“Karachi is safe – only if its people want to keep it safe.” The mayor of Shah Faisal Colony, the town adjacent to Korangi, addressed every question from the talk show host using the same tactic that had kept him in office for over two decades – shifting the blame on a voiceless third party. “Don’t go out if you don’t have to. Don’t travel alone if you don’t wish to get mugged. Simple as that.”
The talk show was called Burning Point Pakistan and was famous for projecting flames in the background, as if broadcasting live from hell. Its host, with his pompadour and beaklike nose, had made a career out of assailing scoundrels such as the mayor.
He followed, “Very inspiring, sir. And can you advise your constituents which places to avoid in Shah Faisal? Surely you’re not saying your whole town is a vice den, are you?”
The mayor, confused as to how he could apply his strategy to this question, had just cleared the knot in his throat to blither yet another vague, blame-shifting response when, like a scalding knife, the host cut him off, “ – because if you do know where street crimes are happening, what’s stopping you from stopping them?”
The background flared up. The flames intensified from a mild yellow to a sharp, scorching orange. A quiet agitation furrowed the mayor’s egg-shaped head.
Back at the Ahmed’s, Qazi-ud-din burst out laughing at the quick wit of the host. This was why he loved primetime news so much.
“He’s finally got this bastard of a mayor…as it is.” He spat his words as he wrestled with a rubbery morsel of lamb nihari; the meat was so undercooked that half of the gravy was blood.
Sadia, who had cooked tonight’s dinner, was praying for her mistakes to go unnoticed. Now past the age of innocence, homemaking ought to have taken precedence over all matters for her, and mistakes, such as that of today, were a cause for scrutiny.
Waleed had not yet returned from work, but that did not stop the family from starting the dinner without him. “To hell with him, as it is,” Qazi-ud-din had said after saying his grace. “If his mother had taught him any manners, as it is, he would’ve known, as it is, what a dreadful sin it is, as it is, to keep food to wait.”
Nobody had dared to contest the patriarch.
At evenings, when the family crossed their legs on the dastarkhwan for dinner, they relied on the bulletproof television screen to color their dreadful silence. It was a half-hour jail sentence that no one looked forward to, except for Qazi-ud-din, who only stomached family dinners to watch his darling primetime news.
And the primetime news was an entertainment of the highest quality, made to be consumed at dinnertime by families all across Pakistan. The youngest of the Ahmeds, Hameed often quipped how the cat and mouse cartoons he loved were no different from these ballooned-up politicians with plastered wigs and ball sacks for chins chasing down one another with venomous words. You could tune into any news channel after nine o’clock and find the same spineless pack of charlatans shedding off their fake skin of civility, only present to assassinate characters, not address any public concern. Any catchy insult or unexpected jab would enjoy the brief life of viral content. This pageantry of mountebanks and reprobates was the bread and butter of Pakistani television.
Tonight’s primetime news was full of the same antics, even though the matter at hand was a damning one. A recently published report by an international watchdog had ranked Karachi as the third-most dangerous city in the world, behind Tijuana, Mexico, and Cape Town, South Africa, and every talk show wanted to have their say on it, including Burning Point Pakistan, which had invited the mayor of Shah Faisal Colony, one of the city’s most crime-infested towns, to address his contribution in Karachi’s demise.
“How would you define these men to our audience?” the host proceeded. “What sort of demographic do these men represent?”
“Men? Stop calling them men, my friend. They are parasites destroying the fabric of our society. And like parasites, they have no place in our towns and our city. I promise you,” the mayor gazed into the soul of the camera, “and my constituents, that we’ll cleanse our neighborhoods of these parasites, that we’ll squash them with the boot of justice and that they will face the strictest, most brutal punishment the law of the land has to offer…once we get our hands on them,” he mumbled the last remark.
“Parasites?! That’s very funny, sir. It really is, I must say. Because our team did a little digging,” the host shuffled through his notes and passed a few pieces of paper to the mayor, “and found police reports linking several of these so-called ‘parasites’ to the Muhajir Liberation Party – your party.”
It was no secret what the Muhajir Liberation Party, or the MLP, had become. Although its diehard supporters would harp more on its glory days, it was hard to separate the kingdom’s current state of despair with the misruling of its all-powerful king. Karachi’s fate was intertwined with the MLP: they pull a string and the city falls apart. In that same way, the Muhajir struggle was a telling of the history of Karachi: a history of defiance, a history of violence, a history soaked in blood.
Once, Karachi was the crown jewel of the Sindh province, whose natives, the Sindhis, were among its first settlers. But, their predominance came to be challenged at the arrival of the immigrants, the Muhajireen, after Partition, who found home in what was then the capital of a newborn republic. But the Muhajireen lacked a unified front that could mobilise them, because of which their majority was kept silent. And since the rest of the province was still the Sindhis’ stronghold, their indisputable provincial government helped fuel their dominance in Karachi. State-commissioned quotas in academic institutions and government offices were predominantly awarded to the Sindhis. Knowing the right people, rather than owning the merit, became the key to unlocking all doors, and since the Sindhis sat on the highest ranks, they extended their hands to help their own kind climb up. The cost of these discriminatory quotas was a sharp decline in Muhajir growth. Not only did this exacerbate disparity, as the Muhajireen could not land high-paying government jobs or enrol in accredited universities, it also resulted in their underrepresentation in local and provincial governments. The Muhajir nation watched their communities get tarnished through misallocation of city resources and inadequate municipal funding, which over the years resulted in atrophying infrastructures and hazardous sanitary conditions, creating slums such as Korangi Town.
It took 28 years since his first arrival for the Muhajir man to finally break. On an early June midday in 1975, the All-Karachi Radio Station broke a news that stole the city’s breath away: a young college student’s raped and mutilated body was found on the tracks of the Bagh-e-Jinnah Railway Station – gashes drawn on her face, eyes gouged out, breasts cut off, teeth shattered, hair yanked out of her head and her pallid body covered in cigarette marks. Written on her belly in blood were two words – “Muhajir Whore”.
That night, in an unprecedented demonstration of rage, a University of Karachi law student named Muhammad Khateeb Najmi led a gang of young Muhajireen into the crime scene with four barrels of petrol and mashals. By the time the police arrived, the railway station had been incinerated to ashes, along with any remaining trace of Muhajir subservience. The group branded itself the Muhajir Liberation Party and quickly gained the support of its people. The Muhajireen finally found their voice and after two months of mourning and bloodshed that tainted the Arabian Sea crimson, Karachi found its new masters. A couple of years later, the MLP took part in their first local elections and won it by a landslide, starting a winning streak that would become impossible for any rival to overcome.
Years of global and regional warfare, natural disasters and extended periods of recessions had led to millions of more people from diverse social, ethnic and religious backgrounds finding a home in Karachi, including the Pashtuns from the neighbouring Afghanistan.
Thirty-seven years since MLP’s inception, Karachi was now shared amongst four political parties: the Muhajir Liberation Party, the Sindhi National Front, the Pashtun People’s Revolution, and the Islamic Democratic Alliance. The MLP still owned the lion’s share of power, but things were changing, and they were changing quite rapidly. By many estimates, the general elections of 2013, which were in ten months’ time, was expected to be that turning point. The MLP could pledge all the great developments to the city, fearmonger as much as they could about the changing sectarian landscape and accuse its rivals of writing conspiracies against the Muhajireen, but if a well-respected, unbiased international organisation attested against their poor governance, there was very little they could do about it. That was why the mayor of Shah Faisal Colony had showed up on Burning Point Pakistan tonight, because the party leadership had asked him to do some damage control, which right now seemed like an impossible ask…
Excerpted with permission from The Oracle Of Hate, Hamza Jalil Albasit, Speaking Tiger Books.
