Violence and Karachi

It doesn’t take much to ignite violence in Karachi. And by the standards of the volatile city, the armed attack on the Karachi chief of the Ahle Sunnat Wal-Jamaat — previously known as the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan — Maulana Aurangzeb Farooqi constituted a major event. While Farooqi survived the attack, carried out by unidentified men armed with automatic guns, his driver, a private security guard and four policemen did not have the same luck.

The incident, predictably enough, triggered off violence across the vulnerable city, with spots of trouble flaring up everywhere as ASWJ supporters took to the streets in several areas. Some threw stones on cars in anger of the attack and a total of 18 people were killed by the morning of December 26 in various incidents all over the city. The toll, of course, could rise with the group calling a strike for December 26 and with sectarian violence hardly an unknown factor in that city. We can for now only hope and pray that the kind of bloodbaths seen in the past do not erupt — although, naivety aside, they probably will.



What we also need to do is stand back and take a broader view of Karachi. The situation in the city is troubling — especially so close to polls. It is impossible to tell what will happen next. But what we do know is that we desperately need calm to be restored. A failure to do that could jeopardise polls; this grim possibility is already being spoken of and would plunge our country into chaos. Are there forces that want this? We do not really know. It is hard to distinguish between truth and rumour. But what we do need is to ensure Karachi does not plunge into another round of mayhem — both for the sake of the innocent people who live there and for the sake of the nation as a whole. Somehow, calm needs to be restored, incidents such as the attack on the ASWJ leader avoided, so that things do not continue to disintegrate. For this to happen would mark a disaster that our struggling democracy simply cannot sustain at the present time, given all the other difficulties it already faces at a time when troubles seem to be gathering rapidly all around it and coming in from many different directions. Somebody needs to save Karachi.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 27^th, 2012.