Karachi: No hope for the city by the sea?

A few years ago I was at a lecture in which the speaker observed that how in modern society we seem to think complex things are easy and simple things are hard. I was reminded of that comment, the other day when  Ahsan Butt posed the question, asking what, if anything, can be done to save Karachi? Now despite the positive comments at what he had written, solutions offered were few and far between. To put things in perspective, Karachi  is Pakistan’s former capital, Sindh’s provincial capital, Pakistan’s biggest city and its financial nerve centre. It is a cosmopolitan fruit salad, consisting of predominantly Urdu speakers who migrated from India in 1947 after partition.  Politically, it is dominated by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), which despite being in coalition with the present government, has seen its former iron grip over the city being challenged by both the Pakistan People’s Party and another coalition partner, the ethnic Pashtun Awami National Party. With gravely rising death toll every day, you have power shortages, water shortages, a collapsing infrastructure, sectarian violence and seemingly unstoppable street crime. Not to forget, both the MQM and the Awami National Party have been on the receiving end of the Military’s wrath for their moderate credentials and their alternative view of the Pakistani establishment (to put it simply they don’t like them). The irony, however, is that despite the similarity in their political views, the two parties’ are nowadays openly calling for the military to intervene in the city.

Sounds complicated enough, doesn’t it? My take, however, was a bit different. Reason being, I view Karachi’s situation as part of a broader problem. To put it plainly, the government and people look at specific problems in Pakistan and Karachi in particular in isolation and miss the crucial point that status quo is part of the problem. 

There are several problems that afflict the city. First and the foremost, there is the decline in the 'writ' of the state and apprehensions over government’s ability to enforce its authority. You have the police, which is on one hand, politicised, under-equipped and undermanned, and a judicial system with barely 5% conviction rate. In the former’s case, situation is far worse than the rest of the country, as Karachi has had to put up with presence of paramilitary forces along with police for the last 20 odd years. There has never been a serious effort to establish a professional, efficient, depoliticised metropolitan police force. Even when it dominated Karachi from 2003-2008, the MQM was content with the status quo. So to expect the police to suddenly be interested in their duties when for 20 years somebody else has been running the show for them is unrealistic.

At the same time, both Altaf Hussain’s and Ghulam Bilour’s suggestion for a military operation in the city are historical inaccuracies. The military operation in 1992 was not what led to a drop in violence in Karachi. It was, in fact, the brutal paramilitary operation, led by Naseerullah Babar. This was followed by the MQM’s rehabilitation by working with PML-N and finally attempts by the Musharraf’s government to reinvest in the city. It was no single event but the whole  process that brought a semblance of peace to Karachi for a few years.

Moreover, as  a consequence of the Musharraf era, the political economy and demography of Karachi changed markedly, Musharraf’s rule was noted for, lop-sided development in certain regions within the country with Karachi being the prime example, as the megapolis underwent a drastic makeover under the mayorship of Mustafa Kamal of MQM, as the city experienced a mini economic boom.

The downside was, this growth exacerbated simmering tension in the city and was amplified by the dominance of the MQM in the province and federation, the presence of the MMA in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa along with the debacles in FATA. However, massive demographic balance changes were witnessed post floods last year which triggered a third major influx of migrants from those regions into Karachi.

Finally, there is a historical generational change that analysts and writers do not factor in. The MQM was defined by several key events in its history such as its soaring popularity post Bushra Zaidi incident in 1986  and finally its ouster from Karachi’s local election scene in the late 90s.

In that period a new generation of MQM leaders have grown up. These are people who came of age in the Musharraf boom, and have only a brief memory of the dark days of operation clean up. For them, the military is not seen as a threat as much as their local opponents are seen.

By contrast, the defining moments for the Pashtun community in Karachi, were the Riffat Afridi case in 1998, followed by the clash between ANP-PPP and the MQM in May 2007 and finally culminating with the 2008 election and ANPs first win in Karachi. This, in addition to the PPP’s closeness to the ANP, created a strategic alliance which is challenging the MQM’s hold on power in the city. Generationally, the people leading this movement are a new middle class amongst the Pashtun community, they are people who are not from traditional ANP dominated areas and have essentially been driven to the party more out of a dislike of the MQM than love for the ANP. They want access to state machinery to improve their lot in the city, but are instead coming across the MQM’s near decade hold over the local and in part the provincial state machinery.

When you add all of this together with the criminalisation of the militant wings and the loosening of the leadership’s holds over their members, here you have the crux of the immediate problem. How do you stop ‘political’ violence when the people committing target killings might not be under the control of the local political party?

The solutions to all this are not “complex-easy ones”. They are not the restoration of the Commissionerate system, keeping coalition partners happy with plots and quotas, nor are they military operations. They are not quests for mythical leaders who will save the people or all or nothing political brinkmanship which also likely to be ineffective. 

The answers are the “simple-hard”:An assertive local government system which is inclusive of all stake holders, a police force which is independent and local, a judicial system which is effective. But above all, the realisation that while developing cities, a uniform approach is required or else one will be compelled to migrate to where the work is. These in themselves are basic first steps, and like all simple things, they start at square one.

Pashtuns: Chowkidars or noble savages?

 A version of this post was published in the DAWN on the 1st of July 2011

Writer Akbar S Ahmad writes in Foreign Policy Magazine (Code of the Hill May 6 2011), writes about the death of Osama Bin Laden and talks about his time posted in the tribal agency of Waziristan,a part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). He writes somewhat glowingly about the people of the region preferred honour over a life of paying taxed. He cites the Pashto proverb  "Honor (nang) ate up the mountains, taxes (qalang) ate up the plains."

He describes the society of which he is a product off as one where “ people pay rents and taxes and live within the state system in hierarchal societies that are dominated by powerful feudal, political, or military authority”. Unlike in the mountain areas, leaders in qalang societies have their status bestowed on them by birth or through economic or political means. He then expands on this arbitrary distinction between societies of honour and societies of taxes by arguing that the Military establishment is a product of the “qalang” society. He then emphasises how societies of honour are freedom loving and the importance of honouring tribal identity when developing the region.

I write with respect for Akbar S Ahmads knowledge, personal ties to the region, long service in the tribal areas and Pashtun belt. However I believe his article misrepresented Pashtuns of Waziristan and the tribal belt.

He tries to justify the present situation by citing the Pashtun honour code of Pashtunwali, of “doing Pashto”as the cause for the regions backwardness. This centuries old code advocates living an honourable life which honours oneself, being hospitable to strangers, punishes ones enemies and does not dishonour others. While the code does exist today in many variations, to assume that it turns Pashtuns into people to whom the normal rules of human life do not apply is misleading. This is a classic stereotype of the “noble savage” that has been promoted for long about Pashtuns. During the time of the British Raj, the closer the British got to the Frontier the more savage the local Pashtuns got, conversely the further away the nobler Pashtuns were perceived.

In fact, within Pakistan this stereotype often co-exists with the cultural one of the “ignorant chowkidar”. The “ignorant chowkidar” is mocked for his poor grasp of Urdu, his lack of intelligence and lack of interest in the trappings of modern society. Neither of these simplistic generalisations are true, it is just an easy way out of understanding complex societal structures.

Traditionally, FATA was a part of the country where the Frontier Crimes Regulation applied. Under Article 1 of the Constitution, FATA is a part of Pakistan; that was governed by the Political agent as the government representative working through government backed Maliks and Jirgas.

 It exists in a anomalous situation , where locals are subject to collective punishment, arbitrary arrests and in its time, the FCR gave the political agents unbridled power. In fact as per Article 247 (7) of the constitution, the courts have no jurisdiction over the region.  Under these laws children as young as two years old have been convicted under the FCR. Jurists like the late Chief Justice A.R Cornelius in 1954  described the FCR as "obnoxious to all recognised modern principles governing the dispensation of justice".

The FCR, was brutally effective in ensuring state control of the region, if not its development. Things have since changed radically, the constant conflict in the region and deployment of the military, has shifted power away from the political agents to either the military or militant leaders. Most mahor decision making is now in the hands of the military the old system has collapsed.

The factors contributing to this collapse are not hard to see, a generation has been depoliticised and radicalised, large numbers of locals are working in the Middle East, the old Maliks have been killed and been forced to flee under the nose of the Army. Finally we have an international brigade of people from all over the world who have created an occupied emirate in Islams name using the locals as cannon fodder.

Akbar Ahmad argues “They should consult the elders and utilize the jirga in order to introduce schools and health schemes within their traditional systems so that the people of the nang areas have a sense of hope for the future.”

This would be possible if the old systems existed anymore, in fact they do not, with militant commanders ruling parts of the region. The socio-economic figures on the region are even more shocking, the literacy rate in Fata is about 17 per cent and only 3 per cent of the total women population. The most recent census report 2009-10 reported a school dropout rate of 63 per cent among boys and 77 per cent among girls, while 54 per cent children quit schools before completing secondary education. These are easily the highest   dropout ratio in the country. So how does one invest in structures that barely exist anymore?

What is really needed is radical reforms in the region, allowing political party’s to operate in the region, opening up existing roads in the region to the locals, investing in the IDP’s and investing in development like the, seemingly forgotten reconstruction opportunity zones. There are precedents that are worth studying close by, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial government has successfully merged the former provincial tribal agency of Kala Dhaka into the new district of Tor Ghar (literally black mountain). They did this by working through the remnants of the old jirga system and in exchanging offering large scale investments in as an incentive.

While we should not forget the past; we should not allow the memories of the past that Akbar Ahmed so deftly writes about, confuse traditionalism with a generation of radicalisation. Instead of Nang versus Qalang we should recall the poetry of the late Ajmal Khattak

Leave me alone if you will..
The modern (hypocritical) Aurangzebs haunt me still.
I am the Pashtun of my age

The truth is there is nothing noble about being radicalised or living a life of enforced deprovation and there is definitely nothing noble in being considered a noble savage.

QOTD: Pakistan's One Unit

In 1954, forty-two years ago, when the One Unit issue was 
to be voted upon in the provincial assembly, the then chief minister, 
Mohammed Ayub Khuhro, in cahoots with his minister Pir Ali Mohammed Rashdi, 
realising that the honourable Mirs of Talpur would vote against their 
proposal, acted. Mir Ali Ahmed Talpur was arrested on a trumped-up charge, 
Mir Rasul Bakhsh Talpur managed to escape and hide, and the smallest and 
gentlest of the three, Mir Ghulam Ali Talpur, was bodily picked up and 
bundled off on the back of a camel to Mitthi, the same old Mitthi in the 
Thar desert.

- Ardeshir Cowasjee (18th July 1996) writing in the DAWN 

I have always found the creation of Pakistans one unit something of an amusement 

considering the intent behind it, the dominant West Pakistan elite fearing the 

Bengali majority wanted some form of parity with East Pakistan. So simple enough

solution ignore the ethnic, administrative and historic divisions in 'West Pakistan'

and just amalgamate them together into one unit. As a sop to the Pakhtunistan movement

inititally Peshawar was supposed to be West Pakistans provincial Capital but this was later

changed to Lahore.

I find the Bengali political leaders willingness to sacrfice their inherent majority 

status for the sake of national unity unusual and tragic. They obviously believed in the concept 

of Pakistan to an extent that they were willing to forego their own basic right of 

representation. It is tragic for several reasons, one is I cannot imagine something similar

happening in present day Pakistan. A ethnic group willingly surrender its unfluence 

somewhere for the greater good. Secondly is the simplistic approach that one unit reflected

sure enough when you look into its history you see the good old military establishments

finger prints over this overly simplistic solution to Pakistans problems. 

So if you have corrupt politicians ban politics, if you have tensions between ethnic groups

ban any reflections of ethnicitiy or diversity. And as the above quote shows...you do whatever it

takes to achieve the figleaf of legal support for your moves. 

It really would be funny if it wasn't so sad... 

Caption contest of the day

Maulana Fazlur Rehman talking to Nawaz Sharif..any guesses on what they might be saying to each other? Answers in the comments section please!