“Our beloved city of Karachi is dying”, mourns an advertisement by the city’s Committee for Citizen’s Welfare (CCW), “Please hurry [and register with the CCW] or else ‘the deluge’…”. How sad that the citizens of Karachi should have been reduced to advertising (!) for help after being cynically abandoned by the state. How can citizens conceivably fend for themselves against the might of the mafias which hold the city hostage?
Prime minister Benazir Bhutto said some months ago that she would launch a Rs 10 billion package to ‘save’ Karachi. It later transpired that her brilliant media managers had conjured yet another trick to hoodwink the people. The promised package was nothing more than a statistical toting up of all the existing development works in the pipeline, many of which have stalled for one reason or another.
Now we hear that Ms Bhutto intends to launch a Rs 25 billion programme to ‘save’ the city yet again. Where this money is going to come from we don’t know. Certainly, there is no special provision for it in the federal budget. Is the PM, per chance, relying on all the foreign investment she ‘thinks’ is about to wash ashore in Karachi, including a couple of power projects which are on the drawing board?
Karachi is gasping for breath not simply because it is short of money or power or transport, health and educational facilities. These are merely symptoms of the plague. In fact, the city is being strangulated by a vicious nexus of political, bureaucratic, ethnic, sectarian and criminal mafias against which well-intentioned civic bodies like the CCW are helpless. Clearly, more substantial strategies to ‘save’ the city are required.
Many anguished intellectuals have written about Karachi’s plight. Unfortunately, most of the ‘solutions’ offered tend to focus only on economic or bureaucratic remedies to alleviate the disease rather than posit any fundamental measures to root it out. While such actions are welcome, they beg the real issue. How can we postpone the surgery which has now become imperative?
The problem, however, is to find a surgeon willing and able to carry out the operation without further jeopardising the health of the patient. In theory, of course, the only surgeon one can think of is the army. But the army’s track record isn’t terribly good. In 1958 and 1977, the army stepped into the operation theatre, promising to revive the country and ended up injecting poisonous substances into the body politic.
Nonetheless, it should be recalled that the army’s “Operation-Clean-Up” in Sindh during the summer of 1992 did not begin on an altogether unpromising note. If the Nawaz Sharif government had allowed it to continue in an unencumbered and even-handed manner, some definite success might well have come its way. Unfortunately, the short-term political exigencies of government clashed with the longer-term interests of the state and General Asif Nawaz was left high and dry.
When General Abdul Waheed arrived on the scene, the prevailing political mood in the country tended to support the idea of a pull-back to the barracks. Naturally, the hope was that newly elected governments in Islamabad and Sindh would somehow know how to tackle the problem democratically.
Nine months later, the situation is, if anything, bleaker. The PPP and MQM(A) are further apart than ever before. Dacoits have spread all over the province like locusts. MQM mafias have reduced city suburbs to war zones. Rabid mullahs are weighing in with sermons and guns. Extremist Sindhis nationalists are hand in glove with Indian agents. PPP ministers have their hands in the till and bureaucrats are being transferred and posted at whim.
Too little democracy (martial law) in the 1980s, it seems, created the problem of antagonistic communities. Too much democracy since 1988 (three elections) has led to a free-for-all anarchy. Should the search for some sort of middle ground be abandoned?
Some people in government seem to think that a refurbished Mehran Force might help quell the dacoits and restore a semblance of law and order in Sindh. Others are hopeful that bloody infighting within the two factions of the MQM in Karachi will erode their respective strengths and make them amenable to a dialogue. Will this strategy work?
Only insignificantly. The Mehran Force is not as disciplined or motivated as the army. If its control is vested in civilian hands, its efficacy will be further reduced. Attempts should also be made to distinguish between moderate Sindhi and Mohajir opinion from the rest of the extremists on both sides, a task best not left exclusively in PPP hands.
General Asif Nawaz got a raw deal in Sindh from Nawaz Sharif. Understandably, therefore, General Waheed is not inclined to step into his predecessor’s boots. But if Ms Bhutto can be persuaded not to wilt under political pressure like Mr Sharif, there is no reason why General Waheed cannot finish the job Gen Asif Nawaz set out to do. If liberals don’t like the idea of asking the army to “aid civil power”, they should come up with something more concrete than idealistic pleas for greater ‘democracy’.