Sir: Williams and Flewelling (1988) in their study to find out the social causes behind homicidal violence, highlighted that in the larger cities of the United States, the communities with the highest crime rates were also the ones with the highest rates of poverty and population density. What other area of Karachi can be regarded as economically more deprived along with having highly dense population than Lyari. Similarly, researches conducted in Latin America by Vilas (1998) and Fanjzylber (1997) reached similar conclusions that more inequality leads to more violence. Robert Wright, an American scholar, in his book, The Moral Animal, emphasises that humans have a predisposed longing for equality, and the costs of inequality are so high that men fight it with special ferocity.
Perhaps humans, traditionally thought to have a free will to make decisions are not at all that free to do so. Free will would have been that if ‘all’ the readers of this letter — if brought up in the same circumstances as the people in Lyari, that is with limited opportunities to advance in their lives — would chose a social action other than violence.
The words ‘limited opportunities’ might further be explained by a hypothetical situation that if a group of people had only enough money to either have dinner or to pay for bus fare to go to school, how many of them would have chosen to be educated? The problem that prevails in the middle and upper classes in our society is that they seem to take credit for resources they have inherited, rather than considering them mere luck (or coincidence), which brought them to the positions they presently are in.
Moreover, even the primary reason mentioned for high homicidal rates do not explain the organised crime taking place in Lyari. In the early 1960s, in the times of Sherok and Dadul (the old kingpins of Lyari), violence was not as organised as it is today. Weapons and hashish are certainly not made in Lyari, and their uninhibited influx in the vicinity does raise legitimate questions.
If the primary causes of violence in Lyari and elsewhere in Karachi, including unemployment, economic inequality, poor infrastructure and high population density are not addressed properly, then Lyari would continue providing human fuel to organisations such as the People’s Amn Committee, if not the Taliban or Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.
JAWAD KHAN BALOCH
Via e-mail