Karachi: "Asia's roughest, toughest town"

Karachi: "Asia's roughest, toughest town"

Majyd Aziz

TIME magazine came up with this description of Karachi more than seven years ago. Since then, Karachi has had a yo-yo reputation moving up on the positive image graph as the City of Lights and dipping down as the City of Danger. What has happened to Karachi nowadays?

KARACHI, the City of Lights. This sobriquet was cherished with unabashed pride by the denizens of Karachi. Alas, domestic politics, parochial resentment, and influx of aliens in search of employment opportunities, quality life, and relishing the charms of a metropolis, converged into a ball of turmoil that transformed this vibrant city into a perpetual no-go area for foreigners and non-Karachiites. Yet, inspite of all planned or merciless actions to ensure that Karachi becomes the City of Darkness, the people who call Karachi their home are still displaying fortitude and determination to ward off all such intrigues and maneuvers against their city.

Karachi has undergone a monumental transformation over the past decade. Land prices have sky-rocketed, the Karachi Stock Exchange is creating new records every day, industrial units are on an expansion spree, halls and hotels for weddings are booked for months, automakers cannot meet demand inspite of running 24/7, philanthropists are donating billions for social infrastructure, while underpasses, expressways and highways are coming up all over the city, the two ports are geared up for the upsurge in global economic activity, political parties are allowed all freedom, and at times it is difficult to get workers because they are fully employed.

Karachi is also hostage to the land mafia whose objective is to gobble up all available land, and then go a step further by usurping land owned by citizens thru connivance of unscrupulous petty officers in government’s land departments or thru corrupt officers of the law. Karachi is saturated with drug addicts due to the proliferation and easy availability of a plethora of drugs courtesy the drug mafia. Street crimes take place every few minutes while Karachi’s elite residential areas are patrolled by uniformed guards to protect the residents of palatial bungalows from burglaries and kidnappings.

All one can say is that the Mafia groups are the Untouchables. Al Capone, the Chicago Don would have loved to be in Karachi circa 2010. Maybe, just maybe, Eliot Ness, the US Federal Agent who headed The Untouchables team and made life miserable for Capone in the 1930s, would have been his partner and not his nemesis in this metropolitan city.

Karachi is now in the throes of a phenomenon known as “target killings”. This adjective is affixed on most of the free-for-all killings taking place as a matter of the daily culture of murders and sniper attacks. The connotation is ethnic or political. One is not sure whether all murders are a result of focused targets, but even vendetta, jealousy, and casual murders are classified under the cover of target killing. As always, the law-enforcers profess to catch the perpetrators but so far innocents are hauled in while the criminals are safely ensconced in the sanctuaries of their protectors.
Daikho Gay Toh Mil Jayen Gi Har Mor Pay Laashain.
Dhoondo Gay Toh Is Shahr Main Qaatil Na Milay Ga.

The highlight of any aftermath is the appearance of the Interior Minister who pledges to cleanse the city from the venom of the desperadoes within the next seventy two hours. Recently, a highly charged meeting at Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry turned into a boisterous and cacophonous condemnation of the Interior Minister who was smart enough to refrain from entering the portals of the KCCI to face this agitated group of small traders as well as industrial tycoons. He did show up the next day, but at the Governor’s House where the KCCI hierarchy were mollified by him and the Governor and where he decided to visit the Shershah Market hanging onto a police mobile a la a Karachi bus conductor.

Meantime, the ravaging floods forced many of the affected citizens to swarm into Karachi where they are living a deplorable existence in make-shift tents, dependant on the largesse of charities of those who desire to care and feed them. Of course, the government functionaries who have been tasked to make life bearable for these victims are, as in the past, finding ways and means to grab the allocated money as well as pilfer the essential commodities. Their nonchalant attitude, their arbitrary decisions, and their discretionary powers have been vividly highlighted in the media and observed by foreign as well as domestic people. It is a pity that altruism is seldom a virtue in officialdom.

The toll of the negative image of Karachi has been further magnified by the continuous load-shedding of electricity, the low gas pressure, the erratic availability of water, the ballooning corruption at all tiers of the government machinery, and the landscaping of its beautiful environment by scattered litter, heaps of stomach-churning garbage, and obnoxious graffiti nearly everywhere.

The question being generally asked by one and all is “who owns Karachi?” and then no one is there to answer. Is it the domain of an ethnic party? Is it the responsibility of the provincial government? Is it a decreed Federal subject? Is it an abandoned orphan? Who does own Karachi? Do the 20 million denizens of this metropolis in the south own it? But then, who are its real denizens? Those who were born here or whose families migrated from their ancestral abodes in India after 1947 or those who come to seek their fortune in this city from the rest of Pakistan and then make their stay permanent, or those who are termed as illegal aliens, coming in from Afghanistan, Iran, Burma, or Bangladesh, etc? Karachi is Pakistan and Karachi will always be Karachi. It does not matter who is out to ruin the peace of Karachi. Karachi lives on. In our souls.

Haqiqaton se bhi inkar hai toh honay doh
Yazid bur sar-e-paikar hai toh honay doh
Hum ahley jabr se manwaain ge haqooq apnay
Sarron pe zulm ki talwar hai toh honay doh


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Karachi, Pakistan, November 02, 2010