There are smartphones in Peshawar as well

Several years ago, a couple of video clips made it to the airwaves. Clips of police brutality within police stations somewhere. These clips weren’t from major cities but somewhere within the boondocks. There was much outrage, as there should have been.

Then some more videos made their way to the newsrooms and the same exercise was repeated. Soon, a deluge of these videos. The Chinese economy had only recently made smartphones affordable and, surprised that there was actually a demand for such content, people everywhere started sending in these videos to TV channels.

This had diminishing returns, however. The stations by then had so much of such clips that they wouldn’t have been able to show anything else at all. So they stopped showing the stuff, not for lack of content, but for abundance of other stuff.

That is the problem with certain types of crowd-sourced vigilance. There would be too much of it. In certain areas of public life, yes, it could be a good tool. In others, it might be problematic.

Take the #fixit campaign in Karachi run by an Alamgir Khan. It is admirable that the fellow is doing his thing. There is much apathy in government departments and there is a need to shake things up.

Now the fellow’s style might have appeared jarring to some, and when he came near the CM’s office, where he emptied some trash into a “symbolic dustbin”, the law finally caught up and took him to task. For littering, amongst other things, which, strictly speaking, he was. This, coupled with allegations (and videos) that some of his campaign members remove manhole covers and also pass those manholes off as government incompetence, caused a bit of a rough patch for him recently.

Released on bail of five thousand rupees, he gave a rousing speech and said that the chief minister (who probably didn’t even know the fellow was arrested) has brought some trouble unto himself.

Now, the fellow seems to be a PTI supporter. I say this not because he comes across as a smug, cocksure rich youngster but because he thanked three PTI leaders after being released and his display photo on Twitter is a photo-op with Imran Khan.

The course of action for the other side i.e., the Sindh government, should be to spur things up in the municipal corporations, not just in Karachi but the rest of Sindh’s cities. And the best course of action for the PPP, the political party that runs the Sindh government, would be to start a similar campaign in Peshawar. Regardless of what you’ve been led to believe, if Qaim Ali Shah seems sluggish, Pervez Khattak is positively lethargic.

Back when he was the irrigation minister in the ANP’s ’08-’13 government in KP, the Peshawar High Court had ordered a clean-up of the canal that runs around and within the walled city. The once beautiful canal was thick with sludge and filth. Khattak didn’t oblige. In fact, the state of the canal remained the same by the time he took oath as CM. Another thing that also remained the same was his key bureaucrat; the former irrigation secretary was now his principal secretary.

It is only when the open manholes of Peshawar are also emblazoned with multiple stencils of Pervez Khattak’s visage that the PTI might request its young follower to cease and desist.

The problem with the governments’ little inefficiencies: there are too many of them. A letter signed by the Swabi Nazim is doing the rounds on social media where the fellow has been asking the government for several months now to fix a ditch in a road, one that won’t require more than Rs5,000 to fix. The Nazim obviously wrote the letter as a symbolic gesture showing the toothlessness of the post that he has been elected to. And also of the inertia of KP government departments.

*****

Crowd-sourced vigilance is an effective tool for very local areas. And police brutality, whether or not it gets airtime, should be recorded. Such a case in Narowal might not be broadcast on national TV, but can get big enough on local cable TV and the Narowal-based social media pages to cause the DPO, Nazim, MNA and MPA enough discomfort to make heads roll.

Open manholes, on the other hand, are a dicey problem for a person allied with (or emotionally invested in) a political party. You can dish it out, but can you take it?