Laurent Gayer’s book on Karachi’s “ordered disorder” has quite rightly begun to occupy top billing in any conversation about the city. This is a case of exceptional timing. As Karachi lurches towards another ‘cleansing’ of its problems, the voices that deserve the greatest attention should be given their due. It is no accident that Gayer ends his book with a subtle ode to Perween Rahman. Karachi is the love that kills. It killed Hakim Said. It killed Azeem Ahmad Tariq. It killed Wali Khan Babar. And it killed Perween Rahman.
The toxicity of Karachi is the nectar of not one, but many, many fruits. This is the none-too-pithy conclusion of nearly every sociologist, demographer, political historian and anthropologist that ever takes a second look at the city. The logical consequence of this most trite of observations is that quashing one of those fruits will not yield the ‘normal’ Karachi that so many of us ache and yearn for.
The normative analyses of Karachi necessitate conversations about the MQM. For several years, it’s been clear that the MQM leadership faces serious challenges in managing the delicate balance between its non-violent political legitimacy in Karachi, with the violent criminals upon whom it has relied on for two generations to enforce various codes of behaviour in the city. In simpler terms, it is not easy to keep privileging the MQM spokespersons you see on television, while hiding the MQM thugs that you don’t see. Those thugs have feelings, and financial needs. When squeezed, like any fruit, they make that toxic nectar. And it hurts. All of us.
What is also clear is that the MQM’s fate is mirrored on a much smaller scale by at least two other political actors that have dabbled in criminality over the years. Once upon a time, the PAC was the PPP’s version of ‘those thugs’. They helped retain control in the hands of legitimate, national political leaders. The deconcentration of information through technology, and movies like ‘Shootout at Lokhandwala’ help thugs reimagine their future. And inflation doesn’t help. So when the PPP’s daddies tried to reign in the puppies, the puppies turned into ferocious Rottweilers. Uzair Baloch may or may not ever return to Pakistan, but Lyari will continue producing violent actors like him ad infinitum, and there’s nothing the PPP can do about it.
The saddest of stories in the trilogy is the ANP’s. Here was an opportune twist of fate. As the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province was on fire, Pakhtuns were marching on Karachi like it was 1979. Birds of feathers and bros of the Pakhtunkhwa flock together, making the ANP salivate at its prospects in an electorally re-zoned Karachi. What no one accounted for (save the jealous and threatened MQM wallahs) was that buried within the migrants to Karachi were enough Taliban-type elements to render the ANP and its brand almost useless, even if the Pakhtun vote was secure, the brand could not, would not and was not.
The disintegration of top-down control by the traditional parties in Karachi didn’t just happen to the ones that win elections. It also happened to the ones that don’t. The Jamaat, having endured two generations of humiliation at the hands of that vaunted post-Bushra Zaidi Mohajir masculinity, relived the nightmare all over again, as it lost many young men enamoured by visions of ‘Islamic glory’ to the real radical right: Al-Qaeda and the TTP. The Jamaat has also had to endure residual losses to groups like the Sunni Tehreek, a home for ‘soft-hardcore’ believers. Having lost the gun battles to the MQM and the vote battles to all manner of actors all around the country, the Jamaat now had to endure Muslims that were even more Muslim than them, because they were Deobandi, or Barelvi or Shia.
For their part the Sunni Tehreek are sitting pretty. They represent the sharp end of the counter narrative to militant anti-Shia sentiment across the country. If Pakistan is going to put the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and its various friends in a box, and rid this country of sectarianism, it won’t do it without assertive groups like ST. Which means what exactly?
It means that just like the MQM’s ‘misguided’ boys were once tolerated, to win bigger battles, so too will others – both ‘secular’ and ‘religious’. The toxic mix doesn’t get any simpler in Karachi, it keeps getting more toxic. Each fruit adds a dangerous new ingredient. Yet all of it manages not to blow up. The bad news? It never, ever will. It will just keep smouldering, flaring up, smouldering, flaring up, smouldering.
The sparks from the flare-ups will kill daughters of the city that grew into mothers of the city, like Perween. And then everybody will go back to work, and we’ll forget everything. Only to be reminded the next time a clean-up takes place.
The cycle of Karachi’s murderous dysfunction isn’t and can’t be understood in its entirety by any one person, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if efforts to find convicted murderers are to genuinely succeed in a larger, more macro ‘normalisation’ of Karachi, then hanging finding, convicting and hanging the Saulat Mirzas of the world represent only the first steps.
It is worth remembering what exactly Karachi represents. It represents one megacity in a country that will have possibly three more within the next two decades. It represents the source of at least a quarter of the country’s GDP. It represents a city in a country that does not distinguish very much between policing rural and policing urban areas. It represents a city in a country that cannot clear squatter settlements located within stone’s throws of the seat of government. It represents a most astonishing failure of national imagination.
In ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’, Jane Jacobs wrote poignantly that, “There is a fiction, that slums, in forming, supplant healthy tissue”. In truth, slums are an accumulation of “people with least choice”. Karachi has become a multilayer cake of various strands of people with least choice, and no single player in the ecosystem that constitutes its virulent dysfunction has the agency or imagination to stop it. There was never any ‘healthy tissue’ to begin with, and there’s been no effort to imagine how to graft some onto the wounds.
This is why the prime minister has a clear role to play in solving the ‘Karachi problem’. The military has conducted three major operations to clean up Karachi, in 1988, 1992 and 1997. It has conducted a range of smaller operations too. But every time, the military’s ‘clear’ has been followed by strange kinds of ‘holds’ and ‘builds’. They beat up the MQM because it does bad things. Then they bring it back. The addiction of Pakistan to the MQM is not a disease. It is the natural consequence of its immense (although much corroded) popularity in the country’s most important city.
The answer is a sober examination of Pakistan’s vision of its cities. Criminals, no matter what party they are from, should be found, prosecuted and punished. But the problems of Karachi are larger than the criminals that light the fires we see. There are fires we cannot see. For those, PM Sharif needs people with the insights necessary to reimagine the Pakistani urban experience.
Perween Rahman may not be alive today, but Arif Hassan is. He should be asked by the highest offices in the land to shape the imagination of this country’s future. Urban growth is an indelible reality in this country. Foreigners like Laurent Gayer, Oscar Verkaik and Mathew Hull could help, but this country hurts itself as it ignores the wealth of people with the eye and mind to shape this urban future. The list is long and distinguished, and it must include people like Yasmin Lari, Rafay Alam, Khalid Bajwa, Jameel Yusuf, Nadeemul Haque, Arif Pervaiz, Omar Shahid Khan, and Durre Nayab.
Cities that reinvent themselves are an established tradition of human civilisation. It is almost inevitable. Karachi can be cleaned up and can be normal. But it isn’t Rangers ops alone that will achieve that noble goal. It is clear-headed and visionary leadership. Can the PM provide it?
The writer is an analyst and commentator.
www.mosharrafzaidi.com
Mosharraf Zaidi, "Reimagining Karachi and urban Pakistan," The News. 2015-03-14.Keywords: Political science , Political issues , Political parties , Political leaders , Karachi situation , Criminal activities , Target killing , Report-Baldia town , Terrorist attacks , Rangers operation , Nine zero , Altaf Hussain , Karachi , Pakistan , MQM