There is no rhyme to it but plenty of reasons. The violence that has engulfed Karachi in the past few days is, unfortunately, a familiar script. We all know how it plays out. There is one incident and then the dominoes start falling, one after the other.
The politics of ethnicity have entrenched itself to an extent in the city that all day-to-day concerns are now mitigated by them. Karachi just doesn’t vote ethnic; it lives ethnic. Group solidarity and ethnicity-based networks in Karachi are ways (sometimes, the only way) to access something as small as the admission of your child to school to something like registering an FIR or buying land in a city where the criminal gangs of the land mafia are perpetuators of much violence. The battle lines have literally been drawn in Karachi in every step of life.
Everybody in the city needs to wake up to the fact that Karachi is a heterogeneous polity and staking claim on the city on the basis of ethnicity is no longer tenable. No amount of rabta or aman committee meetings will solve anything unless they are backed by a genuine political will to solve the conflict. Hackneyed, but that’s all there is to offer.
AMNA AQEEL
Karachi