Ghost town Karachi

The media remains a bastion of freedom in these trying times in Pakistan

Karachiites woke up to an eerie sense of deja vu on Saturday morning. All major arteries were blocked with huge containers placed in the middle of the roads. When it ran out of containers from the Karachi port, the city government put up water tankers and trucks, with tyres deflated or altogether removed, as road blocks. A couple of major intersections were entirely dug up overnight to prevent opposition supporters and lawyers from going to the airport to receive the suspended chief justice of Pakistan. The city was brought to a standstill. Then fire shots roared all around, drowning the ambulance siren whose driver had been pulled out and shot dead by rioters.

Since the show of MQM8217;s muscle power on Saturday, Pakistan8217;s commercial capital and a city of teeming millions is a ghost town. The death toll in two days of rioting by rival parties has reached 42 and paramilitary forces have taken charge of the city. The opposition has effected a complete shutter down. The Sindh government has responded by declaring Monday a public holiday. 8216;Andher nagri, chaupat raja8217; is how a desperate beggar at a desolate crossroads in the centre of the city8217;s commercial hub summed up the situation.

While Saturday belonged to the MQM8217;s gun and stick-wielding bikers out on a rampage, Sunday saw a role reversal: everyone but the MQM supporters were out shooting, with Mohajir-owned households and businesses as their targets. Then, finally, paramilitary forces were called out and ordered to shoot and kill anyone seen rioting. The calm and peace Karachiites were counting as a blessing for the past few months has been shoved as an anomaly into a turbulent past.

8216;What happens next?8217; is the question agitating the minds of a sad and shocked citizenry, with their eyes glued to TV screens. The horrors of Saturday and Sunday, broadcast live by the news channels, including Aaj TV, whose offices were the target of direct firing for six long hours, refuse to recede into a distant memory. The simultaneous broadcasting of images of a jubilant General Musharraf, flanked by Shaukat Aziz and the ruling party bigwigs at the Muslim League8217;s show-of-strength rally in Islamabad, made matters worse. In utter bad taste, the general warned the opposition of consequences similar to those faced by it in Karachi if they continued to rally behind the suspended chief justice.

The media, meanwhile, remains a bastion of freedom in these trying times. Refusing to give up the forbidden fruit, TV channels and newspapers are reporting freely the countrywide closure of all commercial activity at the call of the opposition in protest of Karachi killings. Editorials, too, have gone the whole hog, censuring the government, the MQM, the military, with no holds barred.

The expulsion from Sindh on Saturday of the chief justice8217;s accompanying lawyers from Punjab and the month-long bar placed on their entering the province has created new fissures. Inter-provincial harmony, which only exists in state TV8217;s news bulletins 8212; between Punjab as the most powerful province and the other three federating units as victims of its hegemony 8212; has never been more conspicuous by its absence. Politicians and lawyers from Punjab have come on TV to give vent to their anger at the Sindh government8217;s expulsion orders served.

These images of the governor calling the shots have ignited the fires of hate among Karachi8217;s ethnic mix; reverberations are felt as far away as the Frontier and Punjab. The Pathans, Punjabis, Seraikis, Sindhis and others put together outnumber the Mohajirs in Karachi by a vast margin; a huge number of Mohajirs, too, have their loyalties with parties other than the MQM. The passionate anger expressed on TV screens by ordinary people in the rest of the country protesting over the Karachi killings is in turn fueling the tension in Karachi. And, guess what? Musharraf, this time round, will likely not be among the firefighters.

The writer is a Karachi-based editor with 8216;Dawn8217;