On the boil

Sindhi IDPs have just as much right to migrate to Karachi than the population already in residence.

Karachi is on the boil…again. Nothing unusual about this, of course, as there is plenty to rage about although, quite frankly, one didn’t expect helping hands to turn into vicious fists quite so quickly.

The internally displaced persons (IDPs) are not – this is not new either as displaced people from Fata quickly learnt – welcome in the city of lights if general chit-chat is to be believed. Strangely enough, among the most vicious decriers are some of those who initially rushed to help the flood-affected millions, collecting food, blankets, clothes, cash, etc, before galloping off to dole them out in the disaster area which was wonderful. Their abrupt reverse turn, however, erupted the minute IDPs began trickling into the city where, it appears, so many people simply don’t want them. These people ostentatiously moan and groan at images of the displaced flashing across their television screens and predominantly placed in newspapers but they do not want them to walk the already congested city streets as workers or otherwise.

“The city can’t cope with the population it has” says one such person. “These uneducated people have no place here. They shouldn’t be allowed to come. We already suffer from ethnic violence and if the IDPs are permitted to stay on then Sindhi nationalism will become prominent too. Resources and housing are under pressure as it is and finding work is increasingly difficult all round. Some of these people might find work as household servants but most of them will end up as beggars and the crime rate is sure to rise to an all-time high. They should have been forced to stay back in the areas they come from. There is no room for them here.”

Ethnically speaking, Sindhi IDPs have just as much right, in fact more, to migrate to the capital city of their home province than the large segment of the population already in residence which, 63 years down the line, continues to broadcast, blatantly in some cases, its pride in foreign ancestry and whose members enjoy nothing more than a visit to their roots if financially enabled.  Uneducated through no fault of their own, indigenous Sindhis, on the other hand, have, during Partition and ever since, been squeezed into smaller and smaller parcels of marginal land, each more inhospitable than the last, by migrants from across the border and by, it must be said, their own waderas who mercilessly exploit them to the nth degree.  Like the Australian aborigines, fisher folk Sindhis have been denied education, denied a decent level of medical care, denied the right to a reasonable standard of living and seen their language, culture and customs swamped by what is, to them, a foreign lingo and the attitudes that go with it. Like the endlessly persecuted aborigines they have every human right to object and, in this, their time of ultimate need, to seek the proverbial pot of gold promised to them by the city fathers along with Rs20,000 and a small plot of land. The gold, the rupees, the land being equally unlikely to materialise, they do still have, along with all other residents of the country, the right to migrate to Karachi if they so wish and the helping hands which have so nastily turned on them should think, more than twice, about their publicly proclaimed attitudes which will only serve, in the long term, to promote the very ethnic unrest they profess to deplore.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 14^th, 2010.