The buck stops where?

The first time I read Ardeshir Cowasjee was in ninth grade when my dad started bringing printouts of his articles home for me (we didn’t have a computer, and Pakistani papers weren’t available outside the country at the time). Over the years, while I’ve disagreed with much of his analysis, which had increasingly seemed to stem from personal, rather than political, grievances, one of his lines stuck with me: ‘Sub s**** chor hai’, he had once said in the way that only Cowasjee can.
One could dismiss his words as a generalisation, but the recent events in Karachi would make it very difficult to do so. While cyclical bouts of violence have become a permanent feature of the city since December 2008, the situation has begun to get increasingly dismal since July this year. Not just because of the sheer scale and volume of bloodshed (which is immense), but also because of the fact that all of the major political players in the city seem to be fanning this violence for petty, short-term point-scoring. Madness reached a crescendo between Thursday and Friday, when more than 70 people ended up dead and many others injured. What had begun as politically-motivated ‘targeted’ killings has now enveloped the entire population of the city. Over the past week, scores of passenger buses were set on fire, burning alive adults and children alike; and gunny bags containing the remains of people were recovered from several areas of the city. The victims weren’t just murdered – they were tortured brutally before being killed. In some cases, perhaps the torture led to their deaths; we can never know for sure, because given the state of forensics services in the country, and the fact that the victims were ‘nameless nobodies’, no one has bothered with autopsies yet. The bodies lie in the various mortuaries of the city – some headless, some with hands or feet or both chopped off, some with missing ears, others with eyes gouged out – waiting to be claimed and given a decent burial by loved ones.
Among the victims was a rickshaw driver I knew; he was kidnapped from Shah Faisal Colony. His body ended up in a gunny bag in Shadman Town a few days later. His hands and feet were nowhere to be found. He left behind a family that now has to grapple simultaneously with at least two losses: that of a loved one, and that of their sole bread-earner. Similarly, most other victims – those who have been identified – had no overt political affiliations; they were merely going about the business of earning a living, battling rising inflation, and trying to making ends meet.
Political forces in the city, meanwhile, continue their criminal silence, and in some cases, complicity via covert or overt support for the perpetrators of violence. The MQM rank and file refuses to grow up, and has constantly been trying to fan tensions by falsely claiming that the violence has an ethnic basis. Even a section of the leadership of the party has jumped on to the bandwagon by spreading rumours about how people’s CNICs are being checked before they are killed, and that, only Urdu-speaking people are being targeted. The People’s Amn Committee, which had been set up with the noble aspiration of providing relief to the beleaguered people of Lyari, is now being used as a pawn by PPP’s Zulfiqar Mirza. The latter is also said to be backing the ANP against the MQM. A section of the ANP, meanwhile, is also receiving logistical support from some ‘intelligence’ agencies of the country. The MQM, in turn, is allegedly backing the Arshad Pappu group in Lyari, further fuelling ‘gang-wars’ in the area.
Security forces deployed in the city, on the other hand, are seriously outnumbered and severely unprepared. While the police are ordered to routinely patrol their jurisdictions, they are not told how they are to pay for fuel for patrolling vehicles out of the meagre resources allotted to them. The complete absence of life insurance for personnel on the frontlines, who are armed merely with flak jackets, helmets and a G3 each, also makes their positions sadly laughable.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik is also yet to be cured of verbal diarrhoea. Last week, he had claimed to have everything under control. During a visit to the city a few days ago, he claimed that the media was ‘exaggerating reports of violence’. Going by General Ashfaque Parvez Kayani’s recent statements, meanwhile, the army is chomping at the bits to have a go at Karachi, and thus perhaps pave the way for a ‘Merey aziz humwatno’ type of intervention for the country at large. But an ‘operation’ by a blunt force is not the solution for the madness in Karachi, is it? The problem is purely political, and as such, the solution lies within the realm of politics as well. The easiest way out of the quagmire would be for the powers-that-be to stop using Karachi as a battleground for opportunism, withdraw support for rogue gangs, and resolve their issues at the discussion table. Barring that, one would have no choice but to agree with Cowasjee’s cynical ‘Sub s**** chore hai’ position.

The writer is a researcher and freelance journalist based in Karachi. She generally finds an escape from offline madness in the dark corners of Twitter, where she goes by @UroojZia.