With Karachi burning again, governance of the city is at the centre of all meetings being held to broker peace in our city by the sea. One of the plans being deliberated upon, consultations over which started when MQM’s Mustafa Kamal was still in power, is an elaborated form of the five-district scheme, albeit one that has a greater number of union councils.
Essentially, Karachi would be divided into districts South, West, East, Central and Malir. A sixth district council would be constituted for areas such as Gadap Town and Bin Qasim Town. The five districts as well as the district council are to have a chairperson and a vice-chairperson. The number of union councils, for both urban and rural, is to increase from 178 to 223. The entire set up is to be managed by a central mayor and a deputy mayor.
The old system, PPP argues, was devoid of inclusivity or accountability. The tenure of the Mustafa Kamal-led city government set-up was marked by the construction of signal-free corridors and roads, a blueprint for development later replicated in Punjab as well. The policy was in fact initiated by Jamaat-e-Islami’s Naimatullah Khan, elected to the post of City Nazim because the MQM had boycotted local government elections in 2001. The grander schemes, however, came under the MQM’s tenure and the party was quick to lap up all the praise for having given Karachi a facelift.
The construction, or rehabilitation, of some roads was overdue; with the bureaucracy in power, the scope of Karachi’s development never did match the pace at which the city grew. It might not even be a stretch to suggest that the elected local governments, both under the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Naimatullah Khan and MQM’s Mustafa Kamal, rehabilitated infrastructure that had been left to rot and wither by bureaucrats ever since the time Farooq Sattar was the mayor of the city.
Yet, with the obvious also came the disturbing. Scores of Baloch, Sindhi and Seraiki were removed from their abodes and traditional goths destroyed for the construction of the Lyari Expressway, a road that connected one end of the city to the other. Many of the displaced were promised compensation money to find alternative housing; most are still undergoing litigation in the Sindh High Court over either not being adequately compensated or not being paid at all.
Another project, the Signal Free Corridor (SFC)-III, linked Gulistan-e-Jauhar with Saddar, the commercial hub of the city. Urdu-speaking people had to be removed from their abodes for the purpose. But critics argued that those displaced were settled in Mehmoodabad, an area where the MQM-backed panel had lost elections by a couple of hundred votes. The place where they were settled belonged to the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board, an institution that fell under the jurisdiction of the City District Government Karachi. The land was reserved for a sewage treatment plant, and despite court orders to the contrary, a new colony was constructed.
For opponents of the MQM, therein lies the problem: the former city government, they claim, overruled any and all orders that challenged the MQM’s plan. The City Council, the legislative arm of the city government, could pass a budget for the city without ever seeing the benefits of the system being translated to the union council level. In turn, that would affect the constituencies and vote bank of all parties but the MQM. Development, they claim, took place only in areas where the MQM was in majority.
The MQM, on its part, argues that all power should rest with the authority of the mayor – an elected representative of the people. It is the mayor who formulates larger plans of a mega city such as Karachi; in fairness, concepts such as solid waste management and even provision for potable water for all residents were introduced during Mustafa Kamal’s tenure. The implementation of these schemes, however, remains a separate matter. On the level of the union councils, the MQM stands to gain if the number of union councils is increased since it gets to deepen and broaden its influence among its areas of influence.
The issue of districts too is contentious: for the MQM, creation of Malir as a separate district in the early 1990s was to ensure that the PPP’s support base remained intact. There are also murmurs that Lyari, PPP’s traditional stronghold, will be carved into a separate district; the premise being used is that District South is enormous in terms of area and Lyari is the most underdeveloped place in the entire district. In 2001, Lyari also lost its revenue generation areas to Saddar Town when the town boundaries of the city were being drawn. The MQM claims that this argument should then be applied to the rest of the city as well, including Malir, so that area no longer qualifies as the characteristic that defines a district.
Beyond the empty rhetoric and deeds of meetings, more meetings, search operations, even deweaponisation, what remains a constant is disrespect for particular constituencies and support a party enjoys in that electorate.
The writer is Deputy City Editor, Pakistan Today, Karachi. In Twitterverse, he goes by @ASYusuf.
I must say the author of this report has analysed the situation extremely well.
He is quite right that Nematullah was the planner of the development work and infact intitated construction of roads and flyovers. Remember Nematullah did not have that much support from the government as MK had. Nematullah had no gigantic propaganda machinery as MK had . In fact the goebbels worked overtime to portray MK as best mayor in the whole universe – a superman and super mayor. The journal to which MQM was referring to came out denying the claims made by MQM.
I agree that MK with support of Musharraf government demolished numerous old traditional sindhi villages commonly known as goths. The inhabitants were displaced and left at the mercy of nature.
Coming to the flyovers and roads constructed in his regime, one could easily discern rickety construction and few of them collapsed. No one knows how much was spent on these flyovers and subways. The City Nazim was not answerable to the auditors. Brilliant. Isn't it?
His style was arrogant. He was abrasive and did not hide his feelings that MQM could destabilise the situation and thereby creating the situation in which would lead to collapse of the democratic government. He did not pay any attention to the areas like Lyari and Malir. The times have changed. The City of Karachi has been restored to districts which will free these districts from clutches of Nine Zero.
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