The rotting remains of Kolachi
“Karachi is called the city of lights, but its indigenous residents still live in darkness”. This is how Kamal Shah, a spokesperson for the fisherfolk of Ibrahim Hyderi, describes their plight.
Much of the land around Karachi’s Sea View and Korangi Creek was once home to established fishing communities. What replaced them was not a rising tide that lifted all boats, but rather the displacement of these fisherfolk, pushed to the margins and forced into slums by the sea. This upheaval has given rise to a host of problems in Ibrahim Hyderi, a settlement on the edge of Korangi Creek.
An English mirror
To understand Ibrahim Hyderi, we can compare it to what happened in the homeland of the former colonial rulers of Sindh, centuries ago, in England.
Any school or university kid in Pakistan who has flirted with radical politics of the Left and the history of capitalism won’t know about Ibrahim Hyderi, but will know to reference the Enclosure Acts of England religiously. The acts were passed during the 17th and 18th century, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
This is when the commons found themselves shut out of land that was once owned collectively, worked on and lived on by English villagers. The acts transformed all common land into private property. The peasantry was transformed into city slum dwellers in London, overcrowded, disease prone, and indignant. The multiplying urban population converted agrarian peoples into workers, helping fuel the industrial revolution.
There is an important caveat though: this state of affairs in England was not permanent. Over the centuries their society was victorious in defeating the slum level poverty, and created a relatively equal society during and shortly after the Second World War. Some inequality has resurfaced since, but people no longer live in rat-infested slums.
Displaced and forgotten
Ibrahim Hyderi is a 30-minute drive from DHA and Clifton, open to anyone who wishes to visit, although few would ever want to.
“Within my lifetime, it was once peaceful and scenic”, says Kamal Shah.
Much of the housing around the Korangi Creek and the coast “used to be a fishing village, Gizri. People were told to pack up overnight and leave”. The locals had no permits, of course, even though they had lived and fished there for centuries. Those people were forced to pack up and then crammed into Ibrahim Hyderi.
You often meet people in Karachi, who can describe in vivid detail the hardships and sufferings of those who live thousands of kilometres away. And yet many people living in Karachi’s upscale neighborhoods may not know the name Ibrahim Hyderi and the large scale displacement of these people, let alone the ethnic makeup of the area.
Since then, more people have flocked to this town for outcast communities. Farmers and fishermen from Keti Bunder are one of them. Since little freshwater trickles downstream from the Sindhu (Indus), the resultant “sea intrusion” along Sindh’s coastal belt has made farming impossible and forced many to migrate, in particular to Ibrahim Hyderi.
The Sindhu Delta
“Why do you want to imprison the river?”, asks Shah, as Karachi’s once “dead” rivers are lashing back with indifference to our roads. This is a timely reminder by Shah against the backdrop of the ongoing debate around building more dams on the Indus. Shah’s simple wisdom is backed by scientific consensus. According to the Sindh government’s own website, 90% of all commercial fishing is dependent on the mangroves, which have significantly declined due to constrained flow of the Indus. It’s not a surprise then that Shah believes that the ongoing flooding could benefit the delta and therefore the fisherfolk; “This is a flood to you, but for us it is a blessing.”
“The responsibility falls on the Sindh Government… We have the Malir and the Lyari Rivers, and the government should install treatment plants to make sure the sea water remains clean.” He adds that untreated sewage and industrial waste is dumped into these rivers and the oceans, forcing fisherfolk to sail further away from the coast to catch fish.
This request may fall on deaf ears considering that in the wake of the swelling up of the Malir River, the mayor of Karachi tweeted that “at this point the nadi is flowing like a river,” understandably causing people to make fun of the comment on social media. It reveals a darker reality that our rivers aren’t recognised as rivers but dumping grounds.
Shah recalls his time as a kid, when he could play a game by throwing a coin into the ocean and diving in to find the coin, when the ocean was cleaner, “Today, if a person dives in, you won’t be able to even see him.”
“Their fishing communities have been lost somewhere in the midst of the bungalows”, says Fatima Majeed, the newly appointed head of Sindh’s fisheries department. Majeed belongs to the fishing community herself. She adds, “Their jetties were seized from them…. We even protested and went to Islamabad… and although the fisherfolk were told that they would be compensated, it never happened.” A common story in Pakistan.
“The river (Sindhu) worked for tens of thousands of years to build the earth of Sindh… the river would bring silt downstream and help form the land, and push the sea forward… all this work has been undone in the 78 year history of our country,” says Majeed. Her comment should remind us of the Sindhu River as the foundational basis for the identity of Sindh, as well as much of the region.
Majeed believes that “As per natural law, people who live on the delta must have inalienable rights to the river.” She recalls that over 60 years ago “there was proper farming on the coast” facilitated by the abundance of fresh water. Since the river has been suffocated, and salt-water seepage has made farming impossible, causing people from the coastal belt to migrate to Ibrahim Hyderi.
It is important for people living around Sea View to read the following comment by Majeed: “Today, the fisherfolk have to put their nets on their bicycles and cycle to Sea View to catch fish. There they face harassment by police, and are sometimes thrown in jail. Then we have had to bail them out.”
Few in this part of Karachi, with liberal sensibilities, will have bothered to learn the people’s history of the coast.
The fisherwomen of Kolachi
“The nets made for fishing used to be made by women… and back in the day women would be fishing right alongside men,” shares Fatima Majeed. Karachi gets its name from a legendary fisherwoman called “Mai Kolachi”, belonging to a Sindhi “Kolachi” tribe on this coast. She is said to have defended her family from a sea monster that threatened her family, making her a symbolic protector of the coast.
Majeed claims, “The fisherwoman of history was an empowered woman.” She says that women could earn a decent income in recent history, prior to the destruction of the delta and the creation of elite housing projects. “But since the destruction of the Indus delta, not only have we lost our income, but also our culture.”
“The nets that are used today are imported... These nets are tighter and not only are they bad for the fish population, but also biodiversity.”
It is worth addressing this concern shared by Majeed. Could the government explore the option of promoting local productions of nets instead of importing them, thus generating familiar employment for women in Karachi?
“Women also clean shrimps. If there is a bucket of five kilogrammes, the women would make Rs200,” says Majeed. “This comes with health and safety issues. Almost no precautions are taken to take care of their health and safety... Many women have shifted towards urban work, working at people’s homes, at factories … outside of Karachi, in Thatta, Badin, women don’t even have these prospects available.”
Ethnic tensions
Ibrahim Hyderi is an ethnically diverse neighborhood. Sindhi, Baloch, Bengali, Muhajir and some Pashtuns will be found in various parts of the area. Although there is general coexistence in Ibrahim Hyderi, you do notice ethnic tensions. This became clear while observing a fight that nearly became physical on the drive back from the coast. Ethnic slurs were hurtled at a truck driver who had turned into an alley. While from a traffic point of view he may have been at fault, the episode points to the fact that people in this country don’t know how to resolve genuine disagreements through peaceful dialogue. Instead many resort to bigotry and hatred as a means of expressing disagreement.
Concentrating people together in extreme poverty of this kind is certain to bring about ethnic tensions. In posh neighbourhoods, often people don’t even know who their neighbour is and what ethnicity they belong to, simply because there is enough room for all. This does not excuse hatred that exists in poorer neighborhoods, but poverty is a significant factor causing hatred to fester.
Land grabber interests
In Ibrahim Hyderi, one sees large sections of the neighbourhood covered in garbage, coating the hills, often by the sea. When asked why it seems that the entire city’s garbage is dumped here, Shah replies that it is due to “land grabber interests”. It would have been bad enough if the city’s garbage was dumped there out of neglect and poor garbage disposal practices, but the reality is more sinister. “They keep dumping more and more garbage to take over a certain area, and then they put concrete and cement on it and claim the land”. Not only does this increase the likelihood of significant damage when and if the sea swallows the land in a cyclone, let alone the inevitable sea level rise in coastal Karachi over the next few decades; it points to poor enforcement of the law in Pakistan.
Development for whom
Are industrialisation and elite housing developments necessary for societal progress?
“Trawlers, launches, and uncontrolled fishing are a problem,” says Shah. 200 years back “uncontrolled fishing” would not have been an issue since the overall population would be a small fraction of today’s population, and there wouldn’t have been large “launchers” and industrial fishing.
The argument in favour of industrialisation is that it has produced unprecedented wealth and lifted folks out of poverty and gave us modern medicine. However, all of this could have been achieved without the plunder of nature, if we had constrained our economic system with strong moral laws. The subcontinent had the largest share of the world’s GDP and the richest bankers on the planet prior to British takeover, while an indigenous industrial revolution had been brewing in Bengal, at least according to historian William Dalrymple, as argued in his book "The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire". Is it possible that an indigenous industrial revolution would have been less destructive due to the indigenous value system that valued the sacred rivers, land and oceans?
Not only have we evidently failed to prosper since then, we have degenerated in the opposite direction, symbolised by what can only be called the shutting off of water to the region and the mass displacement of its communities. What do we like to call this?
Without moral progress through a reckoning with history, all economic and material progress is wasted. “Development” has not been a sign of our progress but proof of our moral underdevelopment.
At a time where we have made progress in technology, artificial intelligence, engineering marvels, have we been striving for moral progress? Or perhaps we believe that all morality has already been discovered and that case is now closed.
Fatima Majeed claims that the government can begin to address these issues by increasing flow to the Indus delta, developing a “sustainable” fishing policy and providing compensation for displacement.
“We have hopes from this government that they will formally recognise fisherfolk as “labour” and the rights that come with that,” remarks Majeed. She says that she has worked with different members and organisations within the community towards a proposal for the government.
It is yet to be seen if the destiny of Kolachi’s fishing community will lean towards justice and dignity, or if the trend of infinite development will continue at their expense.
Zain Haq is a freelance contributor
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author