Karachi’s bawdy offerings to the world did not survive for long. But while it lasted, the city swung. In the mid-1970s, Pakistan’s most vibrant city boasted of nightclubs, hotels and bars. Alcohol flowed freely. “We even had the striptease. We had floor shows, belly dancers. Karachi was full of life,” recounts Tony Tufail wistfully. Chasing a dream to make his tortured city the new Beirut after Lebanon hurtled towards a civil war, Tufail, hotelier, impresario and business mogul, ran nightclubs and picked up his dancing girls from Paris and Lebanon. Then he got more daring and built a gigantic casino on the beach. By the time it was ready, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was dead, and Ziaul Haq politely refused to give permission to begin its operations.
“We were free (once),” sighs Tufail.
Tufail is one of the many people who bring Karachi to life in Steve Inskeep’s Instant City, a gripping exploration of an overpopulated and febrile megacity in one of the world’s most troubled nations. Using the 2009 bomb attack on a Shia religious procession that killed dozens of people and led to more violence as a leitmotif, Inskeep investigates the vicissitudes of a complex city in what is easily one of the most gripping and brilliantly researched books of the year. Like most instant cities, Karachi is at once a favoured destination and an emerging dystopia. On the face of it, it even looks promising. It has thriving businesses, a seaport with a gateway to Central Asia, an expansive beach, and diverse people. Look closer, Inskeep suggests, and you see an enervating city of over 13 million people with fault lines like no other, at once diverse and divisive, embracing and deadly. A magnet for migrants – Karachi faced two mass migrations, once during the partition and the next after the 1971 Bangladesh war – the fight for the city’s treasures is an unending one. As with most instant cities, land is at the heart of struggle between politicians, businessmen and gangsters. The city is also, as Inskeep writes, the “destination of pilgrims and home of poor, and a base for makers of buildings and bombs”. Taliban fighters and a thicket of extremists groups find refuge in what some residents wryly call a back office for militants.
In Inskeep’s eloquent and empathetic telling, Karachi is a surreal city. It is a city which reels under massive power cuts, but where the rich play night golf under blazing generator-power lights. It is a place where the rhythm of death plays as incessantly as that of life, with several hundreds of people dying every year in spasms of political killings while soldiers and security guards watch over the powerful. It is a metropolis where smugglers turn community leaders turn realtors turn politicians – a familiar story in the subcontinent; where half of the residents live in the “realm of the extralegal”; and where over 500 illegal neighbourhoods house about 2.5 million people.
As Inskeep investigates the bombing of the Shia procession, he finds that Karachi is fighting the same demons as the rest of Pakistan – 90 percent of its people share the same faith that masks the great diversity and deep divisions. The deadly battle over ethnicity and turf between the Mohajir-dominated Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a party carved out entirely of a refugee identity, and the Pasthun-dominated Awami National Party is just one of them. Hundreds are also murdered in sectarian wars between the Sunnis and Shias.
But Karachi is also filled with bravehearts, who work tirelessly to prevent the collapse of a city where the state appears to have withered away. Take, for example, Abdul Sattar Edhi, a simple-living 85-year-old migrant, who runs the ubiquitous Edhi ambulance service and has seen his city descend into a spiral of violence. Or Perween Rahman, who directs one of the world’s most challenging slum development works in Korangi and offers some clues to the future of Karachi. She shows Inskeep maps of land being gobbled up by brazen encroachment by politicians in cahoots with authorities. So Rahman herself becomes the state within a state, helping dwellers to lay sewers themselves.
So how do you fix Karachi? Inskeep says the city should protect its feisty press, strengthen law and order, and embrace its tradition of religious and ethnic diversity. A failure to engage with its reasonably rich diversity – despite the exodus of Hindus – is destroying it. Karachi, clearly, is a microcosm of Pakistan’s many battles for its soul.
