The disconnect

Source: The News

Date: 22-10-2010

Harris Khalique

While the judiciary, legislature and executive of the country are busy negotiating their respective powers on how to formulate or strike down laws, accept or reject decisions made by each other and the scope and shape of institutional arrangements needed to enact the laws and translate decisions into action, Karachi continues to bleed. More than seventy people lost their lives and scores were injured in incidents of target killing and sniper shooting. Those killed due to their ethnic or linguistic identity were mostly labourers. Others were young political workers of various parties. All were either breadwinners for their dependents or represented hope for their struggling low-income families. This fresh outbreak of violence is the latest in a series of such events over the past decades. But this time around, the spread of carnage is the biggest compared to the past few years. The disconnect is so evident between those plying the Constitution Avenue in Islamabad and the residents of Usmanabad, Lyari in Karachi. Or for that matter, Ghaziabad, Lahore, Tench Bhata, Rawalpindi, and Kharotabad, Quetta. Urban poor are to provide services to the affluent and that's it. The rural masses are no more than farmers who are supposed to grow food for us or are socially and economically incarcerated in order to be counted periodically to bring the landlords and ladies or tribal chieftains to positions of government-authority. A wide segment of the urban poor and lower middle class in Karachi and Hyderabad is converted into captive voters. The cities have become psychic prison houses in the political sense for the largest community which has assumed a single political identity reflected rightly or wrongly in ethnic terms. If it had been a civilised country, all matters would be set aside and a special session of parliament called to discuss the matter or perhaps a suo moto action taken by the superior judiciary to question why the poor citizens of Pakistan are being brutalised and killed in its economic hub and largest city. Widows, orphans, bereaved fathers and siblings and chest-beating mothers of dead sons fail to perturb any one. I am amazed that the neo-liberal economic managers of the country, with their incredible influence over policy-making, are not getting it either. Because in the case of Karachi, it is not just a humanitarian issue of mourning widows and sisters but a major economic concern in terms of revenue earnings, tax collection and the fate of whatever is left of industry in this country.  View details: http://www.thenews.com.pk/22-10-2010/opinion/11279.htm