Karachi Bleeds
The scene of the first Karachi blast. Photograph: AFP
For the last year, as Islamabad, Lahore and especially Peshawar came under unrelenting attack Karachiites nervously wondered why they had been spared the carnage. This illusion has met a bitter end. In December there was the horrific Ashura bombing and today two deadly attacks, one on Sharae Faisal and the other at Jinnah Hospital. We can no longer pretend that Karachi is safer than the rest of the country.
My first thought was to hold National Assembly Speaker Fehminda Mirza and her husband Sindh Home Secretary Zulfikar Mirza responsible for causing a security lapse. I live quite close to the couple and every day, as I make my way home, I get stuck near the fortress they call their home. Still, cathartic though it may be to blame our elected representatives for attaching greater importance to their lives than those they are sworn to protect, there is no way to prevent such bombings. Today, the police presence was understandably concentrated at the route taken by the chelum marchers. And it would have been impossible, not to mention thoughtless, to search people at Jinnah Hospital, where dozens of injured people were being rushed for treatment.
Karachi is often described as a teeming metropolis of ethnic strive, political intrigue and unremitting poverty, more so after a terrorist attack What is often forgotten is the banality of city life. People go about their daily routines without fuss, doing what they have to go. We may not be safe in Karachi but we cannot let calamity take over the banality. So, while it might have seemed suicidal to continue with the march, I’m glad they did. I just hope they forgive the rest of us for wanting to go home and gulp down a scotch on the rocks.
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We’re presented with one excuse after another for what happens in the country. The same questions will be asked again that are asked each time such an incident takes place: Who’s responsible? The police, the government, mafias, political parties, sectarian elements? Security lapse? Planted bomb or suicide attack? And who will answer these questions, questions unending inquiries have never been able to answer and there seems to be no hope that they ever will.
What are we to make of this incident? The Muharram 10 blast is considered by many to be a cover for burning down the markets. But what of today’s attack? This, too, quite evidently, was a well thought-out plan. First the bus was attacked, and then the hospital where the injured for such incidents are taken, and that too the hospital’s ER. Then there were reports of routes to Civil hospital – the alternate to Jinnah for such situations – being cordoned off by the police, forcing ambulances to take an alternate route which is longer and takes more time. What does today’s incident signify, apart from the sectarian colour it is bound to take on?
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