Some days ago, two young men walked into the Karachi office of architect Naved Husain, pumped bullets into him and left him for dead. Naved, thank God, has survived. But how many others like him will be so lucky?
Naved’s “crime” is that he is a member of Shehree — an NGO of decent, law abiding citizens who are braving the mafia which has ravaged the urban landscape of Karachi. A week earlier, the head of the KESC was assassinated by the mafia which has plunged the city into darkness. Several senior police and administration officials, including their children, and hundreds of policemen, have been gunned down by the MQM mafias in Karachi and by Sunni mafias in Punjab. And so it unravels.
The ground for the ethnic mafias was prepared by General Zia ul Haq when he sought to block the PPP’s return to power, especially in Sindh, in the early 1980s. As the Afghan war gathered momentum, and arms were freely brought into Pakistan by the Afghans, the nexus between the Afghan war and the MQM was duly firmed up. MQM terrorists also set up base in the NWFP because the province was an easy pipeline for all kinds of weapons and explosives systems.
The sectarian mafias also owe their rise to General Zia. The Shias, it may be recalled, clashed with General Zia when the dictator tried to impose Zakat on the community. General Zia hit back by making a significant concession to the anti-Shia, Sunni mujahideen of the NWFP when he gave them the green light to eliminate the Shias of Parachinar (Mohmand Agency) so that Shia territory could be used for better penetration into Afghanistan. The Shias of Pakistan, it may be recalled, were not actively involved in the Afghan ‘jehad’, mainly because the Shias of Afghanistan had decided to keep out of it. Nor, indeed, have Shia formations been involved in the Kashmir ‘jehad.
General Zia’s attempt to impose a Sunni state in Pakistan and in Afghanistan eventually pitted him against Imam Khomeini. The Iranians were therefore compelled to denounce General Zia by stoking the growth of Shia militias. This, in turn, provoked the Sunni Saudis to aggressively deal themselves into the game. After the Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen government in exile in Peshawar and its ISI ‘handlers’ were bribed by Riyadh to keep the Iran-based Shia formations out of the power-equation in Afghanistan.
The origins of the police mafias of today can be traced to the property-grabbing or ‘kabza’ mafias in Punjab and elsewhere during the 1988-90 rift between Benazir Bhutto’s federal government and Nawaz Sharif’s Punjab government. The chief minister’s relatives were involved in grabbing property on a large scale. Therefore the Punjab government fought with the federal government in an attempt to retain police officers who were ready to do its bidding. When, eventually, the chief minister was compelled to surrender a number of federal police officers to Islamabad, he immediately waived the rules to induct hundreds of officers of his own choice into the Punjab police. The ASIs inducted into the police during this time were, by and large, individuals of dubious reputation. Meanwhile, the federal officers who remained loyal to the chief minister began to accumulate power and form mafias of their own in order to enrich themselves and their benefactors in parliament. This kind of thing also happened during the reign of Jam Sadiq in Sindh where the war against the PPP devolved a lot of power into the hands of police officers who were used by the likes of Irfanullah Marwat, a son-in-law of President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, to create criminal bases of their own.
If Karachi’s criminal mafias grew up under the umbrella of the MQM and the ‘jehad’ in Afghanistan, the militias fighting the Kashmir war grew up under the aegis of the old ISI. All these groups have now developed their own criminal gangs to rob and kill in order to maintain themselves. The police and the ISI have therefore sometimes ended up working at cross-purposes. When the police wants to denounce the dacoities committed in Pakistan by the various mujahideen groups jehading in Kashmir, it has to contend with an ISI which is committed to saving them from being apprehended. The ‘superior’ morality of the ‘jehad’ against India has thereby overcome the civic morality which wants to outlaw criminal behaviour. The jehadi militias indulging in crime are armed with an ideology that considers democracy to be an alien system and regards Pakistan as a state which has reneged on its commitment to Islam.
Most criminals belonging to the militias avow that they have no sense of guilt. Defiance of the writ of the state on such a large scale, coupled with the proliferation of arms, has bred a new common criminal who commits violent crime and believes in killing during the crime so that no witnesses are left.
The “ideological” state has gone bankrupt. The “democratic” system has degenerated into Mafiadom. And common citizens of this country are paying for these failures with their blood. Where will all this end? Who will cast the first stone?