KARACHI – Young men have begun going around to households in ‘Urdu-speaking areas’ in the city – Nazimabad, North Nazimabad, Sakhi Hasan, Azizabad, Ghareebabad and Liaquatabad among others – claiming to be working on the census process. The problem, however, is that none of them carry government-issued identification, and upon questioning, are revealed to be cadres of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM).
A bigger problem is the fact that they don’t reveal this to households that they visit. They ask the right questions: “Do you rent or own this house”, “How many members are there in your family”, “What’s your ethnicity”, etc, and mark houses, making people believe that they are census department officials, which they are not.
“Yes I have identification papers,” one of them said when confronted, but was unable to produce them. He eventually conceded that he was from the MQM. “But we’re merely helping government officials,” he claimed. “We’re making their jobs easier by doing part of it for them. We don’t want ‘our people’ to be left out of the census, you see.”
Who are ‘their’ people? “All of these are Urdu-speaking people. They are our constituents,” he claimed, adding that it was “the government’s responsibility” to gather data about people from other ethnicities living in the same area. “We were sent by our sector in-charge, but please don’t tell him I told you,” he said.
The sector in-charges concerned, however, denied all knowledge of these goings-on. “You must be mistaken,” several of them told Pakistan Today. “Why would we spend money and resources for this? This is not our job. It is the job of the government department concerned. We don’t interfere in official work.”
The young cadres, meanwhile, had a different story to tell. “This was decided by the Party at the ‘high’ level,” they said. “We’re doing it everywhere. It is important to make sure that ‘our people’ are counted.” In their zeal to follow orders, however, these young men apparently see nothing wrong with impersonating government officials.
Impersonating someone else, they maintain, is wrong only if it is done for ‘the wrong reasons, like robbery’. “What we are doing is beneficial for our people and we are not harming anyone,” they claimed. “As such, we are not doing anything that would be illegal. Why should anyone have a problem with our activities?”
“This way, we’ll have a record through which we can verify data produced by census department officials, so they won’t be able to ‘try anything’,” they said. “You can say that we’re simply watching over the process to make sure it is done right.”
Politicking with numbers
