In the aftermath: Drops of blood for drops of polio

Sindh IG comes with a motorcade of 21 vehicles to inspect the site where police recruit Shahmir died a lonely death.

KARACHI: For 10 minutes he lay there. Bleeding. Gasping the last few breaths, writhing in agony. There were no screams. No pleas for mercy. And even if there was, no one heeded them.

Shahmir, the young police recruit who was shot dead while on duty with a polio vaccination team, died alone. Ironically, he was in a congested street, which would otherwise have been brimming with people at 11am — the time he was killed.

The street is a half-minute walk from Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, one of the busiest healthcare facilities in the city. On most days, the hospital is on high alert as emergencies are a norm in this part of the city. That fateful day, however, all the odds were stacked against Shahmir. The Edhi ambulance driver stationed at the hospital was sleeping when the incident occurred. "He responded quite late," said Munawar Khan, another ambulance driver who had replaced the former. "He should not have slept on duty."

The women living on the street Shahmir was killed blamed themselves. "All of us are cowards!" said one elderly resident, who was screaming from her first-floor balcony. She did not wish to be named. "That young boy lay there bleeding for 10 whole minutes before the backup police arrived. The least the people could do was offer him water or just be with him."

Twenty-four hours after the incident, the street still wore an eerily deserted look. The windows were sealed shut and so were the doors — an unnatural sight in an old city street. The most ominous sign was a patch of sand in the centre of the street. Shahmir's blood had soaked through the sand — with little blotches of blood apparent on the surface. This was where he was shot.

But things were slowly starting to come back to normalcy. A vegetable vendor pushed his cart up the narrow lane. As if on cue, windows and doors started opening up, some throwing down baskets in which he would put the vegetables of choice. Further down the street, labourers complacently worked on the construction of a house.

And then all hell broke loose. The wailing sirens of police mobiles filled the narrow street. "They have come to conduct a search operation," said one of the labourers with a worried look. "So what? We aren't thieves. Keep working," ordered their boss.

The police vans, meanwhile, kept coming. From far ahead, policemen frantically waved for people to get off the street. "Go inside or I will shoot," said one of the personnel, standing atop one of the vehicles, waving his rifle menacingly at the figure looking down from a third-floor balcony. One policeman said the inspector general had come to do a follow-up inspection of the site. The IG probably did not want to block the narrow street. He could not, however, prevent his 21-vehicle motorcade from trampling over the pool of blood where Shahmir died.

The IG and a few close aides stood near the site for a couple of minutes before speeding off. The flustered personnel visibly heaved a sigh of relief as they left. But the relief of the residents was more obvious. "They [police personnel] beat up two passersby yesterday just because they were on the street when a senior official had come to inspect the site," said an aged resident, who too did not wish to be named. "No one asked us what we saw, what actually occurred."

Nazimabad SHO Ejaz Lodhi, however, rebuffed the residents. Flustered from the incident and the bureaucratic hustle bustle in its wake, SHO Lodhi looked as if he had just been through hell. "Why don't you ask those residents why they did not help the policeman when he was lying there alone?" he questioned, when asked about the delayed response. "It could have been their son."

Not only was the officer upset with the residents, he lashed out at his senior officials too. "My jawans are out there, on the frontline, playing with death because of these ill-conceived policies." He explained that the number of personnel deployed for security duty was equal to the number of polio teams. "We put one police personnel with each polio team. Now they ask me why I did not put two policemen with each team. How can they expect me to provide something that I do not have?"

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2015.