Save Karachi from the Jaws of Its Mafias
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
As these lines are being written Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has landed in Karachi with the heavyweights of his cabinet. That’s a good omen as far as his avowed mission of saving Karachi from anarchy is concerned.
Coming to Karachi with his inner circle of advisers, movers and shakers, is a clever move by Nawaz. It conveys a hands-on style of governance. Even if he doesn’t succeed in what to many is a ‘mission impossible’ he will at least have succeeded in soothing the frayed nerves of the people of Karachi. They, Karachi’s harried and nervous denizens, will have reason to feel cared for after years—if not decades—of deliberate neglect by the country’s ruling elite. Nawaz seems ready to put an end to that ignoble tradition.
Nawaz is obviously being given sensible advice by his media-savvy gurus. But Karachi is much too warped in problems and free flow of blood to be appeased by an exercise or two in PRs. It’s not just a can of worms that must be opened with extreme caution but what comes out of the can should be tackled with great tact and finesse.
Looking at the Karachi scene from his perspective of a politician who must work in tandem with other political parties to tackle the enigma of Karachi, it should be a smart move for Nawaz to take every other political party on board. His confidants and soothsayers may tell him it’s a damn smart move.
But he courtesans couldn’t be more wrong. Most of the political parties and factions active and involved in the bog of Karachi are part of the problem, not solution of Karachi’s festering ills and ailments.
It’s no secret that for at least the past two decades Karachi has been in the clutches of political mafias whose sole center of gravity is self-aggrandizement and ruthless accumulation of power at the expense of the interests and welfare of the people.
Nawaz should be reading the latest proceedings of the Supreme Court’s special bench, headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, convened in the city itself to take stock of its aggravating and un-abating crisis. The apex court has been holding periodical sittings in the city to focus on its problems and seek their alleviation through the involvement of its official machinery.
Some of the reports presented before the special bench—not voluntarily, of course, by the city’s sleep-walking bureaucracy and administrative mafia, but only on persistent coaxing of the court—makes almost hair-raising reading.
The honourable judges of the apex court were briefed, for instance, on the activities—or shenanigans—of the armed wings of the main political contenders operating at will and with complete impunity.
There’s, for instance, an armed band—a terror group, to be true—of MQM.
MQM’s comrade in arms for years, Sindh’s ruling PPP has its own armed wings of goons and murderers. It’s called the People’s Action Committee (PAC).
The third major faction active on the Karachi scene is ANP, with its own gang of armed murderers and robbers. The ANP aficionados have helped themselves, over the past decade, to generous and plentiful supply of weapons from the weapon factories of the tribal are in the north.
So Nawaz should have no cobwebs in his mind about the role of Karachi’s major stake-holders: their interest is focused only on using Karachi’s economic levers to amass power and wealth through unfair means. They don’t give a damn about the people whose lives have been ruined under the weight of these political mafias’ dirty politics and criminal activities.
Facts and figures of Karachi’s nightmare of crimes—compiled by concerned citizens of the city and civic-minded media outlets—speak for themselves and make a horror reading. According to these statistics, almost 1900 people have been killed—in what has become fashionable to describe as ‘targeted killing’—over the first 8 months of the current year.
But still scarier are the figures put together by GEO Television of the enormous amount of money being made by goons and murderers of these political mafias through what’s euphemistically recorded as ‘street crimes.’ The GEO survey says that criminal gangs operating with impunity in the city in broad daylight rob its denizens and the provincial and state exchequers—through theft of water, power, land, plus extortion (known in Karachi’s parlance as bhatta )---of a whopping amount , close to 830 million Rupees a day. The amount involved is incredible.
Why have the goons such impunity and full freedom to act in the city? The answer is, because its police is helpless, or too scared to take them on. But why are guardians of law so helpless? The answer to this riddle is, because Karachi’s police has been politicised for years. Officers of the force serve at the pleasure of political mafias. They aren’t there to serve or protect the people whose taxes pay for their salaries. No, they are there solely to watch over the turf of their political masters and help themselves in the process.
An interesting detail in what GEO has paraded on its telecasts as the goons’ black budget informs us that the lion’s share in the 830 Rupees extorted, daily, from the people of Karachi, 210 million falls in the lap of the police force. One will have to be insane to trust this bone-corrupt Karachi police to check the wave of crime or bring the culprits to book.
The appetite of tormentors of Karachi has been whetted to unimaginable proportions by the corruption and moral depredation of those supposedly in charge of its law and order. While Nawaz was closeted with the leading lights of political parties at his All Parties Conference (APC) in the cloistered ambience of the Governor’s House, the streets of Karachi belonged, as usual, to the mafias operating with full freedom. At least ten targeted killings were recorded within the hours of political parleys of the Prime Minister.
Nawaz ought to appreciate these in-built handicaps of the law-enforcing apparatus in Karachi. Cleaning up a mess of such epic proportions as Karachi’s would require the services of a Hercules, no less, to wash and cleanse its Augean Stables.
Who, in their right mind, could imagine a geriatric Qaim Ali Shah, Sindh’s doddering Chief Minister, to be the man of the moment and lead the proposed police and Rangers operation in the city in order to rid it of its mafias?
Qaim Ali Shah is a bumbling buffoon who should, at best, be running a chicken farm. The man can’t tell his right hand from the left. Nawaz must be joking to put him at the apex of a major operation to end Karachi’s nightmare of crimes.
The Sindh Governor, Ishratul Ibad, is, likewise a dead weight for this purpose. He’s as good as a page boy of his master who has been controlling him like a puppet on a string from far-off London.
If Nawaz is serious—and under the circumstances he has got to be—then it would be a blunder to rely on a team that the Supreme Court has already denounced as ineffective to run the province’s administration and save it from the ever-daring clutches of its umpteen mafias.
To repeat, the incumbent administrative machinery and characters operating it are incapable of redressing the situation, or pull Karachi back from the brink of the abyss where it has been driven to because of its incompetent and criminal leaders.
There’s only one solution to save Karachi from the ever-widening and lustful jaws of the sharks operating there. Karachi must be handed over to the army for at least a good six months, while the current political rogues and scoundrels dressing themselves up as leaders should be sent packing. Nothing short of it would deliver.
In his own interest, Nawaz should bite the bullet and give the army a free hand and mandate to revive and resuscitate Karachi. Nawaz, as per his own admission, describes the Karachi situation as extra-ordinary; and there’s no denying it.
An extra-ordinary situation demands exceptional rules, regulations and the machinery to enforce them. The only institution organised and disciplined enough to fit the bill is Pakistan Army. It’s understandable that Nawaz should be reluctant to give primacy to the army, given his own bitter experience at the hands of a wayward General Pervez Musharraf. Bu General Kayani is cut from a different cloth. In any case, a burning Karachi makes it incumbent on Nawaz to take a personal risk in the larger interest of the country.
The fate of his government, and his style of governance, over the next years would be determined, in large measure, by how astutely Nawaz handles the task of bailing out a beleaguered Karachi crying out, desperately, for help.
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
