The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.
It is hard not to feel sad and angry over the fate that has befallen the Sindh police. The entire institution has been reduced to a sorry joke both in public debate as well as in reality. It has become the antithesis of professionalism, dedication and dutifulness allowing characters like Zulfikar Mirza to adjudge them to be fit only for minding official buildings and for standing guard at ceremonies.
The Rangers’ latest demand to hand over police stations to them – which the Supreme Court has wisely turned down citing jurisdiction issues – cements the general perception that the Sindh police are a hopeless case, an extension of a corrupt and thuggish political system that has no redeeming feature other than legitimacy obtained through votes.
But like all popular perceptions this one too needs to be closely examined. To begin with, the Sindh police are not dysfunctional from head to toe. No institution can be unless the whole state system has failed. In its ranks and official cadres you do get to meet and see thorough professionals who sweat it out in the heat and dust of this tough arena just to remain true to the principles for which they joined this force to begin with. That they are not even a footnote in the larger charge of incompetence and failure that the institution is slapped with on a daily basis is regrettable.
The balance of the good vs bad elements in the police is a matter of debate. The Rangers might say it is 1 and 99; the Sindh government would see that in reverse. More objective analysts would stay in the middle and call it 50:50. Rationally seen, therefore, the wholesale condemnation of this department is rooted more in standpoints rather than in data and statistics.
‘Political recruitment’ numbers themselves are a poor guide to measuring the depth of degradation in the police. Not every political appointee is a goon. Not everyone who comes through the ‘system’ is cast in gold. Take a look at the characters in civil and military bureaucracy who looted the national kitty and the picture becomes clearer on this count. The issue, therefore, is not so much with entrants to the department as with what happens to them after they have joined in. Instead of getting groomed into proud members of a proud force, they act as guardians of special interests (waderas, urban mafias, political bosses, criminal gangs).
To this extent, the critique of the Sindh police’s present state is fairly accurate. Zardariism’s core objective has been to press state institutions into personal service and use politics as a shield to protect against any accountability. Handpicked policemen, besides compromised members of the civilian administration, thus became pawns on the billions-dollars chessboard of speedy assets accumulation. It is this nexus between crime and politics that seems to define the current debate about the performance of the Sindh police. But even in this context the rulers, and not the institution, deserve the blame.
The blistering critique against the Sindh police is ill-directed. The institution developed fault lines because it was needed as an instrument of carrying out illegal acts and thus was shaped to meet those needs. It was allowed to degenerate in significant respects because it had to be diluted to remove a crucial hurdle on the path to endless gratification. However, while those who muscled the police force into a handmaiden are still there, at the high pedestal, the victim is being kicked around as if all evil originated from it.
But the most important missing element from this lopsided debate about the Sindh police relates not just to Zardariism but what came before him, the heydays of Altafism.
Long before the Sindh police fell into the hands of greed and cabalistic politics came their worst nightmare: the Musharraf years. That one decade saw brazen destruction of the police as a fighting force. The Sindh police’s functions were gradually handed over to sector commanders and their means to enforce the law – weapons and resources – were far outstripped by General Musharraf’s deliberate policy of feeding and fattening the MQM’s militant wings. One thing led to the other: those competing with the MQM for terror space girded up their loins and created groups that commanded fearsome firepower and had kill-capacity far more than all police resources put together.
That’s when blood was spilled on the city’s streets as if it were water. There were political workers, lawyers, journalists, businessmen, social workers and of course policemen. Members of the police whose careers carried even a suggestion of having tried to do their job were eliminated. Their families were destroyed. More resourceful police officers got themselves transferred out. The MQM ruled the roost because it was allowed to defeat the police.
The most unabashed display of who controlled the city – the law enforcers (ie police) or the MQM’s core committee – came during May 12, 2007 when the whole city was handed over by General Pervez Musharraf to the MQM. We all know what happened then. There was a bloodbath in Karachi and Musharraf toasted to his power in Islamabad. Mustafa Kamal, who is now pretending to be Mother Teresa, was one among many captains of the force that destroyed law and life in the city with lasting impact on the morale of the police.
Post May 12, he, along with others, visited media houses – wagging his finger warning, threatening and abusing. He told them to comply or be ready to meet the same fate as those who perished on the city streets. “We control Karachi and if you don’t like it get out of here. We are the law here” was how he addressed one media owner in front of his stunned staff members.
This glorification of violence, this celebration of destruction of state institutions was supervised and engineered by, well, the state itself. It was the state of Pakistan led by General Pervez Musharraf that drilled holes in the very institutional base on which modern governing orders are based. There was no mourning when policemen’s dead bodies came home. There was no national remorse when police stations were taken over by party cadres and police weapons were found in party offices. Nobody said anything then. The Sindh police were dying a slow, deliberately-planned death and we were all told that the heavens were smiling on Pakistan for being so lucky as to have Gen Musharraf as its leader.
But now the same state that has forgotten those years of systematic uprooting of police as an institution wants to see the Sindh police “perform professionally”. Those making these demands forget that the police did perform professionally in 1995 when quietly and without much media hype and exceptional powers they were able to achieve much more than what is now being paraded as a rare trophy of success. But then what happened? The state again took over and turned that remarkable turnaround into another quagmire. It criminalised policemen and their actions and endorsed criminals as victims.
The Sindh police, as they stand today, have become an easy punching bag. You can hand them over to NAB or change IGs with a flicker of a pen. You can ridicule them in talk shows and poke fun at them in press conferences. But nothing changes the history of why the Sindh police are where they are today. They are in the depths of chaos because they have been pushed down there by a state that conveniently keeps no record of its own shameful deeds.
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