The scale of violence that periodically erupts in Karachi beggars description. How much of blood is shed on the streets of the country's most populous city every day it is mind-boggling. Not that previously such waves of violence were no less brutal - those too had taken huge toll of innocent lives but the one now weaving through the labyrinth of the metropolis is simply apocalyptic.
Some of the killings may fit the definition of targeted-killing - which is equally inhuman and therefore unacceptable and condemnable - but most of the casualties are innocent residents, who fall victim to the savagery for no other reason than that they happen to be there. Consider people being incarcerated for days in their own homes for fear of being hit by blind fire, their rations running short and their children crying for food. If Karachi today is not the proverbial killing field what is it then? This painful narrative is all the more poignant because there is no hope of retrieval and recovery from this lingering curse at any time soon.
As the current wave of violence entered the fourth day on Friday, the killers were very much on their job, to their time-tested experience the rulers of Karachi and the authorities responsible for maintenance of law and order would do nothing more than make shrill noises and empty promises. Till the evening of the third day of running mayhem no tangible move on the part of the authorities to stem the rising tide of violence was in evidence - as if a paralysis of mind. Then there was a hurriedly called meeting at the Chief Minister House and an order to shoot-to-kill the suspected assailants was passed. Later Interior Minister Rahman Malik showed up in the city and promised deployment of additional 1000 Rangers and Frontier Constabulary.
One is surrounded by a feeling of déjà vu; Rahman Malik may be a good fire-fighter but as to where is the source of sparks that occasionally set Karachi on fire, he seems to have no clue. No doubt Karachi is a mega-city with a population of 18 million, and it is a mosaic of different ethnic and linguistic segments of people. It is also true that since the days of the Afghan Jehad, the city's religious sections of population are afflicted with a sharp sectarian divide. Then a kind of compartmental feeling has come to exist between the old settlers and the new arrivals, who often find them furiously competing for the economic and commercial opportunities that Karachi as Pakistan's industrial and commercial hub offers.
And last but not least, the question who 'controls' the city of Karachi is always there to pit its various political power centres against one another. But there is nothing unusual about this, being the political geography of Karachi; the mega-cities all over the world host similar population peculiarities or fault lines. And they also contend with mafias and gangs as we have in Karachi, engaged in myriad criminal activities like land-grabbing, extortion, kidnapping-for-ransom, contract killers and hired thugs. But what keeps Karachi apart from those mega-urban centres is the low quality of law-enforcement by stiff policing and tough administrative control.
Unfortunately, the police force in the entire country is politicised but in Karachi it's to the maximum. Whenever the city's political order changes we get a new set of police officers, whose loyalty becomes suspect from day one. Unless that trend is reversed, in that the police force is completely de-politicized and is allowed to operate independently of political influence, there is no hope of redemption from violence that so often plagues the city of Karachi. Instead of calling in the Rangers and the FC troops, the government should undertake training of the existing police force along professional lines, as is the case of the armed forces. Not that such a requirement was not felt before; police reforms have been on the table for a long time, but political masters prefer a crony police force for the selective enforcement of law and order. Of course, political parties would never hesitate to use the police force for their purpose but it is up to the police to preserve its independence and autonomy of action.
The truth is that the political leadership have to move beyond the cosmetics of usual pledges of giving up patronage of mafias and criminal gangs because such pledges were made in the past only to be broken. This time let them move on a bit further and pass a law to ensure de-politicisation of police force. If the armed forces can shed of political influences, why can't it be done in case of the police force? That's the only option available to control violence and rampant mayhem in Karachi.