The Sindh cauldron-I Apocalypse now
Two recent incidents show up in stark relief the magnitude of the Catch-22 problems that have polarized society in Sindh into a seemingly unbridgeable divide. The first was the murderous set-piece ambush in Baldia that resulted in the deaths of a Ranger Captain, an SHO Police and four other policemen. Since the location was nominally an MQM majority area, the immediate reaction of all concerned was to blame it on the MQM, hundreds of suspects being picked up for interrogation. The other incident was the claim of a girl of Kashmiri origin, Naheed Butt, that she had been strip-searched during the search of her home by law enforcement agencies (LEAs) looking for an MQM activist named Taqi.
Baldia is inhabited by Mohajirs who originally belong almost evenly to a Baloch sub-tribe called Patni and “Turks” originating from Turkish sea-faring class that had settled in Kathiawar. Even there pre-partition these two communities had rivalries that had degenerated into gangland-type warfare which continued post-partition on a sporadic on-off basis in Karachi. The Patni-origin criminal gangs tended to lean towards the MQM post-1985 but remained quite independent, the “Turks” on the other hand aligned themselves with local crime syndicates drawing most of its members from the Punjab Pakhtoon Ittehad (PPI), mainly the Pathan “Swabiwal” drug gangs. As per prevailing practice all over Karachi, the local police took a percentage as “Bhatta” (or protection money) from all the gangs. Baldia’s great silent majority of Mohajirs remain MQM sympathizers but the local MQM leaders do not have the same control (or for that matter, clout) as the MQM has in other MQM-majority areas. Being involved to an extent, the local police left the criminal gangs on both the sides alone while keeping the vast majority of the population in line through intimidation, not a new modus operandi for corrupt enforcement agencies all over the third world. The deceased SHO was believed to have developed animosity with the Patnis and was seen to be favouring the “Swabiwal” Pathans in their on-going feud. As a sequel to an earlier incident where a Pathan youth had been killed in a drunken dispute, that late Sadiq needed to restore his authority in the area by a “show of force” with the inadvertent help of the Army. It seems quite clear that Late Capt Amir of the Rangers was totally innocent of the greater manipulation in which he and his sub-unit were being used as a pawn. In short order, a deadly ambush decimated almost the entire party, whether the masked assailants were aware that a Ranger officer was part of the group being ambushed is a matter of conjecture that can only be confirmed after anyone who took part in the ambush is caught and confesses.
