It's made to be more-or-less unmissable by the multitudes that trudge underneath. The street, after all, feeds into the frenzy of Saddar and Shahrah-e-Faisal (which was itself recently smothered in maddening PPP membership appeals--"Socialism Is Our Economy" plastered unapologetically above The Most Famous Grin in Pakistan).
I know that our area's denizens will applaud the idea. I can't count the number of times I've heard, in one bourgeois safehouse or another, theses on trash habits and Premodernity. It's as if, in the world of Pajeros and I-Phones, it's the juice-boxes and paan stains that stand between Pakistan and the promised land.
Whenever I pass by on my way home, though, my eyes invariably fix on a smaller, subtler sub-heading, printed in green letters that run along the top edge: "Operation Clean-Up." Even as the banner lolls about in the wind, these words seem to stay still with self-importance.
Ah yes, Operation Clean-Up. It's in that sense that the all-English sign serves its purpose--as a reminder to the settled residents of these parts of South-Central Karachi: We will keep your streets chaste, your trees green, and your gates secure. Worry not, you who wield foreign passports and English educations. Your city is safe with us.
Operation Clean-Up.
This is the civil society of Marx's early writings--an island of bourgeois civics in a sea of lumpen misery. This pampered noblesse, with their fashion extravaganzas and catered charity bashes, were the object of Fanon's undying dismay: mimicking the West while Karachi burns around them. I don't know if the Lawyers' movement ever understood?
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I can't help but think of a grinning Syed Mustafa Kamal, patron-saint of this "world city" (who knew modernity meant Sofitels over hospitals? Let the sick soak in the spas, I suppose.)
Plant trees, save the planet, take pictures. Operation Clean-Up. Cast for your Dubai wet-dream: Sheikhs as investors, Dreamers as planners, Whites as residents--apartment buildings to scrape the sky; beaches to be deloused (Fisherfolk move aside!). Operation Clean-Up. Build flyovers, so that many a burgher bhaabi can be spared the indignity of driving through the lies, the grind, the grime. Operation Clean-Up.
Cobble together the deepest fears of our urban elite, invoke the Bogeyman (in fact, give him a beard, some bombs, and a pathological hatred for girls' schooling), buy some guns. Operation Clean-Up. Ring up some lackeys (bring your gun), burn some shops, purge some neighborhoods. Operation Clean-Up. Kick ass, take names, win votes. Operation Clean-Up.
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I write this, after all, because two weeks ago Karachi imploded. This city, saddled with a history of "ethnic strife," the media-men told us, had once more cracked under the weight of difference. Mohajirs shot Pashtuns, Pashtuns shot Mohajirs--throw in the specter of the "land mafia," mix well with some palace politicking, and you have the governing coalition's official explanation. No one remembered to tell the stocky Afghani man that darts up and down the right wing in our football scrimmages at the Polo Ground that "difference" was the sticking point, but so it goes (Gattuso's little brother they call him, for the hair and the red cards).
"Scores dead, hundreds wounded", ran the ticker-tape headlines. Karachi might just as well have been hit by a senseless epidemic. "X number of buses burned, Y number of shops closed, Z number of neighborhoods affected." No explanation, no context, just "the facts." Very few of our Satellite Jacobins seemed prepared to ask what was actually happening. Instead--invariably, I suppose--they ran the liberal line: on-the-hour updates, flashing photos of children in hospital wards, mothers in tears. "Hurricane Ethnic Violence has struck! Karachi in chaos!" The streets emptied, schools closed.
Of course, it's here at this moment of non-explanation, that the paradigm makes clear its conservative foundations. As all abnormal violence is denounced, however correctly, in the name of the peace that previously prevailed, what's really being pursued is the Restoration. One mustn't talk of the systemic violence that scarred the status quo--hunger, unemployment, thirst, patriarchy--everyone seeks chronology and the breaking news and "peace," not sociology and root causes and emancipation.
Granted, root causes don't quite fit here, though they have their place--we weren't dealing primarily with an outburst of the oppressed, after all, but with pogroms planned by Karachi's oppressors. Why else would "ethnic strife" stop for Eid, except if on cue? And let's not forget that Altaf Bhai, crackling in on the line from London, had been slowly setting the stage, for months. "Save us from Talibanization!," scream MQM's now-tattered, monochrome posters. What tripe!
Thus, in this case, what's more apparent is the myopia of the commonsense condemnation of "all" violence. As each outburst is inveighed against without distinction, they all threaten to become indistinguishable from one another. The paroxysms of Pashtun immigrants are equated to the expulsions of their families, the burning of their homes, their buses, their shops. Again, no background, no analysis, just the "numbers."
What's more, perhaps the entire tragedy of the liberal world-view is that one brand of violence, one kind of terror, remains basically unimpeachable. If, following Weber, polite politics begins where one accepts the authority of the State's coercive arms (their "monopoly over the legitimate use of violence"), a certain "right to violence" gets normalized by this knee-jerk call to peace. As society summons the State's proxies, it becomes terribly tempting to ignore the role of those same institutions, either generally (in securing the asymmetries and stoking the grievances that make conflagration inevitable), or specifically (in facilitating fascist violence). If the liberal, then, believes that the police intervene in order to save society from itself, others have always understood that this invariably happens at Power's behest.
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Two days before I went to Landhi, to hear some of this for myself, I cycled through a Dawn.com slideshow of pictures from "The Violence." The cameraperson had obviously accompanied the police on a "Search and Destroy" mission through an "Afghan refugee camp"--image after image enacted the swift arrest of "suspected criminals" by smartly-dressed police and paramilitary men (the "Rangers"). Guns out (not just for the camera, one imagines), sunglasses on, uniforms ironed, these guardians of the peace were tossing bedraggled, bewildered Pashtun men into the back of their flatbeds as if it were hero meets hostage-taker.
I don't think that they--the Government, the Police, the Media--really believe that everyone has digested all this "score one for the good guys" bunkum. What's certain, though, is that they know they can rely on us, in our urge for regularity to resume, to excuse and to forget. And in order to sustain the myriad tyrannies lodged in the foundations of third-rate democracies, that's all that really matters.
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When I left, then, to meet the "bad guys," I fully expected stories of grief and rage. We had been told of their plight--about 330 Pasthun families, give or take, forced from their homes in Korangi by a coordinated MQM "purge." Their warehouses, stocked full of trash that they sorted in order to sell (Karachi's recyclers, they are), were burned. Two boys on watch were killed (one by a bullet to the head, the other by fire). Thousands-strong, they fled--most to Ilyas Goth, which is where we met them.
Yet I hadn't really prepared for the lack of hope, for the helplessness, for the despair.
December 6, 2008--we slowed to a stop in front of men crouched in the caked dirt, either side of the road on which we had parked. Probably a little under a hundred, in all. I remember thinking that they didn't seem angry enough--more bored, more lost, and more fatigued than anything else. As I walked by and bumbled my hellos, most smiled back--but always skeptically, as if they knew nothing would be decided by reactive, long-distance solidarity. And rightly so.
Almost immediately after being introduced to grieving relatives of the boy that had been shot in his temple (someone mimed his murder for me), I was hit with a barrage of testimony and names. Some remembered MQM cadres coming at 10pm on the 30th of November, others said that they had arrived, Police in tow and petrol in hand, early the next morning. Some said State proxies were actively involved--other said intentionally inactive. What difference did it really make, I thought. All agreed that it had been planned in advance: in one fell swoop, the boy was murdered and their warehouses burned (my translator insisted on asking them to quantify their losses: Muhammad Gul said 3 lakhs, Faiz Muhammad reported 6-7 lakhs. Lifetime savings, up in smoke).
What could they do but come here, they asked?
Everyone kept interrupting each other as I scribbled names, stories, dates ("facts"). Finally, an old man, hunched and wrinkled, grabbed me by my elbow and walked me toward where his family now found themselves. The crowd dissipated behind us. As we approached the roofless, doorless structure, I remember him turning to the translator, and then me: "We left everything behind--everything. I'd been living in Korangi for 23 years, and all of a sudden I've lost everything."
Later, a friend supplied some context: All of the houses in Ilyas Goth were still incomplete (there was no running water, no toilets, no gas, no electricity). The plots themselves were owned by wealthier Pashtuns, who retained them as secondary investments. Most of these refugees were squatting, though others said that at least one family had already arranged to rent. In all, I was ushered to and from ten houses--scores of people were sleeping in the nooks and crannies of spaces the size of my freshman cubicle at boarding school. Oh and how we had whined.
Everywhere we went, the kids followed. I thought, of course, of my relatives their age--shiny plastic pampers, fruit shakes, and picture books that make sounds. Divine justice in the Land of the Pure.
I asked the most talkative, Mohammad Islam, about the MQM. What was going to happen, why did they do this? He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows? They call us terrorists--Taliban. Look around for yourself. We're using blankets as doors. Do you see guns? Do you see bombs? Meanwhile they bomb NWFP and FATA every day."
'"You tell me what we should do?" he continued. "I went to the police station after we were expelled, and they told me that they wouldn't do anything--that my place was in a Pashtun neighborhood."
But, as with the other men earlier, he didn't seem angry--almost as if it weren't worth the effort. Instead, he was despairing--and rather matter-of-factly, at that.
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The two days that followed our visit saw some of the most determined rains in months. I thought fleetingly of these families--how they were coping without drains, without roofs, without hope. But not often enough, to be honest.
In general we've forgotten, I think. Even the well-intentioned among us. Eid happened, and the city seems to have returned, decisively, to normalcy. The roads are once again choked with smog and stress. Schools have re-scheduled postponed exams.
It's amidst this amnesia--certainly inevitable, perhaps even necessary--that I can't help but think of Mohammad Islam and that jarring absence of anger. On the way home, in my notes, I had amended a line from Walter Benjamin. "It's only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us." It seems more appropriate, I had written--especially in these days of Presidents as Commodities (I mean Brand Obama and "Change" and "Hope," of course)--to demand not hope, but anger. In a world as mad as it is, the task of sustaining false optimism for the sake of those who can't afford it seems all-too-forced; I'd prefer that we be angry, to be honest--furious, in fact--for those who've been robbed of their right to be enraged.
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