Mohammad Kashif, 18, showed off three bullet holes in his family's tea shop. Fighting broke out after a neighbor was killed and "cut to pieces" while buying bread in a Pashtun area, he says. Kashif hid in his house for three days until the Rangers arrived to enforce a fragile truce. "There's still a lot of uncertainty," says Kashif. "The situation could get bad again."
Achieving peace is not the only critical issue dividing Karachi's politicians. For the past two years, this megacity has been in an administrative limbo, while the PPP and MQM squabble over how it should be run: by a locally elected government or centrally appointed bureaucrats. "Nobody is talking about how essential services will be provided to the citizens," says Noman Ahmed, an architect and town planner with the NED University of Engineering and Technology. "That appears to be a sideline." Karachi remains a maximum city with minimum governance.
The MQM's decline is inevitable, believes Shahnawaz Farooqi, because despite its political stranglehold the party has done little to improve city life. For Farooqi — a Mohajir who writes for the Daily Jasarat, a newspaper owned by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's oldest religious party — Karachi is proof that "secular forces are failing in every respect" and that "religious parties will emerge as a strong political force on their own merit." He points to post-Mubarak Egypt, where Islamic parties won at least two-thirds of the seats in recent parliamentary elections.
However, Pakistan's religious parties fared poorly in the last national elections, in 2008. The religious coalition known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal lost 50 out of 272 seats in the assembly, falling to a total of just six. Even if they were to establish a presence in provincial assemblies like Sindh's, there is no guarantee religious parties would run Karachi any better. A December report by Crisis Group, the Brussels-based think tank, says that they are "committed to a narrow partisan agenda and willing to defend it through violence" — a description that could apply equally to Karachi's secular parties.
Salvation in Growth
So is there any good news? Ghazi Salahuddin, a member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) who investigated the recent violence, has mixed feelings. On one hand, he takes heart in Karachi's growing civic-mindedness, pointing to successful local nonprofits such as the Citizens Foundation, which has built hundreds of schools across Pakistan, or Shehri, an environmental group that has fought to save city parks from land-grabbers. On the other, he wonders whether such efforts will be "overwhelmed by the darkness." By that, he means continued political bloodshed. "While gangs of land-grabbers and mafias have tried to exploit the breakdown of law and order," reported the HRCP in September, "they do not appear to be the main directors of the horrible game of death and destruction; that distinction belongs to more powerful political groups."
At Karachi's universities, for example, women students often outnumber men, even in traditionally male-dominated subjects. "I taught a batch of 35 students in which 34 were girls," recalls the architect Ahmed, who is also NED University's chairman. These young women also seem to be marrying much later, as are the men. "For the first time in the history of this city, you have an overwhelming majority of unmarried adolescents, which is enough to change family structures and gender relations," says Hasan. "Project these figures 10 years from now and you will have a totally different Karachi."
The forces of urbanization benefit not only Karachi's middle classes but also its new arrivals. In the past, says Ahmed, Pashtun men worked in Karachi and remitted their earnings to families in the conservative hinterlands. Now they are bringing their families with them — not to "Talibanize" the city, as MQM propagandists put it, but to gain access to jobs, health care and education. "They even send their girls to school, which is not something they'd do back in their hometowns."
Karachi is doomed, Karachi is indestructible. Meet students on the NED campus, and you sense they are battling with the same contradiction. They despair of ever dislodging the politicians they unanimously blame for the city's dysfunction. But they still have hope for their hyperkinetic hometown. When I asked Fariha Sajid, a 21-year-old architecture student, which part of Karachi was her favorite, she shot me a challenging look. "All of it," she replied. (End)
Courtesy of Column Time
آج : جمعرات ، 23 فروری ، 2012
