The escalating unrest holding Pakistan’s financial hub of Karachi in its vicious thrall has at last prompted a rethink in the government’s highest echelons. The stakeholders have, mercifully, renewed efforts to inject a measure of sanity in the city. President Asif Ali Zardari, during a visit, has constituted a six-member committee with representation of all the three coalition partners in the Sindh government, the PPP, ANP and MQM, to restore peace in Karachi. To be headed by Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah, the committee is tasked with ascertaining the political or other affiliations of arrested law-breakers through interrogation by Joint Investigation Teams. President Zardari has ordered an across-the-board crackdown against law-breakers, which, however, seems to be a tall order, given the fragmented social fabric of Karachi, riven by ethnic rivalries and turf wars. Viewed in the historical backdrop, the forces of exclusivist ethnicity have done great harm to Karachi, and indeed to the whole country. MQM seems to believe, and at times asserts, that being the cultural and ethnic inheritor of the founding fathers, it has an almost exclusive right to dominate Karachi. As a result of competing ethnic claims, our industrial and economic hub has been given a baptism of fire and blood, which is extremely tragic. Our collective survival hinges on peaceful coexistence, marked by strict distributive justice. What has been happening in Karachi can be called a low-intensity MQM-ANP war of attrition. In the given circumstances, the PPP, being the senior coalition partner, needed to play a mediatory role. Now that the President and Co-chairperson of the PPP has taken the initiative, one can only say, better late than never. If Karachi is to see peace again, the law enforcement apparatus should be purged of elements with political affiliations, law enforcement personnel must be given the confidence to conduct operations against criminal elements, whether politically affiliated or not, and political interference in the police’s work must end. Only when the coalition partners cooperate with each other to obviate political turf wars, stop protecting criminals that may be sheltering under their umbrella, and allow the professionalised law enforcement agencies to do their work without fear or favour, can there be any hope of a turn for the better. The committee constituted by President Zardari promises much. Let us hope it delivers for the sake of Karachi and the country. *