March 3, 2013
A Black Prado, windows tinted, waits outside of the elite Dolmen Mall. Inside, a group of men scan the female shoppers exiting. Each night for the past few months, they have been kidnapping and gang-raping two young girls in the city’s affluent areas: Clifton, Defense, and Zamzama. The streak does not endure: their sting leader returns, empty-handed and frenzied. The driver slams his foot on the accelerator as mall security guard Ghulam Din runs, feet slamming the pavement in stunned dejection, after the enigmatic car. That night, Facebook posts warn in a conspiratorial tone that the “Black Prado Gang” travel in vehicles with government license plates.
March 13, 2013
A car emblazoned with an Orangi Pilot Project bumper sticker stops at a traffic intersection. Inside, Parveen Rehman, the project’s director, considers fundraising for sanitation facilities in the Orangi squatter community. Assassins pull their trigger, however, before she can accelerate, and the social worker’s head slams against her dashboard. The assassins belong to the city’s land mafia, indignant at Rehman for revealing their maltreatment of impoverished communities. That night, there is a candlelight vigil: “May God honor the Mother of Karachi,” one banner reads.
January 17, 2014
A news van, engine humming, is parked outside of the Express News Live television network building. Inside, flies whiz near its windows. Three employees have just been shot at point-blank range, and the flies have come to feast. The Taliban, in response to the network’s anti- fundamentalist tone, claims responsibility. That night, Aslam Khan, the network’s Karachi bureau chief, wipes sweat from his neck. The salty liquid falls like blood, in steady, nervous drips, as he announces that station employees will now seek permission to carry weapons.
September 10, 2014
A car blaring recitations of Qu’ranic verses travels along a highway towards Nazimabad. Inside, Sunni cleric Maulana Masood Baig muses about his upcoming sermon at a local mosque. His thoughts are interrupted by screeching, shattering glass: he is struck by three bullets in the head and chest and falls against the windshield. Four armed men on motorcycles trail Baig’s car. That night, they smile at avenging the slain son of their beloved Shia leader, Allama Kumaili.
…
A bustling metropolis of 18 million on the Arabian Sea, Karachi is Pakistan’s economic stronghold, with exports submerging the Port of Bin Qasim and glib bankers jostling to buy shares in factory stocks. It is also, however, the nation’s citadel of crime. According to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Karachi is the most violent city in the world, with 2,000 murders per year. Though this crime reflects pervasive dissidence, it is in some ways unifying: almost every prominent group commits some form of it. The Shias and Sunnis engaged in a tit-for-tat sectarian quarrel. The Taliban espousing a vision of Islam that is incompatible with Western notions of a free press. Corrupt property-owners silencing humanitarian activists. The gang network instilling fear in the wealthy through sexual assault. Understanding criminality in Karachi, then, requires an understanding of the intersection of the sectarian, class, extremist, and gang forces that underlie the city’s politics—an intersection that dates back to the city’s founding as Pakistan’s capital some sixty years ago.
Jinnah, Partition this Subcontinent, Please
After the third local shooting in two weeks, Constantinos Doxiadis was growing weary. A Greek architect with activist inclinations, Constantinos had earlier been commissioned by Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to design Karachi. Envisioning the city as a community that would provide inexpensive access to public utilities, Constantinos found his task difficult to actualize. A single mistake in plotting a longitudinal coordinate, in distributing land amongst Karachi’s neighborhoods, and Karachi would lose both a city plan and planner. If infrastructure did not match municipal agendas—if one political faction disagreed with his strategic construction of army headquarters—Constantinos mused, he could be dead.
Constantinos’s fear was rooted in national political phenomena: a series of assassinations and betrayals in the executive branch had, it seemed, established a trend of criminality. At a 1951 political rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, had collapsed on the cobbled pavements with a bloody thud. Afghan nationalist Sa’ad Babrak was later convicted for the murder. Seven years later, Pakistan’s first President, Iskander Mirza, exited his palace with his head bowed and ego deflated; he was deposed in a 1958 coup d’état by the general he had previously appointed. By the time Constantinos finished marking his master grid, Karachi, in many ways, reflected its motherland; its population was rapidly growing, its unity rapidly shrinking. Constantinos, one could argue, foresaw Karachi’s tragic development. “Cities everywhere,” he cautioned Jinnah, “are becoming dystopias.”
Karachi’s dystopian history, though, began prior to its construction. It began in the partition of India—in Jinnah’s decision to institute an Islamic Republic. By the time the British had officially demarcated India and Pakistan in August of 1947, the largest mass relocation in human history had occurred; 14.5 million people in total crossed borders to join their respective religious majorities, which had convened on either side of the subcontinent. Of those individuals, 7.2 million—presumably Muslims—migrated from anti-Muslim pogroms in India to Pakistan. Mohajirs, the Arabic title for such Muslims, ended their flight from carnage by entering Karachi’s Nazimabad neighborhood. The remainder—presumably Hindus—migrated from Pakistan to India. “There was a mass exodus of people who found themselves on the wrong side of the dividing lines,” Steven Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, told the HPR. “You would think that [this relocation] would make [Pakistan] more stable. It actually became less stable over time.”
This instability initially arose in part because Karachi’s early Muslim settlers came from different Indian towns and accordingly brought their own mother tongues and loyalties. Bohra, Chhipa, Khoja, Memon: these were the city’s first major ethnic groups—all hailing from the Indian state of Gujrat. Karachi, in its early stages, essentially functioned as a collection of autonomous territories: within the city there existed multiple enclaves, each of which was ethnically homogenous.
Karachi’s current instability is an extension of such autonomy from homogeneity. While Karachi still remains an enclave for immigrants, it now attracts internally displaced persons rather than persecuted Indians. More specifically, Karachi’s recent Muslim settlers come from Pakistan’s own provinces. The result is what Brookings Institute fellow Teresita Schaffer observed to the HPR as “an ethnic cocktail.” Though Karachi is located in the province of Sindh, it is home to a relatively small percentage of Sindhis. By contrast, it houses close to 7 million Pashtuns and Balochis—more than the Federally Administered Tribal Areas from where both clans descend. “They came in trickles,” Dawn reporter Zia Ur Rehman wrote of these 7 million Muslims, “fleeing insurgencies and operations in their homes… But along with the tormented, came their tormentors, the very Taliban the refugees were fleeing from.”
Muslim Brother against Muslim Brother
When 28-year-old commander Muhammad Usman came to Karachi from the Swat valley in 2009, he brought with him a backpack stuffed with explosives, dried fruit, and instructions to “eliminate[e] rivals.” Usman is officially a member of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan or the TTP: a party that originated in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in the country’s north and fashioned an urban stronghold in the grime-streaked slums of Karachi. An alliance of scattered Islamist militant groups wanting to dismantle Pakistan’s national government and its perceived Western bias, the TTP has a notoriously criminal past. In May 2010, one of its trainees tried to detonate a car bomb in New York City’s crowded Times Square. In October 2012, ten of its ideologues claimed responsibility for shooting teen activist Malala Yousufzai as she rode home from school. And most recently, in December 2014, a gunman affiliate burst into an auditorium where children were taking an exam and committed Pakistan’s deadliest terror attack: 132 students, 10 staff members, and three soldiers died in a massacre at the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar.
Yet “the TTP in Karachi is a different phenomenon than the TTP in tribal areas of [Pakistan],” cautioned Nazia Hussain, a research scholar at George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center. They are “politically savvy,” she explained to the HPR, and have “violently edged out the secular ANP.” The Awami National Party, better known as the ANP, is a relatively young political faction—founded in 1986—holding only a single seat in Pakistan’s Parliament. Comprised mostly of uncompromising Pashtuns, the ANP has surprisingly far-reaching influence. Abiding by its platform of democratic socialism and economic egalitarianism, it attracts many who share these same ideals: in this case, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. The MQM is certainly controversial—its founder and leader, Altaf Hussain, has been exiled to the United Kingdom and charged numerous times with extortion—but it is also powerful. As Sindh’s second largest party, boasting 37 out of 130 seats, and Pakistan’s fourth largest, it adorns Karachi’s stone buildings with its signature flags: green, red, and white, with a kite nestled in the midst of these coalescing colors.
These flag-waving, Urdu-speaking urban dwellers—perennially engaged in an on-again-off-again camaraderie with the ANP—are the rivals that Usman to eliminate. And he, along with the rest of Karachi’s TTP, are doing just that. The TTP derives its political savvy from a two-pronged strategy. The first aspect is simple; draw strength in numbers. As a Sunni coalition, the TTP benefits from Pakistan’s sectarian paradigm. Followers of Shi’a Islam constitute only 15 to 25 percent of Pakistan’s population, while the remaining 75 to 85 percent are, like the TTP, followers of Sunni Islam. It’s no surprise that TTP leaders issue such antagonistic statements; “whom so ever leads a campaign against Islam and Shariah is ordered to be killed by Shariah.” In broadcasting a stringent ideology, the TTP associates minority Muslims—Shias included—as opponents of Shariah and, in turn, reiterates an “us vs. them” dichotomy. So while TTP leaders themselves conduct major attacks—such as the 2009 bombing at a Karachi march commemorating a Shi’a holy day, Ashura—riled constituents, avenging personal grievances under the guise of an Islamist campaign, perpetuate sectarianism through individual murders. “We are now seeing sectarian tensions triggered not only by terrorism incidents,” remarked Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, “but average clashes within the sectarian communities.” With each “average clash”, the TTP gains another vote from the Sunni majority. But these clashes are also born from constructs other than religion, namely, class.
Brother, Can you Spare a Dime?
On a humid March 2013 afternoon, outside a Karachi suburb, smoke clouds billow from towering factories. Acting as opaque curtains, the clouds shroud a decrepit house and the more than 20 people gathered around it from sight.
The house is a court and the people want prosecution.
They have come to the TTP, who offer mobile justice, to settle a property dispute. A small business owner’s plot of land, they insist, was usurped by mafia. The Taliban deliberate for a grueling two hours before adjourning the hearing; the people will have to voice their grievances once more—on a different date and at a different house—for a chance at retribution.
This appeal to the TTP indicates the second part of the Taliban’s strategy: serve as Karachi’s de facto judicial system. Residents—especially more impoverished ones—have, at an alarming rate, become satisfied with this de facto justice. After a man reported a theft in January 2013, for instance, the TTP returned the goods and publicly lashed the alleged thief. Compared to a 28 percent conviction rate in regular Karachi courts, the TTP offers responsive dependability. Subverting legal hierarchies, the party has become, essentially, Pakistan’s Robin Hood. “It is not a reign that has been accepted with open hearts,” Nazia Hussain explains. “It is a reign justified by necessity and fear. There is a need that is being fulfilled for those who are completely marginalized.”
And Karachi’s police are ill-equipped to meet this need. Mostly because they, too, have become marginalized, operating under the motivation of kill or be killed. Sixteen officers have already been murdered by TTP militia in 2015, a grim total on track to reach last year’s number of 142. The numbers indicate that, like the inhabitants of Karachi whom they strive to serve, the police lack adequate resources. With one officer for every 830 individuals—a third of the ratio in Delhi— their limited manpower is rendered worse by government neglect. Despite the police’s two-year long counterinsurgency mission against the TTP, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif refuses to institute a federally funded plan to safeguard officers who are often the targets of Taliban shootings. In a meeting with Karachi’s police chief, Ghulam Qadir Thebo, on January 30, 2015, Sharif deflected complaints that armored cars, bulletproof vests, and helmets were given only to elite units and that other units required money to acquire such defensive measures. Thebo retreated back to Karachi’s only major police station—staffed by 27 officers, yet responsible for protecting 400,000.
“When the Night Falls”
On the eve of Election Day in November 2012, a Karachi shop-keeper handed authorities a seven-line handwritten note with a bullet casing slapped to the bottom. “If you don’t deliver us one million rupees,” it read, “we’ll cut you into pieces and kill your entire family.” The death threat was from a gang—one of many that prowl the streets in search of wealth.
In an environment where the Taliban manipulate vulnerable enthusiasts to assume power and where disgruntled police can neither protect citizens nor themselves, gangs have capitalized on political volatility for socioeconomic gains. This is, however, no new phenomenon in Karachi. Serving as a transit point in the illegal drug trade from India to China during the pre-colonial era, Karachi once again became submerged in transactions when the route reopened after the Afghan-Soviet war. “Small-time gangs,” Hussain described to the HPR, “became transnational drug syndicates [because] the passage of opium and heroin…was grown in Afghanistan and transited through Karachi.” Such smuggling has since become politicized with the rise of organized crime, and Karachi remains at the center of slick dealings.
Dawood Ibrahim—pudgy, mustached, and, more often than not, wearing shades that tint ash puffed from his cigarettes—is Karachi’s paragon crime lord. The most trusted confidant of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the 59-year-old is India’s worst nightmare. Infamous for orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai grenade attacks, Ibrahim does not shy from harming his birth nation through the D-Company, his massive crime collective, with headquarters in Dubai and Karachi. Ibrahim’s most recent alleged mission to assassinate Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonstrates this well. Yet more importantly, perhaps, his amity with the Pakistani government points to motivations other than cash for covert operations—motivations that could land gangs like the one that terrorized the Karachi shopkeeper into positions of political authority. “[Some] gangs nurture political ambitions and also want a seat at the table,” Hussain notes.
The ANP and MQM have noticed. And they are fighting to keep their seats. In a joint petition issued last month, both parties announced their anti-Talibanization and gang program. Staging a walkout, ANP Senator Shahi Syed demanded Sindh’s provincial government combat “genocide” against Pashtuns. “Launch a military operation in Karachi to clean it of filth,” he cried. “Don’t force us to pick up weapons.” While it appears weapons have become a commodity of choice in Karachi, so too have words—they are all politicians have left.
When MQM representatives left the Senate, they dropped on the Senate floor poetry excerpts from their late leader, Dr. Imran Farooq, in what appears an armistice:
When the night falls, engulfing everything like a dark sea,
In the silence of night, the moonlight whispers to me,
Telling the stories of sorrows and pains,
Of those who lost everything without gain,
At the altar of tyranny…
When the night falls, my imagination shows me all these sights,
Sad faces of mothers, sisters, children and wives,
Tears twinkling like stars of pain in their eyes,
Saying only one thing with silent lips,
On my heart, drops of their words drip,
“Don’t dare to betray our sacrifices,
Besides this we don’t want any rewards or prizes
Our tears are words of request to you,
Don’t betray the cause, please don’t do.”
Image sources: Wikimedia Commons /