Call of the city

The murder of qawwali maestro Amjad Sabri and the kidnapping of Owais Ali Shah, son of the Sindh chief justice in Karachi have set alarm bells ringing. Chief Justice of Pakistan Anwar Zaheer Jamali has said that the judiciary has come under intense pressure following Owais’s abduction, and the police and the Rangers in the city have gone on their usual spree of detaining dozens of people; still we appear far from knowing who is behind either the murder or the kidnapping. The vague reassurances of Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah that the police have important leads in both the cases are not very reassuring – given the record of his government. In his speech to the Sindh Assembly the CM suggested that crime in Karachi was essentially linked to land grabbing and other such factors. But this does not make much sense under the present circumstances. There is no reason to believe that these factors had anything to do with Shah’s kidnapping or Sabri’s murder. The CM did not acknowledge that his own party, like other parties in the city, has been part of the land-grabbing problem. He also blamed a not-to-be-named third element and left us wondering about the credibility, courage and calibre of the political leadership suffered by the unfortunate province of Sindh and the city of Karachi. Until our representatives start accepting responsibility for a situation they have themselves created and are bold enough to tackle it, Karachi will not know peace. This, in a nutshell, is why violence in Karachi cannot be eliminated by the Rangers alone – especially when any such exercise is perceived to have been politically compromised.

The recent bout of lawlessness also brought Army Chief Raheel Sharif and Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar to Karachi for meetings with government and law-enforcement officials. The COAS has taken the recent incidents as proof that the Rangers are so successful that militants are now going after ‘soft’ targets. He has vowed that the operation will continue till Karachi returns to normalcy. With civilian governments seeming inept, certainly many may feel relieved that the COAS has stepped in. However, apart from the point that there may be a problem in defining an international celebrity and a son of a chief justice as soft targets, there is uncertainty too about what might constitute normalcy in Karachi’s context. All indicators point to the Rangers being a permanent part of the city’s landscape whose powers indefinitely outstrip those of the police. According to Chaudhry Nisar, the two incidents are meant to spread panic. This is stating the obvious in the face of such incidents and when both those that provide justice and those that uphold our cultural traditions have reason to fear for themselves.

What needs to be acknowledged is that – two years into a security operation with unparalleled powers available to paramilitary forces – there is a problem somewhere. Many terrorist groups continue to operate from outside the city and the problem will continue here and elsewhere so long as militant groups are not destroyed here and elsewhere. The problem then, in the broader context, is linked with the wider question of the states’ overall strategy to counter terror uncompromisingly and without discrimination. This is not to ignore the role of the ‘political’ forces in the city or elements within them. As we have noted in an earlier editorial, in the complex cauldron of conflicting ethnic, racial, sectarian, political and institutional interests that Karachi has become, the possible motives of Sabri’s murder are quite a few. But, we dare ask, what possible good can come out of the perceptions about more such actors being artificially added to this already explosive cauldron? The political parties now have for long been the main target of the operation, but in a pattern that does not appear without politics itself. The unseemly affair of leaked videos clearly designed as political moves can do little to lessen the sense of panic and insecurity. The last thing we need to be subjected to after the Sabri murder would be the appearance of a similar video after a while, featuring confession by a goon of this or that party, and then being lost in the political mist which has continued to thicken even as the Karachi operation continues amid very clear claims of success. It is time all the stakeholders decided to get rid of violence. It is high time political games and considerations were taken out of the task of providing security to citizens.