Celebrating diversity: ‘Instead of reclaiming the past, a new multicultural Karachi can be found’

Speakers at Aga Khan Hospital emphasise on deweaponising the city.

KARACHI: As most of Karachi’s population have migrated from across the subcontinent, the multicultural city is home to many ethnicities. A new peaceful city should be found instead of reclaiming what it was in the past, stressed the speakers at Aga Khan University’s seminar on Thursday.

At the seminar titled, ‘Reclaiming Karachi: crime and violence in our society and what we can do about it’, the speakers emphasised on the role of the government in sponsoring weaponisation and demanded the political parties to dismantle their militant wings while they blamed proliferation of arms for growing violence in the city.

‘Armed’ parliament

“Most of the government functionaries and parliament members are involved in spreading weapons in Karachi,” said freelance writer and a noted deweaponisation activist, Naeem Sadiq. “The parliament in Pakistan can be termed as an ‘armed’ parliament,” he claimed.



He further quoted the number of licences issued by the government to government officials and to the common man. “The government has issued 11 licences to the leader of a banned outfit, Malik Ishaq,” he claimed. The weapons are legally issued, which is the main hurdle in deweaponising the city, he said.

“Without deweaponising the city, we cannot reclaim Karachi and call it a peaceful city,” Sadiq stressed.

The people who want peace in the city will have to make the effort, he said. “The privileged class does not want to deweaponise the city,” he concluded.

Finding home abroad

Citizens’ Trust Against Crime’s member Nazim Haji, in his speech, recalled the 1985 Bushra Zaidi incidents in which the city witnessed its worst spell of violence and how different mafias, including the white-collar mafia, took the city hostage. “Our politics has become criminalised, all political parties have set up militant wings to meet ends through unfair means,” Haji accused.”To reclaim the peaceful Karachi’s past, we have to dismantle the militant wings of all political parties so that further bloodshed is avoided.”

Aga Khan Hospital’s trauma surgeon Dr Hassan Zafar discussed that different people from different walks of life have been affected by the violence.

“The stray bullet that hits any one, their whole life just changes,” Zafar said. The bloodshed has traumatised our country while we have witnessed a huge brain drain, he said.”This is the reason why the finest minds of our country are settling abroad,” he concluded.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 9^th,2013.