The Mutahidda Qaumi Movement wants to purge Pakistan of all weapons; I want to be Pope. Legitimate but improbable. Pigs dont fly, as a rule, and when they are made to, as one was in Stephen Dobyns short story A Happy Vacancy, they tend to tumble from the sky and kill Jason W Plover, a poet with six books.
I love books and guns and some unmentionables but despite the love for guns have never had the desire to go out and kill people. And for all the decades I have handled guns, I have never seen my gun walking out and killing someone. Thats called self-indulgence and only man (and man here is gender-neutral) is capable of it, though high-school boys are usually more self-indulgent for reasons that I may not list here.
Its somewhat boringly banal and un-Aristotelian: guns dont kill, people do. In other words, my gun needs me to pull the trigger before it would do what it is meant to: fire a shot. It needs me to point it at someone and fire it in order for the projectile to kill.
But yes, the MQM has a point given how many people are pulling the triggers to kill others. So, one can argue that if those who want to kill are deprived of the means to kill, they wont be able to. Reasonable, but superficial. Cain didnt have a gun but still killed Abel. The only point that can be granted to this argument is that a killer will be able to kill more if he has an MG or an assault rifle than if he were wielding a knife or a machete. But then how many Tutsis were killed by Hutus using farm implements and machetes?
The other thing about organised violence among groups, Karachi being a case in point, relates to interests. Karachis violence has several layers but one commonality: turf war. Groups are armed because they distrust each other. That reminds me of what Salvador de Madariaga, once chairman of the League of Nations Disarmament Commission, wrote about the direction of causality. I shall insert the word groups where he wrote nations:
The trouble with disarmament was (and still is) that the problem of [violence] is tackled upside down and at the wrong end … Groups don’t distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. And therefore to want disarmament before a minimum of common agreement on fundamentals is as absurd as to want people to go undressed in winter. Let the weather be warm, and they will undress readily enough without committees to tell them so.
One can prove this. For instance, would the MQM unilaterally deposit all categories of weapons in its possession to kick off this process? I doubt it. Reason: the MQM is armed, like other groups, because it distrusts them. And the other groups are armed because they distrust the MQM and one another.
My point is not that this country should remain awash with all categories of small arms and light weapons, collectively referred to as SALW. The illicit possession of SALW and the availability of ammo, as also explosives, have served to exacerbate the situation and there is need to regulate the possession and distribution of these weapons. But the proliferation is owed to fault-lines among groups and disagreement over fundamentals of political and social interaction, not the other way round. The fault-lines are not caused by SALW proliferation.
Heres another example. Even if civilians are prohibited from carrying weapons, law enforcement personnel in certain circumstances are still required to possess them. The Punjab governor was killed by a man in his own security detail who was entrusted with a weapon by the state. He did it because he believed in a supra-state ideology. Such is the nature of fault-lines.
But of course, the MQM is broadly right that the state needs to check the proliferation of illicit SALW. Having worked at one time on SALW proliferation in the run-up to the United Nations conference on the issue in June/July 2001, I can assure the MQM that the problem is very complex and multi-layered. I have not seen the draft bill submitted by the party in the National Assembly and Senate but I do hope they have studied the UNDP How to Guide on Small Arms and Light Weapons Legislation and also worked their way through literature generated since the 2001 UN conference and the 2006 review conference.
The most important first step is information collection. The last time I checked the Interior Ministry did not even have correct statistics on the number of permits it had issued for prohibited bore weapons. These are weapons that are supposed to be traceable. Imagine the degree of difficulty in collecting info on illicit weapons. Additionally, the last two attempts at de-weaponisation were frustrated by Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa that cited cultural reasons for possession of personal weapons.
If the MQM is really serious about the issue and not merely out to score political points, it should aim for what is doable and can, and will, be enforced rather than demanding taking sweeping measures. Also, there is existing legislation, though outdated, but which can be built on. Legislation is important but equally crucial is the states ability to enforce its legal regime. Our problems, quite often, spring not from lack of laws, but the inability or reluctance to enforce those laws.
And that inability or reluctance has several reasons and I dare say the MQM knows how to prevent the government(s) from doing the right thing. It has been as much a part of this game as other political actors.
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.
