High Noon in Sindh
In dismissing the petition before the Supreme Court against Governor’s Rule in Sindh, Chief Justice Ajmal Mian articulated the wishes of the masses if not of all the intelligentsia in stating, “everybody wants peace in Karachi and the interest of the country and its citizens is of paramount importance instead of a particular individual or party”, unquote. During the course of the hearing, the Chief Justice repeatedly observed that the Supreme Court had already upheld the government’s move of proclaiming Emergency as a consequence of which the Federal Government could invoke any clause of provision of the Constitution under which the Emergency had been imposed.
For the past 10 years Karachi has gone steadily downhill in all senses of the word. Living under the shadow of the gun of different mafias with varying vested interest, one could excuse the MQM’s initial need for a militant wing. Gaining power by the ballot was impossible without having the cover of weapons to get to the ballot box. The gun soon became an addiction, an aphrodisiac as well as a means of enforcing one’s will for what is politely known as “Bhatta”, collecting “protection money”. On joining government, the first split within the Party was natural, the broad mass separating from the hard-core militants, most of the whom went and made the “Haqiqi” faction, nurtured and funded by the ISI, starting an internecine war that has outlasted two Benazir regimes and is well into the second Mian Nawaz Sharif regime. When Ms Benazir as PM, wanted the Army to come in under Article 147 of the Constitution and deal with her allies now-turned foes, the MQM, the lack of adequate powers led the then COAS, Gen Aslam Beg, to decline politely since he did not want the Army to be engaged in “chasing shadows”. During his first tenure Mian Nawaz Sharif also fell out with his MQM allies and “Operation Clean-Up” was launched in 1992 on a massive scale but again without the powers requested by the then COAS, Gen Asif Nawaz. While a lot of terrorists were caught, almost all walked free because prosecution witnesses were intimidated and the Courts lacked the will to convict them. Operation Clean-up, which promised much was left in confusion and frustration with Field Intelligence Teams (FITs) running amok and giving a bad name to the Army. Affected by paralysing strikes and complete shutdown of economic and social activity, the second Benazir regime handed matters over in 1995 to Gen Babar the then Federal Interior Minister.
