Bombing the Vote in Karachi
By Rafia Zakaria
US
An election is supposed to happen in Pakistan. In the dusty plains of interior Sindh, crisply clad Imran Khan climbs up to the podium. Before the villagers of Jacobabad he promises to end the feudal system and to free the landless peasants. In Sargodha, Punjab, Nawaz Sharif of the PML-N has claims of his own; vowing to end load shedding in the whole country. The next morning, they do it all again, Imran Khan on a whirlwind tour of cities in Punjab promising to shoot down American drones, Nawaz Sharif in blazingly hot Thatta promising to end corruption, poverty and unemployment. At each of their events there is noise and clamor and flags and festivity; the feverish pulse and pitch of electoral campaigning.
In Karachi, the biggest city in the nation, producing from its cramped shops and strike stricken streets the largest chunk of the country’s GDP, there can be no campaigning. The talk in Karachi is all of terror, all of bombs and all of fear. One newspaper report details dens of terrorist groups hidden in the industrial zones of the city, another reveals mobile “justice” units that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan are using to mete out punishments. Shootouts erupt on street corners and large crowds are just invitations to suicide bombers. No one has tears to spare for the three, four, five or seven people killed in targeted shootings day after day. Far enough away to be safe from its scourges, Nawaz Sharif promises to “sacrifice his life for Karachi” and then worried perhaps of how cheap life is in the city, he also promises an underground railway system. It is nice of him to even mention Karachi, for otherwise it seems that the election is taking place only in Punjab and the upper part of Sindh.
In the meantime a lineup of soap stars in a crisp and snazzy black and white public service message instructs voters, a good twenty million of them in Karachi, to vote for “freedom” and for “education” and “with your head”. From the television screen, they raise their eyebrows and point their fingers and cryptically allude to the “change” being “inside us”. It’s a great contribution to drawing room conversation, and a taunt to all those in the country for whom election campaigning must be watched from afar and all political events be avoided for the sake of survival. Against the black and white hopefulness of these celebrity voters, is the technicolor bloodshed of the daily or twice daily bomb blast. When it aired last week, it was followed by a sudden cut to a news alert about a bomb blast on Burns Road outside the sector office of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. It would have been ironic, if it were not so bloody and tragic. In Balochistan, another ailing part of the country, two polling stations that also happened to be schools are blown up .
Wishing for a perfect world to conduct experiments in democracy is considered greedy even in the fat, safe and happy parts of the world and so it is useless to bother with it in Pakistan. In the heady run up to elections, while Lahoris feverishly debate the prospects of PTI versus PML-N and television hosts pretend election campaigning in just a province and a half is election campaigning for us all, there is an imperative to pause. Even with the Election Commission’s announcement that a hefty seven security personnel will be deployed at the “sensitive” polling stations in the country, and the imminent deployment of the military in all the rest of the cities; the campaigning part of the democratic electoral process has already been denied to millions of Pakistanis and particularly to those in Karachi.
An argument for a safer election, for opportunities to campaign and elections to be something more than the fever of a lucky few in safer places is not an argument against democracy. Indeed, it is known by all that not participating in the vote is capitulation to those bent on establishing the Emirate of Karachi and returning to medieval times. At the same time, all those in the rest of the country, the politicians clamoring to stages in cities other than Karachi, must address the alienation of those for whom the whole process, is a far away story, and for whom going out to vote is taking the risk of becoming a casualty. A perfect world is not within wishing distance of bomb burdened Karachi, but a safer election should be.
(Rafia Zakaria is a columnist for DAWN. She is a writer and PhD candidate in Political Philosophy whose work and views have been featured in the New York Times, Dissent the Progressive, Guernica, and on Al Jazeera English, the BBC, and National Public Radio. She is the author of Silence in Karachi, forthcoming from Beacon Press. – Courtesy Dawn)
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