Where is the amn?

Saturday is when it all became clear: there the security segregation in Karachi came crumbling down even before the façade of an amn rally had concluded. That the irony of the location chosen for the amn rally being among the safest in town is not lost on anyone but the tragedy was the unabashed but craftily manufactured perception of everyone being friends. They are all lying to us.

The areas of Defence and Clifton were once considered relatively safe to live in, partly because they are run by a cantonment board and partly because the city’s elite live there. Most newspapers even reported on how residents of these areas were either inconvenienced by the volume of traffic or too scared at the sight of men on motorbikes. These are areas that know little about the violence in the rest of the city since it isn’t really where the turf wars are being played out.

Noises from the PPP are that the MQM will soon rejoin the government. By the time this article goes into print, it might already have. In this rather abusive relationship, however, lies another challenge for political forces: if the killings and violence stops, political forces are to be solely blamed for having converted Karachi into a war zone; if it doesn’t, the role of “external forces” – including but not restricted to foreign elements – cannot be ruled out.

The former puts the onus of all lives lost – over 320 in July alone – on our political representatives. With every body that falls is the stark realisation that all the major political stakeholders in Karachi are essentially patrons of armed groups, their pasts checkered with allegations of corruption now decorated with a badge of wanton violence. That they want to ensure control of their areas, but a “state of equilibrium” is far from being reached at. It is, as yet, nowhere on the horizon as the PPP, ANP and MQM-Haqiqi try and wrestle away their areas from the MQM’s control. No-go areas have appeared again, and law enforcers seek to protect themselves before citizens. Make no mistake, this is a result of the gerrymandering engineered in Karachi by a dictator.

If the killings don’t stop, our democrats have a huge problem.

Before 1971, the idea that religion formed the basis of our identity was the bedrock of our ideology. After 1971, it became ethnicity in the smaller provinces. But ethnicity’s pull of affiliation is shaky too, as Zulfiqar Mirza proved with his portrayal of Afaq Ahmed as a “political prisoner second only to President Asif Ali Zardari.”

That the Urdu-speaking could be manipulated through exploiting the MQM-Haqiqi/ Altaf-Amir sparring was simple to grasp; the extent of it, albeit with support or antagonism from political allies, is difficult to digest. Any semblance of normalcy returns when there is some sort of communication between Asif Ali Zardari, Altaf Hussain, Asfandyar Wali, and lately, Afaq Ahmed. Remove the four from the picture, and there is more violence and bloodshed since our political cultures have not developed enough to move away from a charismatic mode of leadership.

What worries me today is that accommodation or even peaceful coexistence is no longer at the top of any stakeholder’s priority list. With political leaders having little to show in terms of goodwill or meaningful dialogue, there is a clear absence of a plan to bring peace back to Karachi. The same parties that provoke and stoke fires, responsible for the deaths of over 320, continue to revert to ethnicity as their primary source of defence as well as most potent form of offence. Karachi is merely an old hag that remains silent despite being gang-raped.

The amn rally, noble as the intentions of some of its participants, was primarily a mechanism for gaining favourable publicity – something that you and I both hog, because in our small worlds, every statement issued by political parties and every ascribable act committed swings opinion one way or another. Planned by the PPP, it was also to ensure that its support from Lyari could get to the venue and make the event successful. That the others came was just an added bonus.

But the situation for peace cannot be gauged by the success of a rally conducted in the safest locality of the city. While activists marched together for peace, at least 10 more citizens fell. But while ‘10 killed’ is a mere statistic in headlines, for the Karachiite, it is the new normal and what must be lived with. Karachi, after all, takes everything in its stride. We have lost part of our emotion but there is a piece of us that needs saving. Let peace not be another meaningless and hollow word.

The writer is Deputy City Editor, Pakistan Today, Karachi. In Twitterverse, he goes by @ASYusuf.