A heatwave in Karachi

One more chapter has been added to Karachi’s chronicle of adversity. This, after all, is a land of magical uncertainties where demons and dragons have lurked in the shadows. But this week’s spectacle has defied all our forebodings of disaster. In that sense, it poses a new challenge to the city’s capacity for survival.
I must confess, at the outset, that I am not able to adequately portray the tragedy of how more than one thousand citizens died in the wake of a freak heatwave in the month of fasting. We, my wife and I, had left Karachi just as Ramazan began. This is our seasonal sojourn to southern California in the US to be with the family of our elder daughter.
Hence, I do not have any personal experiences to recount. Otherwise I have been a kind of participant observer of all that has happened in the city during the past several decades. Another limitation is that when we embarked on our journey, I had this intention of also taking a vacation from that addictive involvement with national affairs. No more talk shows, was my resolve, though the Pakistani diaspora is hooked on them. I felt encouraged by the fact that Ramazan usually is a slow month.
This, of course, was not to be. In fact, the furies seem to have been unleashed with the advent of Ramazan. The focus of almost all developments has remained on Karachi. Wednesday’s BBC report, with the shocking allegation that the MQM had received funding from India, had originated in London and had global implications. But it has its roots in Karachi.
Irrespective of the potentially volatile developments in the MQM story, I feel that the consequences of the unprecedented heatwave, coupled with power outages and water shortages, deserve more attention. I was able to look at some coverage on news channels and read a number of reports in the print media, including in The New York Times. Quite simply, I cannot comprehend the human dimension of this heartbreaking calamity.
We have some idea of how many persons died of heat stroke. But so many more were obviously affected by the adverse weather conditions and pathetically insufficient public health facilities. We thus literally had thousands of exclusive stories, each with some specific details. Apparently, the features of a natural calamity became intertwined with the attributes of a man-made disaster. It will live in the memories of a large number of people – the personal stories worthy of a Manto.
The larger issues relating to the measures taken by the government to deal with a massive crisis have to be explored at another level. Karachi is the home of Edhi Foundation and people have wondered how the city would have coped with its bloody encounters with violence if the Edhi ambulances were not there to pick up the bodies and carry the wounded to the hospitals.
Well, it appeared that the Edhi Foundation and other similar, less extensive relief organisations were not able to carry the burden of casualties. Mortuaries were left with no more room for bodies and photographs of bodies stacked on the floor of a mortuary were published in the international media. Burying the dead in congested graveyards became a problem.
At the heart of all this was this painful realisation that most of the dead and severely afflicted individuals belonged to the lower depths of Karachi’s society. Quite a few of them came from the destitute class and could not even be identified. These marginalised people who are undernourished and live in slums are naturally very vulnerable to inclement conditions. They survive in patently unhealthy circumstances, without ventilation, water supply or proper sanitation.
Shortage of toilets in the slums and very crowded poor neighbourhoods is a crisis that has not been explored by either the media or the authorities that are often under the sway of the land and the builders’ mafia constructing gleaming towers in residential areas. Housing for the poor has never been on the rulers’ agenda.
What I am trying to underline is that this tragedy was multi-dimensional and contained messages that we should properly interpret and understand. In the first place, many lives could and should have been saved. It is a forbidding thought that this tragedy, in terms of its magnitude, was preventable. The mass media had the ability to promote facilities to treat patients of heat exhaustion in its initial stage. I do not know if Ramazan had any impact because taking of enough fluids like water is the standard medical prescription.
Anyway, there were intimations in this tragedy of the nature of our class society. It also reflects the state of social justice, particularly in the sphere of public health. Some accounts of conditions prevailing at large public hospitals were shocking. This is how the poor and the disadvantaged have been treated by rulers who are seen to be ruthless in the pursuit of their own narrow interests. These are the days when scams involving the high and the mighty of the political hierarchy are in the news.
Against this background, how did the Sindh government respond to a challenge that was an opportunity to establish its presence? I have suggested that a Manto could tell the stories of individual sufferings in the midst of a collective affliction. The follies of the rulers would also be a rich source of material for a creative writer. And the Sindh government unknowingly seemed to be following a script that may have been intended as a satire.
With some disbelief, I read a report about a late-night meeting chaired by the chief minister himself. It announced a one-day government holiday and a protest sit-in against Karachi Electric and the federal government. There certainly have been other decisions and steps taken at the official level. But the overall impression is obvious. The provincial administration has been too busy playing other games and is now incapable of meeting the test of a heatwave in Karachi.
This is not the first time that the shortcomings of Karachi’s physical and administrative infrastructure have been exposed. As it is, Karachi is deprived of certain fundamental resources that sustain a metropolitan community. The state of public transport in the city is akin to a permanent heatwave. In recent weeks, the water crisis was a reminder to the citizens of threats that are building up to social order.
Consider the fact that these warnings have come at a time when an operation against organised crime and corruption is gaining momentum. This only means that setting things right is a revolutionary enterprise. But where is the leader to spearhead this revolution?
The writer is a staff member. Email: ghazi_salahuddin@
hotmail.com