These words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet mirror our politics, politicos and system of governance of today. Violence in Karachi has prompted an unending debate, not only in the city but across the country. The fundamental question that will remain is the absence of rule of law. Today the perception is that the state is doing nothing but fostering hopelessness, despair, hatred, corruption, alienation, extremism, lawlessness and discrimination.
The country faces an economic meltdown. Corruption, insecurity and cronyism rule supreme. Balochistan is on the brink of civil war, and Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and its commercial and industrial centre, is inching towards a kind of civil war itself. It is already a city paralysed and ruled by fear.
It is the wayward policies of successive Pakistani governments over the decades, both civilian and military, which have produced the outcome in the form of the grave countrywide crisis that we face today.
Karachi’s stark reality is that it has become a battleground for political control. Since the 1980s, with the steady arrival of weapons and drugs in this once peaceful city, the level of violence has risen alarmingly, while the provincial and federal governments lacked the political will to curb it. A very uncomfortable political alliance in Sindh has proved to be a recipe for disaster. Today gunmen appear and disappear at will, leaving behind death and the scent of gunpowder, and thus emphasise the absence of the state’s writ.
AROONA ANUM KHAN
Karachi
