Behind the Chairman’s Door

This Op-Ed piece was picked up from the Sunday Daily Dawn. Great reading and posted here for your consumption.

THE Economist of London described General Musharraf’s autobiography as “laughingly vainglorious”. That description equally fits his reaction to the gang warfare and pillage in Karachi on May 12. Three days and 40 deaths later, according to a report in this newspaper, he decided to deal with the killers and arsonists with an iron hand.

A “poised and composed” president, says another report, has counseled his nervous allies to concentrate on his election and later on their own, and leave it to him to handle the current situation which poses no threat to him or to them. For the trouble in Karachi he has put the blame on the ‘non-functional’ Chief Justice and his counsel Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan.

No matter where the blame lies (most would disagree with the president), the responsibility for saving the lives and property of the people lies squarely with the government.

In that, the provincial and central governments both failed, completely and miserably. Gangs ruled the streets of Karachi while the police and even the Rangers, if seen anywhere, were bystanders.

How one wishes (surely this wish is shared by every citizen) that the president, instead of delivering his iron-hand warning from Islamabad, had come down to Karachi and expressed his sorrow and sympathy the way Colonel John Nicholson, commander in the American Marines, had done at Jalalabad where his men, enraged by a suicide bomb attack, shot dead 19 innocent Afghans by the wayside.

This is what Nicholson said addressing an audience of the bereaved: “I stand before you today deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people.”

Gen Musharraf’s expression of penitence on the death of a larger number of his own people, matching Colonel Nicholson’s intensity was necessary but did not come.

It would have been in his political interest too but the power game makes its own merciless calculations.

The MQM coordinator Farooq Sattar’s apology did not match the enormity of the tragedy nor could he be speaking for any of the three governments — district, provincial or central — for he is part of none.

Besides the bloodshed, so extensive was the blockade on that day that even the judges had to climb over the boundary wall of the Sindh High Court to get to their chambers. Whether it was sheer complacency or actual complicity on the part of the law-enforcement authorities, the three governments remain equally culpable.

Every government at the political level, and that too in an election year, has its aims and chooses its means, fair or foul, to achieve them. The same is also true of the opposition. Law and order take a back seat in the priorities of both.

Maintaining public order in all situations, irrespective of party aims or interests, thus becomes the duty of the permanent civil service assisted by the police, paramilitary and even military when called out. With the passage of time, the civil service has ceased to be permanent and the administration of law and order has been made an adjunct of politics.

Before Gen Musharraf’s devolution plan took hold, the powers and responsibilities of officials responsible for law and order were clearly defined and known to the people. Not any longer. In the lawlessness that swamped Karachi on May 12 and on the two days following, no one appeared on the scene to exercise this power or to acknowledge this responsibility. No one can be punished, even if it is so intended, for no one was in charge.

Under the system and laws that Gen Musharraf abrogated, this power and responsibility vested in the district magistrate. There was no ambiguity about it nor escape from it. In the new system, the law and order powers and responsibility are diffused, and control over the law-enforcement agencies is divided between a variety of commissions and the three governments mentioned earlier.

If one person were to be named on whom this responsibility rests it is the nazim whom the new law requires to “perform functions relating to law and order in his district.” But the law doesn’t say what these functions are and how the nazim is to perform them.

It is now for the people to say whether Mustafa Kamal ever made an appearance at the rioting scene in Karachi on May 12 and on the days following. Or were he to be around and willing could he be trusted to take control of law and order when his party — the MQM — was being widely accused of disturbing it.

The Aaj TV host should have been looking for the nazim and not for the home secretary when his studio came under gunfire. The home secretary sits at a policy desk in the secretariat and is not expected to chase rioters on the streets. But then, could the Aaj TV host expect the nazim to intervene when the attackers, he suspected, came from the latter’s party?

Three lessons emerge from Karachi’s costly mayhem. One, the country cannot do without a professional and impartial law and order administration. Two, officially sponsored rallies are invariably counterproductive, and so was the president’s at Islamabad. Three, a caretaker government of national consensus should be formed here and now to organise elections under a chief election commissioner who is as fiercely independent as was India’s maverick T.N. Seshan.

The course of events in Pakistan’s politics has never been easy to predict but the kind of fervour and despondency that now reside together in the body politic strongly suggest that time is fast running out not for the government alone but also for the opposition.

Another round of irresponsible behaviour and violence like that of May 12 and the curtain may come down on the political scene as a whole.

Remarkable, however, is the complacency of the government on the disorder that paralysed Karachi. After 40 deaths and three days of anarchy, the prime minister had the gall to say that the city has been saved, or plainly put, got away lightly, and the Sindh chief minister wants the gory chapter closed. No one, it seems, will ever be held to account.

With mounting tension and repeated warnings of terrorist strikes weeks ahead of May 12, no district magistrate of the old times worth his salt would have permitted the MQM rally to be held on that day. And if the administration apprehended factional clashes on the arrival of the suspended Chief Justice, the district magistrate would have issued an order (not just made requests) banning the Chief Justice’s entry into Karachi.

The enforcement of law and order sometimes requires tough decisions by putting careers at risk, if necessary. The administration is not all about plots, promotions and extensions.

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2. Emerging Political Situation - Mir Jamil ur Rahman
3. The Maker and The Shakers - Cowasjee
4. The Karachi mayhem - Some Bitter Facts
5. Karachi Lawyers Attack Media With Batons
6. Wanted - A Bold President - Ahmed Quraishi
7. The Intelligence Intrigues that Preceded the Islamabad Bomb - Brig-Gen Shaukat Qadir