New PTI MPA crusades to purge Clifton of push-cart vendors, filth, faqirs and send Johnnie walking

Commissioner brings Karachi departments together to assist newly elected representative.

KARACHI: The purgative instinct runs deep in Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf MPA Khurrum Sher Zaman. The newly elected 38-year-old wants the Karachi commissioner’s office to put its weight behind cleaning up his PS-112 constituency - literally and morally. He wants the garbage and thella wallahs removed, drains cleaned. He wants to end what he says is soliciting on Zamzama. He wants the street lights working because he feels it discourages crime and muggings. He wants them to tackle restaurants in Clifton which he alleges serve alcohol.

“Take the example of Dubai,” he says. “No alcohol is allowed, but you can get it in bars and certain hotels.” Make it legally clear, he argues so we know which restaurants to avoid. Just a short while ago he locked horns with Sindh law minister, Sikander Mandhro, on the floor of the Sindh Assembly over sex workers and serving alcohol.

A lot is riding on these agendas. A constituent member came to him complaining that when she took her five-year-old daughter to one restaurant, some people were drinking at the next table. The girl asked her mother to order the same thing. “I didn’t even want to drink from my own glass,” Zaman quotes the woman as telling him.

For a new MPA, Zaman has the rhetoric of a seasoned politician or a pulpit-pounder. “What is the name of this country,” he asks. In his answer lies the thrust of his argument: “The Islamic Republic of Pakistan.”

It is, of course, hard to argue with him when it comes to garbage and sewage in Clifton. With the exception of Blocks 8 and 9 and a few Gizri streets, which are with the cantonment, the rest falls in Saddar Town, which does a spectacularly bad job. And thus, a few days after taking oath, five months or so ago, Zaman went to the city government demanding that something be done. He did not get the response he wanted, leading to much anger. But on Wednesday, the Karachi commissioner called a meeting of all the departments.

For his part, Commissioner Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, stressed, according to a handout issued after the meeting, that, along with Clifton, the government would give priority to street lights, sewage, drain cleaning in the rest of the city. He also ordered Additional Deputy Commissioner South Fayaz Solangi to issue warning letters to all restaurants to stop serving alcohol or they would act against them under the law.

In some ways, MPA Zaman’s proclamation to “clean up” Clifton echoes the spirit of his leader’s mantra. Prior to the elections, Imran Khan’s popularity swelled on the back of revolutionary promises to sanitize Pakistan’s political landscape. Where Imran promised to “end corruption in 90 days”, Zaman wants Clifton cleaned in three.

“These Afghanis, people from interior (sic) Sindh, faqirs are behind the encroachments,” Zaman goes on to say, referring to, among others, Shah Rasool Colony where he wants push-cart vendors out. He wants one track of the Gizri to Zamzama boulevard be cleared. “Aap ghareeb hain is ka ye matlab nahi ke aap har cheez kharab karein,” he says. Just because you are poor doesn’t mean you can spoil things.

The city government machinery is cranking into motion for him. He receives a phone call an hour after the meeting at the commissioner’s office from a land and encroachment official. Zaman recommends they give the push-carts three days’ notice and then quietly remove them at night.

The only problem with such approaches, as pointed out repeatedly by urban planners such as Arif Hasan, is inclusivity. “Hawkers, poor people, commuters are not separable,” Hasan told The Express Tribune. Hawkers or push-cart vendors give the poor man a 30% cheaper price than a shop. “Wherever you will have bus stops you will have hawkers,” added Hasan, who co-wrote Hawkers of Saddar Bazaar in 2008. “It is simply because of an anti-poor bias that they are called encroachers. There is no bigger encroachment than DHA itself - first finish that one off.”

Zaman argues, however, that his solution is for the government to allocate its land for a separate designated encroachment bazaar. But, as Arif Hasan has pointed out, this defies the natural system of hawkers who will converge where there are poor people going to and from work. What is needed, says Hasan, is equitable legislation that legally gives them space. “If places like Thailand can do it, why can’t we.” But then again, perhaps Thailand’s example is not a good one to give Zaman.

Who is Khurrum Sher Zaman?

Khurrum Sher Zaman, whose background is Hindko via Abbottabad, was born in Karachi and spent most of his childhood in what is now his constituency. After his intermediate, he says he was admitted to the University of Minnesota but family circumstances did not permit him to go down that road. He calls himself a self-made man, having set up his own business, Krispy Broast Chicken, about a decade ago in Saddar. He decided to move away from the ‘Krispy’ when the menu was expanded to include Chinese. It was renamed KBC and has gone from a tiny 15-seat establishment to a place that can, he says, accommodate 1,200 diners.

Zaman joined the PTI in March 2013 and beat the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s Hafiz Mohammad Sohail by roughly 10,000 votes. “When I joined the party I said I wanted to be a leader, not a worker,” he says.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 31^st, 2013.