorry we have not been able to get the brutal culprits to law, but the eternal candle of honesty and bravery that you have lit will show us the way to justice.”
Dr Saleem’s widow and daughter came to see me a few weeks ago, and asked me to write about the inaction thus far shown by the police. As gently as I could, I told them that as far as I know, my writing has never had any effect on anybody in power. And my experience with the entire law and order machinery in Pakistan has certainly not given me any grounds for optimism.
I never met the murdered principal of Dawood Engineering College, but I had heard good things about his efforts to clean out that moribund institution. Apparently, he had stepped on a lot of toes, both within the corrupt college administration and its entrenched students union. Who actually pulled the trigger, and who paid for the hit remains a mystery, although the family has strong views on who was behind the crime.
A possible key to the whole affair is the whereabouts of Dr Saleem’s driver. Soon after the murder, he was allowed by the investigating officers to leave Karachi for his village in the Frontier. Now, the police say that without his presence, they cannot proceed further. And here the matter rests, much to the family’s chagrin and frustration.
As I told Mrs Saleem, it is extremely rare for our police to actually find the culprits in crimes like these. For reasons that remain unclear to me (despite trying to find out from my many senior police officer friends), we still do not make use of fingerprints and photo archives. These techniques have been around for a century in other police departments, and do not cost very much. But they do require organisational changes, something our police administration is averse to.
While the entire country suffers from an unending crime wave, Karachi is the epicentre of violent crime. Day in and day out, newspapers carry a litany of every kind of felony. From murder, kidnapping and rape, the gamut runs to car lifting and armed robberies. No area is exempt, and criminals are seldom apprehended. And on the rare occasion when they are, they are promptly released on bail to continue their criminal spree.
Four weeks ago, six armed robbers broke into our family house shortly before dawn, and helped themselves to whatever caught their fancy at gunpoint. My mother, a relative and an old friend went through this ordeal on their own as the robbers did not come upstairs to my flat where I was sleeping. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, and my 85-year-old mother laughed off the incident.
The reason I am bringing this up is that during the course of the day, I spent some time at the nearby Ferozabad Police Station in registering the First Information Report. First of all, let me say that thanks to my friends in high places, there was no problem in filing the FIR, unlike the hassle other citizens are subjected to. But while I was at the police station, I noticed that in the last 23 years, the Station House Officer had been changed no fewer than 47 times. In some years, there had been as many as three changes.
Needless to report, I have heard nothing about any developments in the case, nor do I expect to. The only change in our lives has been the raising of our boundary wall. The last time the wall was raised was about ten years ago when we were subjected to a similar armed robbery. But that time, Haroon Jan, our childhood friend, was knifed. Then, as now, there was no question of anybody getting caught.
I brought up these personal experiences while talking to Mrs Saleem, just to prepare her mentally for failure in her quest to nail the murderers. Basically, our police force’s primary task is to protect the state and its high officials. In this scheme of things, citizens are very low in the priorities fixed by the police. Indeed, this is an odd kind of protection racket: we taxpayers pay the police’s salary and dish out the bribes, but the state and its senior minions get all the protection.
Last year, the World Bank produced a report on what kind of investment climate attracted capital, and law and order was high on the list of desirable elements. The report says that in South Asia, there could be 20 per cent more investment if crime is controlled. I am sure the figure for Karachi is closer to 50 per cent. Ever since the crime wave that began in the mid-eighties, many industries and corporate headquarters have moved out of Karachi. Fresh capital is much more likely to go to Punjab.
This has further exacerbated unemployment and led to greater criminality as jobless young men turn to crime. And once they start, there’s no turning back, for no straight job would get them the kind of money they earn from holding up banks, robbing homes and stealing cell phones. Before this tidal wave of crime, the police are helpless bystanders. Indeed, they are often behind many of today’s crimes.
Sitting in Islamabad where such stories reach them as distant rumours, our leaders boast about our rapid progress and our healthy macroeconomic indicators. Whenever our president and prime minister visit Karachi to address a bunch of well-heeled corporate types, talk about crime does not raise its ugly head. They don’t ask such uncomfortable questions, and our governor and chief minister certainly do not volunteer this information.
But despite this depressing picture, I am glad Mrs Saleem and her family are pursuing the case. Perhaps their persistence will prompt a police officer with a remaining spark of professionalism to reopen the investigation.