KARACHI CHRONICLE: Panic among the privileged

Panic gripped the residents of Clifton and Defence Housing Authority when the Met Office announced a cyclone alert on Monday evening. An exodus followed as frightened people left their homes and moved away from the seaside.
This was fright without a cause; a cyclone alert does not mean a cyclone is about to hit the city. In fact, no evacuation order was issued by the City District Government Karachi (CDGK) to the residents of Clifton and Defence.
Those who had cause to be afraid were the fisherfolk in the fishing villages along the coast of Sindh and Balochistan, and, thanks to the early warning issued by the Met Office, Army, Navy and local administration were busy evacuating people to higher ground.
The fisherfolk were cautious but unafraid because this is not the first time they were confronting choppy seas, it is an annual feature expected in May-June and again in October-November.
Anyone who was following the progress of cyclone Yemyin 03B on radio and television knew well that the path of the cyclone was 100Kms off the Karachi coast and heading for Balochistan coast where it was expected to make landfall at Gwadar, Jiwani, Pasni, Ormara or Lasbela. So why the panic among the residents of Clifton and Defence? In the 1980s they had similarly panicked and caused a memorable traffic jam along Boat Basin and over the Clifton Bridge. The rest of the city laughed at their foolishness.
Then, as now, they were reacting to a threat miles away from them. The Clifton and Defence area, which I call "bey-his ilaqa", comprise the privileged class of Karachi, with the most education, best housing, and other advantage that can be had from middle income and affluence.
While they conscientiously do their duty, such as paying Zakat and contributing generously at fundraisers, on a personal level they have little interaction with the rest of the city and are self-focused.
So a threat to the fishing villages is interpreted as a threat to their homes; "We live on the coast too, don't we?" said one Clifton resident to the press, voicing the generally held opinion of people living in Clifton and Defence. Normally (in other societies than ours), the privileged class are in the frontline helping others struck or likely to be struck by a calamity.
But to have the guts to stick your neck out you need to have a tradition for taking risks and a sense of obligation of the strong to help the helpless. Such traditions of bravery are born out of conditioning to risk. In a world in which defence no longer requires everybody to know how to fire a gun or wild a sword, sports has provided conditioning. Sailing and fishing on the high seas, horse riding and polo, mountain climbing, hunting, exploring, helping at archaeological digs, trekking are some of the expensive hobbies which teach the privileged crisis management and condition them to take risks.
Not Karachi's privileged class. How many indulge in these sports despite having the time and the money to do so? You can count them on your fingers. Karachi is a commercial city and her privileged class only knows how to give generously, but don't ask them to stick their necks out for anybody. They are the first to run from danger and hide. It almost seems as if Clifton and Defence is another Karachi.
Taking precautions is one thing, going into panic quite another matter. One is rational the other irrational behaviour. And what really was the merit of the thunderstorm that broke over Karachi last Saturday that it caused such a great panic in Clifton and Defence? Despite the terrific gale and lashing rain what Karachi has been experiencing since Saturday June 23 is just that, a thunderstorm, not a cyclone.
Karachi has never been hit by a cyclone and if, God forbid, it ever will be in the future, the early warning system of the Pakistan Meteorological Department is already in place. It can predict the likelihood of any natural calamity, such as an earthquake or cyclone well in advance: decades in the case of the former and several weeks in the case of the latter, for which satellite tracking can monitor the day-by-day development and path of the cyclone.
Following the earthquake of 2005 in Northern areas and Kashmir, the National Disaster Management Ordinance 2007 has been created to organise and conduct rescue work.
Karachi as never been hit by a cyclone but this was not the first time a thunderstorm of terrific force has visited the city. It is an expected annual event between May-June and October-November periods, when cyclone activity develops in the Arabian Sea.
The Arabian Sea cyclones are comparatively infrequent and of much lower intensity than those in the Bay of Bengal, yet they influence the weather in Sindh and Punjab. It is noted that the cyclonic winds tend to veer eastwards and so rarely threaten lower Balochistan's weather. Thunderstorms are a typical phenomena caused by cyclonic winds travelling northwards.
Even if they do not hit Pakistan coast and are weak, on coming sufficiently close (north of latitude 20 degrees north) the cyclonic winds induce thunderstorms over Sindh and Punjab. Their effect is much pronounced if during the same period a low-pressure weather system also crosses over into Pakistan from the west, as it did last Saturday, causing very high wind velocity and intermittent rainfall.
Because of global warming the frequency of cyclone development in the Arabian Sea has increased since the 1990s. During November 10-15, 1993 and June 8-22, 1996 cyclones passed very close to Karachi but made landfall in the Runn of Kutch. The cyclones caused freak weather in Punjab but no rain fell in Karachi, yet it induced stifling hot weather, causing a number of deaths due to heat-stroke. In the Punjab particularly Faisalabad and Lahore rains lashed for over a week causing untold havock.
In Karachi the most tense occasion was generated by the June 1998 cyclone which till the 8th of the month was heading straight towards the city. By international standards it was Category-I cyclone (the weakest category) carrying wind velocity of less than 150 kilometers per hour (kph). But under the influence of the south-westerly winds the speed built up as it approached. On the 9th of June it veered eastward and, passing over the Runn made landfall one the 10th in Kathiawar where thousands of people perished. The cyclone passed 200 kilometers from Karachi.
Because of the increased frequency of cyclonic activity in the Arabian Sea, Karachi should expect frequent thunderstorms. Last year it generated a full-blooded monsoon season and this year, too it seems, we will have a long spell of monsoon rains.
The city has been battered by gales carrying windspeed between 60-80 kph and heavy rainfall but the natural calamity was not the direct cause of the 200 deaths. Human greed, incompetence and mismanagement wrote their death warrants. Nature did not put up the giant billboards which collapsed killing 68 persons. Nature is not responsible for chaos at the KESC. If Nature did the municipal work, Karachi's stormdrains would have been clean and functioning.
On a personal note: while the people of Clifton and Defence were leaving their seaside homes, my siblings and I arranged to have a family dinner at Bar-B-Q tonight which is near the sea. Our Pathan genes makes us cavalier or crazy or stupid, whatever you may think. They were especially active on Monday making us impervious to the threat of being engulfed by a cyclone.
And we knew the restaurant would be open; after all the owners have the same idiotic genes. One of them, who is a friend of my brother, greeted us at the entrance and said to my brother, "I'm going to make a list of the names of all who have come today and give them free dinner next time." That was high compliment from a fellow "akhrot".