The MQM chief,Altaf Hussain,has now demanded what his rival Awami National Party (ANP) has been demanding for months: call in the army to restore peace in Karachi. But in a bizarre corollary to that demand,Hussain also asked Manmohan Singh whether India had a heart big enough to take back five crore Mohajirs if Pakistan embarked on a policy of ethnic cleansing against them.
For its part,the Sindh government has announced a reward of 50 lakh rupees for reporting a terrorist and one crore for capturing one (or more) on camera as killings and vandalism continue in Karachi. The Frontier Constabulary,a notoriously ruthless paramilitary force from the colonial times,has been called into Karachi to restore peace. Interior Minister Rehman Malik promised all-out action to catch the killers,but promptly denied that action was being launched,because this would ruffle the MQMs feathers. Altaf Hussain also advised Karachiites to hoard up on rations to last a month. Will the battle for Karachi be lost and won in a months time?
Rehman Malik tells us that those who are killed include all ethnic groups,not just Mohajirs. But he also calls the killings a conspiracy to destabilise Karachi by those who wish to harm Pakistan. Do Pakistanis need foreigners to do this to them when they themselves are quite up to the job? This country is one big state of denial,where hate preachers preach and enforce their agenda with complete impunity; where terrorists and killers,even when nabbed,have such wobbly prosecution cases brought against them that the courts have no choice but to set the accused free.
All suspicion remains on the American diplomats who are now restricted to their cities of posting by the government,not allowed to leave without a No Objection Certificate from the Foreign Office. A similar restriction imposed on suspected terrorists and killers would have accomplished more for restoring normality to Karachi and other parts of the country.
The army chief,Ashfaq Pervez Kayani,met President Asif Ali Zardari on Tuesday to discuss internal and external security concerns,and the president called a meeting of his cabinet and loyal partymen from Sindh on Wednesday to review the security situation in Karachi. Again,representatives of the MQM and the ANP,the two erstwhile coalition partners in the Sindh government and major stakeholders in Karachi,were not invited. It seems the PPP is going it alone once again,as has been the norm. When unilaterally taken decisions did not work in the past it is unlikely they will work now.
The problem of Karachi is that,as the countrys commercial capital,it is the goose that lays the golden egg; the PPP and the ANP have just seven Karachi seats between them in the Sindh assembly,while the MQM commands 40. The other perennial issue in Sindh is that the MQM has the majority urban vote and the PPP the rural,yet the ruling party refuses to share any power in a meaningful manner with the urban vote holders. This has precipitated a virtual urban-rural divide,with devastating consequences for Karachi and Hyderabad,the latter being the second city of Sindh.
The PPPs hubris in running the Sindh province,its traditional power base,is the biggest hurdle in settling matters with other stakeholders in the province. The party has a feudal approach to governance because of its leaderships predominantly rural,feudal composition. Unless that changes,there is little hope that the party will come round to accepting that others who have been democratically elected also have the right to exercise some power. There is little hope of such a change taking place any time soon.
The writer is an editor with Dawn,Karachi,express@expressindia.com
