Missing…

Not a single day passes without the Karachi Press Club being besieged by clusters of protestors, often airing different complaints and grouses. They inevitably camp on the pavement under a canopy, block one side of the road and at times, obstruct the entrance to this consecrated institution, which is, of course, the only place in the city where people with serious grievances can air their grouses with impunity, because they can be sure of getting photographed and perhaps, a write-up. At times, this is particularly irritating to those members who have a major problem getting their transport through the front gate and are told they have to park in a side lane where chaps with illegal parking tickets are ready to pounce on them. December 10 was one of those days. People were swarming all over the place. On the lawn, a well organised protest meeting was being held where a string of orators made fiery speeches. And in the lounge, in a more subdued tone, speakers described the cavalier ruthlessness with which men were snatched from hearth and home. In case you haven’t by now guessed the subject, remember it was Human Rights Day and an occasion to remind the world about the many Baloch men who were abducted and never heard of again.

That very morning, the headlines had announced that 14 missing persons had been produced in court, of whom only six could be identified — from the media’s view. It was a most solemn occasion, unrelentingly miserable, sublimely tough and touching and at times, quite grizzly, especially when the families of those who have disappeared recounted the ordeal they passed through. So when a club member complained that he had a problem getting into his club, I told him that was because many Sindhis feel the necessity to travel hundreds of miles to Karachi to air their grievances. This is because of the sham democracy under which we live. As soon as an MPA is elected, he heads south and becomes totally inaccessible to his flock. And so, the poor sod who is desperately trying to get the government to appoint a gynaecologist qualified to conduct C-section operations in the local dispensary is faced with a predicament which appears insoluble. So he, too, heads south.



The late Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister of India, was also faced with this problem in a country with the world’s best bureaucrats and the world’s worst bureaucracy. Little had changed in a land where people went to the polls every five years, had 15 general elections and where the electorate unquestioningly accepts the verdict of the returning officers. Now, how does the little bloke in a village in Andhra Pradesh react, whose kids were down with measles, whose cow had stopped producing milk, whose tap invariably ran dry every second day and whose wife died because there was nobody to treat the rare disease she had contracted, when he had no access to his representative? And that, too, in a country where there were a mere 5,000 agents servicing a billion-strong multi-ethnic population? Rajiv came up with the answer. Expand the Panchayati Raj into a 250,000-strong force. Eventually, the unit employed over three million representatives, a third of them females. The share of women in the bureaucracy and civil society was also raised to 50 per cent. I am not sure if this would work in Pakistan in the rural areas because of the high level of corruption, police indifference, interference from the maulvis and a general sense of inertia. But it would be a start.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 15^th, 2013.

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