Daily Times

Every year, the Pakistan army celebrates Youm-e-Shuhada (Martyrs Day) in May and the whole nation joins them to pay tribute to the departed souls of those valiant army officials who sacrificed their lives for the safety and security of the country and its people. The Pakistan air force and Pakistan navy also celebrate their Youm-e-Shuhadas to commemorate their martyrs. The only security agency that does not have any Martyrs Day to celebrate is the police department and it has its reason too. In no wars that this country has fought against India so far, has any policeman lost his life facing the enemy because of the nature and location of the war. The last war between Pakistan and India was in 1999 in Kargil, the border area of the Kashmir valley. Since then, the war scene has changed in Pakistan and with it has changed the location of the war too.

From the border areas, the war slowly and silently crept into the heartlands of our country creating new war fronts, enemies and victims. Most of the capital cities of our provinces and other districts became war zones and the civilians became more affected by it than the security forces. In Kargil, the Pakistan army and Kashmiri mujahideen fought the war and, according to some estimates, lost 500 persons. Now the ongoing war is not being fought by the armed forces alone; there are constabularies, levies, khassadars, rangers and, last but not least, policemen.

Last year, Pakistan lost 644 security officials and the majority of them were policemen (303), followed by army personnel (278), frontier corps officials (31) and the remaining 32 persons belonged to the khassadar, levies, rangers and others. This year, by July 21, Pakistan had already lost 483 security personnel and the highest victims were policemen (202), frontier constabulary (119), army (78), levies (25), khassadar (21), rangers (19), airport security force (11) and the remaining nine belonged to some other security agencies of the country. Provincially speaking, Sindh was the highest loser of security personnel this year (148), followed by FATA (143), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (88), Balochistan (72), Punjab (28) and two each from Azad Jammu Kashmir and Islamabad. In Sindh, almost 90 percent of fatalities occurred in Karachi with the police losing 101 persons, airport security force (11), rangers (6) and army (2).

In 2013, Karachi suffered a loss of 126 policemen meaning that on every third day the city lost an average of one policeman. Instead of witnessing any decline in this trend because of the ongoing operation in the city, what we observe now is contrary to our expectations. The city is now counting a dead policeman every second day and once they lay down their lives in any encounter or target killing, they are simply accorded an official burial as unsung heroes of an undeclared war in the country. They perform their duties on bare minimum infrastructure, insufficient life protection system and outdated weaponry. Despite being the largest, most commercial and most highly populated city, Karachi has a police force that is highly disproportionate to the number of people living in the city. According to a report, the Karachi policeman ratio against the population runs into the thousands while in Lahore, the second largest city of the country, this ratio is in the hundreds.

The deteriorating law and order situation in the city further aggravates this police/population ratio as half of the police force remains engaged in providing VIP protocols while the remaining half keeps losing over 100 policemen every year. What happens to the wounded is unknown but one can assume the kind of fate they might face once they run into such a situation. During this year, till July 21, 90 policemen have been wounded. How many of them could recover completely and what percentage of them remained physically disabled is not known either. The violence ridden metropolitan city of Karachi does not only suffer from lack of sufficient police force, it also suffers from the ongoing killing and crippling of this force that make it extremely difficult for the already ill-trained, ill-equipped and understaffed police to meet the challenges of the crimes that are unprecedented in their nature and execution.

Insufficient budget allocations and nonexistence of fair practices are another aspect of the problems faced by the police department. It encourages corruption and disallows them from providing basic facilities to their staff. Lack of an effective monitoring system leaves many corrupt practices unchecked with each and every police station taking care of its minimum official requirements on its own, be it fuel for vehicles or stationery for the office. Many police officials when contacted revealed that quite often the police department fails to provide financial support for medical treatment of its wounded policemen. There are even cases of martyred dead bodies that could not be dispatched to their homes from the police fund established for this purpose. Consequently, their colleagues had to arrange their journey by sharing the expenses among themselves.

We, as a nation, fail to realise the miseries of these poor policemen and their families who try to provide whatever security they can manage based on their training and level of readiness. Unlike the army and paramilitary forces, policemen are highly vulnerable to target killings as they do not live in well-protected places like cantonment areas. However, it does not deter them from continuing their services. Once they are dead and gone they are forgotten forever with nobody even willing to celebrate a day in honour of those policemen who have sacrificed their lives fighting against the menace of violence that has been plaguing this country for a long time.

The writer is a freelance journalist and senior research associate at the Centre for Research and Security Studies, Islamabad