Clean-up order
The latest effort to curb street crime in Karachi came in the form of a “direction” from President Asif Zardari to Sindh Chief Minister Murah Ali Shah during a meeting in the country’s commercial capital. But much of the meeting, which also included Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi and other top political leaders, was theatre. Lest we forget, Zardari is still arguably the most important leader in the PPP and has been Shah’s party boss for the past 15-plus years.
Regardless of whether the order came from President Zardari or PPP leader Zardari, Shah faces the same set of challenges he has been dealing with for the past eight years. The issue of illegal occupation of land is not a new one, and many of the illegally occupied areas of the city have been in adverse possession since before Shah assumed the role of CM.
While Shah did note that Karachi has dropped from sixth to 82nd place in the “world crime index”, many such indexes are based either on public perception, which is subjective and unreliable, or government statistics which are often calculated differently in different countries, making comparisons unfair. So while Shah was quick to compare how Karachi ranked favourably to many other major cities around the world, we are quite sure that almost every Karachiite would happily move to Paris or Washington DC — both of which rank worse on the crime index — if given the chance. Also, neither Paris nor Washington goes into lockdown when a foreign dignitary is visiting.
Bringing down crime rate is not just a matter of increasing security presence or arming law enforcers with better weapons. Job creation and provision of social services are major factors in ending the feeling of deprivation that leads many disaffected youth into lives of crime. On this, the failure has been universal. The governments in Islamabad and the provinces have failed for years to bring the kind of changes that Karachi and other large cities need to provide young people with jobs and a social security net that would make a life of crime unattractive.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 3rd, 2024.
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