Old style ethnic violence involved physical clashes between communities. This is not what we witnessed in Karachi. Sniper fire by trained political activists. Kidnapping and torture of and by students affiliated to the PPP and the MQM. Administrative aggression. This was Clauswitz’s “continuation of politics by other means”. This was political violence pure and simple.
It is not a violence we can afford. Most people recognise this. So the President has called for an All Parties Conference (APC) to discuss the law and order problem. In its implicit declaration that political violence requires a political solution, President Ishaq’s proposal is to be welcomed. Yet there are aspects of the President’s request that demand scrutiny.
First, there is a worrying lack of definition. Amid all the acclamation for the President’s statement it may seem niggardly to ask: what is an All Parties Conference? The last one was in 1988 over Afghanistan, and that was little more than a briefing. By telling us that an APC is when politicians “sit together and talk in an atmosphere of accommodation and understanding,” he has told us nothing. Who is to be invited? Will the Sindhi nationalists, without representation in parliament yet with great power on the streets, be at the meeting? Who will set the agenda?
Second, Karachi is not an Afghanistan or a Kashmir. National unity in the face of a possible external threat is an obligation on politicians. But an absolute demand for national unity on internal issues is a threat to democratic government. The President, in his address at Sibi, seemed to desire that the nation’s polity “speak with one voice on any problem of national importance”. One newspaper the next day gushed that we should convene an APC “whenever a crisis crops up”. If this is how the President’s words are to be interpreted, then they strike at the notion of a government sovereign through parliament. No wonder politicians have been wary of accepting the President’s proposal.
But this is not to deny that national consensus is a good thing, and there are many issues that cry out for agreement between our warring politicians, the demand for the convening of a CCI not least among them. Is the violence of Karachi amenable to such an approach?
Despite the lack of information on how the APC is to be constituted we can be sure that the COP will be sitting across the table from the PPP. This is the COP which has said: “the government which massacres its own people [in Karachi] has no right to rule”. And this is the PPP whose interior minister has threatened strict action against Altaf Hussain and the MQM for the killings of innocent people.
The rhetoric is harsh, the reality harsher. The government is locked in a bitter struggle for supremacy with the opposition. It is a battle in which Karachi is but a pawn. We have said that the COP will not rest until it has seen the back of Ms Bhutto. This remains true. They are not going to give the PPP the propaganda coup of peace in Sindh.
So if consensus is not to be sought from the politicians resident in Islamabad, where are we to look? There is, of course, only one place to look, and that is to Karachi itself. No solutions can or will come from outside. The government of Qaim Ali Shah must start the long process of winning back the trust of the MQM, lost through so many promises broken by the PPP with an attitude amounting to contempt. The MQM must say no to the siren calls of the COP and rid itself of its delusions of national grandeur. These two parties are going to have to live with one another come what may. It is only they who can bring peace to Karachi.