Daily Times

Over 1,000 people have died because of the freak heatwave in Karachi while the PPP government fiddled away in the air-conditioned Sindh Assembly. It was easy to blame K-Electric for the breakdown and do nothing. Not only that K-Electric failed to meet the electricity needs of the people, it also had no contingency plan for the system’s breakdowns and violent fluctuations. The provincial government failed too.
But most of the people died because they were out in the sun and many were fasting. Doctors who handled the emergency say the majority were dehydrated. Karachiites were not prepared for this heat and nobody told them what to do. The Rangers and army established some camps, as a public relations exercise, offering water and medical assistance to the affected people. However, the civil government was not seen anywhere. Yes, it talked loudly and unabashedly in the provincial Assembly and on the television channels. If K-Electric had no contingency plan, the Sindh government did not either. There was no urgency to come to the rescue of the people. Tragically, as the death count kept shooting up, the graveyard mafia jacked up the prices of graves although it was supposed to be under various government agencies. Even closed graveyards, such as the one in affluent PECHS, offered space at Rs 100,000 each.
Now consider this in the backdrop of the recent power tussle between the Sindh government and the army top brass, which resulted in PPP supremo Asif Ali Zardari’s outburst — so out of character for the otherwise cunning Zardari we know from his post-Benazir era. As expected, most politicians and the media lashed out at him for speaking out against the army generals’ interference in the Sindh government’s affairs. You can heap allegations and insult on prime ministers and presidents but army officials and mullahs are the sacred cows of this security state.
The whole conflict cannot be seen in black and white; there are always many shades of grey in between. The Rangers and the corps commander were not wrong in saying that sources of massive funding to different mafias in Karachi have to be stamped out. However, that does not mean they should encroach on the civil government’s jurisdiction like the historic student hostels of Karachi. The politicians hit back and ask: are other provinces and the federal government free of corruption? Is the present biggest threat to the country not terrorism, which flourished because of the myopic policies of our security establishment? But two wrongs do not make a right, particularly when the army has finally decided to eliminate rebel terrorist organisations. And its fantastic perception managers at the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) are successfully building its image as the saviour.
On the other hand, Zardari, who cares two hoots about public perception, was on a slippery path when he raised the jurisdiction issue in Peshawar. He mistakenly believes that money walks and BS talks. Tales of the corruption and inefficiency of the Sindh government are well known. Even if one discounts these corruption stories by 50 percent, the figures are astronomical.
The same is true about the Rangers guesstimate of Rs 230 billion. This disclosure by an authoritative organisation like the Rangers, who have been around for the last 20 years, was readily accepted by the public. No sceptical reporter — as there should be — has asked the Rangers how they arrived at this fantastic figure and how much of this mafia money flows to their political patrons. Several research reports and books have been published about how different mafias operate in the megalopolis. The recent publications, Karachi: The Land Issue by Arif Hasan and his team and Karachi Ordered Disorder And The Struggle For The City by French scholar Laurent Gayer are well researched on this subject.
What has happened to Karachi was expected. Such organised crime mafias flourish in societies where public amenities are scarce and the state’s structure is crumbling. Way back in the mid-1980s when the All Pakistan Muhajir Students Organisation emerged following the famous Bushra Zaidi accident with a minibus, I did a quick study to understand why the city was bursting at the seams, to prepare for a lecture at a Women’s Action Forum meeting. The city population was growing at the rate of four to five percent per annum while expenditure on amenities had grown at 1.5 percent per annum during 1980 to 1985, including the water supply. So, every year a backlog of scarcity was piling up and continues to do so even now. The Rangers report particularly mentioned the land mafia, which is not news as it has been there since the influx into the city started in 1947. As the state failed to meet the housing, water and transport demands of the poor, mafias filled this vacuum. Big money was made by these mafias with the connivance of the bureaucracy and politicians. Military rule was no different.
Suffice it to say what do we expect in a city of 20 million where every third person lives in informal and illegal settlements, where the water supply to the people is half of what is needed, where public transport is short by 15,000 buses and people commute on the roofs of available buses, where the per capita police is not even half of what is required and much of it is assigned to so-called VIPs, where billions of dollars in arms have proliferated thanks to the Islamic jihad in Afghanistan, where thousands of children have no educational institutions to go to and where the rapidly changing ethnic demography is tearing the social fabric? The list is long. Any sociologist will tell you such cities cannot be tamed unless a grand strategy is prepared to tackle these colossal problems heaped up in 67 years of negligence.

The writer is can be contacted at ayazbabar@gmail.com