Crime and No Punishment

March 3, 2013
A Black Prado, windows tinted, waits outside of the elite Dolmen Mall. Inside, a group of men scan the female shoppers exiting. Each night for the past few months, they have been kidnapping and gang-raping women and young girls in the city’s affluent areas: Clifton, Defense, and Zamzama. The streak does not endure: their sting leader returns, empty-handed and frenzied. The driver slams his foot on the accelerator as mall security guard Ghulam Din runs, feet slamming the pavement, after the mysterious car. That night, Facebook posts warn that the “Black Prado Gang” travels in vehicles with government license plates.
March 13, 2013
A car emblazoned with an Orangi Pilot Project bumper sticker stops at a traffic intersection. Inside, Parveen Rehman, the project’s director, considers fundraising for sanitation facilities in the Orangi squatter community. Assassins pull their trigger, however, before she can accelerate, and the social worker’s head slams against her dashboard. The assassins belong to the city’s land mafia, indignant at Rehman for revealing their maltreatment of impoverished communities. That night, there is a candlelight vigil: “May God honor the Mother of Karachi,” one banner reads.
January 17, 2014
A news van, engine humming, is parked outside of the Express News Live television network building. Inside, three employees have just been shot at point-blank range. The Taliban, in response to the network’s antifundamentalist tone, claims responsibility. That night, Aslam Khan, the network’s Karachi bureau chief, announces that station employees will now seek permission to carry weapons.
September 10, 2014
A car blaring recitations of Qu’ranic verses travels along
a highway towards Nazimabad. Inside, Sunni cleric Maulana Masood Baig prepares for an upcoming sermon at a local mosque. He never arrives to the sermon, however: three bullets strike him in the head and chest as he falls against the windshield to the chorus of screeching, shattering glass. Four armed men on motorcycles trail Baig’s car. They have successfully avenged the slain son of their beloved Shia leader Allama Kumaili.
* * *
A bustling metropolis of 18 million on the Arabian Sea, Karachi is Pakistan’s economic stronghold, with exports submerging the Port of Bin Qasim and glib bankers jostling to buy shares in factory stocks. It is also, however, the nation’s hub of crime. According to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Karachi is the most violent city in the world, with 2,000 murders per year. Though this crime reflects pervasive dissidence, it is
in some ways unifying: almost every prominent group commits some form of it. The Shias and Sunnis engaging in a tit-for-tat sectarian quarrel. The Taliban espousing a vision of Islam that
is incompatible with Western notions of a free press. Corrupt property-owners silencing humanitarian activists. The gang network instilling fear in the wealthy through sexual assault. Understanding criminality in Karachi, then, requires an understanding of the intersection of the sectarian, class, extremist, and gang forces that underlie the city’s politics—an intersection that dates back to the city’s founding as Pakistan’s capital some 60 years ago.
Partitioning Lawlessness
Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, commissioned Constantinos Doxiadis with no easy task. A Greek architect with activist inclinations, Doxiadis envisioned the city as a community that would provide inexpensive access to public utilities. A single mistake in plotting a longitudinal coordinate, in distributing land amongst Karachi’s neighborhoods, and Karachi would lose both a city plan and planner. If infrastructure did not match municipal agendas—if one political faction disagreed with his strategic construction of army headquarters—Doxiadis could, in fact, be dead.
This possibility of death was rooted in national political phenomena: a series of assassinations and betrayals in the executive branch had, it seemed, established a trend of criminality. At a 1951 political rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, had collapsed on the cobbled pavements with a bloody thud. Afghan nationalist Sa’ad Babrak was later convicted for the murder. Seven years later, Pakistan’s first president, Iskander Mirza, exited his palace with his head bowed and ego deflated; he was deposed in a 1958 coup d’état by the general he had previously appointed. By the time Constantinos finished marking his master grid, Karachi, in many ways, reflected its motherland; its population was rapidly growing, its unity rapidly shrinking. Constantinos, one could argue, foresaw Karachi’s tragic development. “Cities everywhere,” he cautioned Jinnah, “are becoming dystopias.”
Karachi’s dystopian history, though, began prior to its construction. It began in the partition of India—in Jinnah’s decision to establish an Islamic Republic. By the time the British had officially demarcated India and Pakistan in August of 1947, the largest mass relocation in human history had occurred; 14.5 million people in total crossed borders to join their respective religious majorities, which had convened on either side of the subcontinent. Of those individuals, 7.2 million migrated from anti-Muslim violence in India to Pakistan. Mohajirs, the Arabic title for such Muslims, ended their flight from carnage by entering Karachi’s Nazimabad neighborhood. The remainder—presumably Hindus—migrated from Pakistan to India. “There was a mass exodus of people who found themselves on the wrong side of the dividing lines,” Steven Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition and author of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, told the HPR. “You would think that [this relocation] would make [Pakistan] more stable. It actually became less stable over time.”
This instability initially arose in part because Karachi’s early Muslim settlers came from different Indian towns and accordingly brought their own mother tongues and loyalties. Bohra, Chhipa, Khoja, Memon: these were the city’s first major ethnic groups—all hailing from the Indian state of Gujarat. Karachi, in its early stages, essentially functioned as a collection of autonomous territories. Within the city there existed multiple enclaves, each of which was ethnically homogenous.
Karachi’s current instability is an extension of such heterogeneity. While Karachi still remains an enclave for immigrants, it now attracts internally displaced persons rather than persecuted Indians. More specifically, Karachi’s recent Muslim settlers come from Pakistan’s own provinces. The result is what Brookings Institute fellow Teresita Schaffer described to the HPR as “an ethnic cocktail.” Though Karachi is located in the province of Sindh, it is home to a relatively small percentage of Sindhis. By contrast, it houses close to seven million Pashtuns and Balochis—more than the Federally Administered Tribal Areas from where both clans descend. “They came in trickles,” Dawn reporter Zia Ur Rehman wrote of these seven million Muslims, “fleeing insurgencies and operations in their homes … But along with the tormented, came their tormentors, the very Taliban the refugees were fleeing from.”
Muslim Brother Against Muslim Brother
When 28-year-old commander Muhammad Usman came to Karachi from the Swat valley in 2009, he brought with him a backpack stuffed with explosives, dried fruit, and instructions
to “eliminate[e] rivals.” Usman is officially a member of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan or the TTP, a party that originated in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in the country’s north and fashioned an urban stronghold in the grime-streaked slums of Karachi. An alliance of scattered Islamist militant groups wanting to dismantle Pakistan’s national government and its perceived Western bias, the TTP has a notoriously criminal past. In May 2010, one of its trainees tried to detonate a car bomb in New York City’s crowded Times Square. In October 2012, 10 of its ideologues claimed responsibility for shooting teen activist Malala Yousufzai as she rode home from school. And most recently, in December 2014, a gunman affiliate burst into an auditorium where children were taking an exam and committed Pakistan’s deadliest terror attack since 2007: 132 students, 10 staff members, and three soldiers died in a massacre at the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar.
Yet “the TTP in Karachi is a different phenomenon than the TTP in tribal areas of [Pakistan],” maintained Nazia Hussain,
 a research scholar at George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center. They are “politically savvy,” she explained to the HPR, and have “violently edged out the secular ANP.” The Awami National Party, better known as the ANP, is a relatively young political faction—founded
in 1986—holding only a single seat in Pakistan’s Parliament. Comprised mostly of uncompromising Pashtuns, the ANP has surprisingly far-reaching influence. Abiding by its platform of democratic socialism and economic egalitarianism, it attracts many who share these same ideals: in this case, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. The MQM is certainly controversial—its founder and leader, Altaf Hussain, has been exiled to the United Kingdom and charged numerous times with extortion—but it is also powerful. As Sindh’s second-largest and Pakistan’s fourth-largest party, its signature flags adorn Karachi’s stone buildings.
These flag-waving, Urdu-speaking urban dwellers—perennially engaged in an on-again-off-again camaraderie with the ANP—are the rivals that Usman seeks to eliminate. The TTP derives its political savvy from a two-pronged strategy. The first aspect is simple; draw strength in numbers. As a Sunni coalition, the TTP benefits from Pakistan’s sectarian paradigm. Followers of Shi’a Islam constitute only 15 to 25 percent of Pakistan’s population, while the remaining 75 to 85 percent are, like the
TTP, followers of Sunni Islam. It’s no surprise that TTP leaders issue such antagonistic statements as “whom so ever [sic] leads a campaign against Islam and Shariah is ordered to be killed by Shariah.” In broadcasting a stringent ideology, the TTP associates minority Muslims—Shias included—as opponents of Shariah and, in turn, reiterates an “us versus them” dichotomy. So while TTP leaders themselves conduct major attacks—such as the 2009 bombing at a Karachi march commemorating a Shi’a holy day, Ashura—riled their constituents, avenging personal grievances under the guise of an Islamist campaign, perpetuate sectarianism through individual murders.
“We are now seeing sectarian tensions triggered not only by terrorism incidents,” Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies director Muhammad Amir Rana remarked to the HPR, “but average clashes within the sectarian communities.” With each “average clash”, the TTP gains another vote from the Sunni majority. But these clashes are also born from categories other than religion, namely, class.
Taliban Justice
On a humid March 2013 afternoon, outside a Karachi suburb, smoke clouds billow from towering factories. Acting as opaque curtains, the clouds shroud a decrepit house and the more than 20 people gathered around it from sight.
The house is a court and the people want prosecution.
They have come to the TTP, who offer mobile justice, to settle a property dispute. A small business owner’s plot of land, they insist, was usurped by mafia. The Taliban deliberate for a grueling two hours before adjourning the hearing; the people will have to voice their grievances once more—on a different date and at a different house—for a chance at retribution.
This appeal to the TTP indicates the second part of the Taliban’s strategy: serve as Karachi’s de facto judicial system. Residents—especially more impoverished ones—have, at an alarming rate, become satisfied with this de facto justice. After a man reported a theft in January 2013, for instance, the TTP returned the goods and publicly lashed the alleged thief. Compared to a 28 percent conviction rate in regular Karachi courts, the TTP offers responsive dependability. Subverting legal hierarchies, the party has become, in many ways, Pakistan’s Robin Hood. “It is not a reign that has been accepted with open hearts,” Nazia Hussain explains. “It is a reign justified by necessity and fear. There is a need that is being fulfilled for those who are completely marginalized.”
And Karachi’s police are ill-equipped to meet this need. Mostly because they, too, have become marginalized, operating under the motto of “kill or be killed.” Sixteen officers have already been murdered by TTP militia in 2015, a grim total on track to reach last year’s number of 142. The numbers indicate that, like the inhabitants of Karachi whom they strive to serve, the police lack adequate resources. With one officer for every 830 individuals—a third of the ratio in Delhi— their limited manpower is rendered worse by government neglect. Despite the police’s two-year long counterinsurgency mission against the TTP, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif refuses to institute a federally funded plan to safeguard officers who are often the targets of Taliban shootings. In a meeting on January 30, 2015, Sharif deflected complaints that armored cars, bulletproof vests, and helmets were given only to elite units and that other units required money to acquire such defensive measures. In one of the most dangerous areas of the city, a police station staffed by 27 officers is responsible for protecting 400,000.
“When the Night Falls”
On the eve of Election Day in November 2012, a Karachi shopkeeper handed authorities a seven-line handwritten note with a bullet casing slapped to the bottom. “If you don’t deliver us one million rupees,” it read, “we’ll cut you into pieces and kill your entire family.” The death threat was from a gang—one of many that prowl the streets in search of wealth.
In an environment where the Taliban manipulate vulnerable enthusiasts to assume power and where disgruntled police can neither protect citizens nor themselves, gangs have capitalized on political volatility for socioeconomic gains. This is, however, no new phenomenon in Karachi. Serving as a transit point in the illegal drug trade from India to China during the pre-colonial era, Karachi once again became submerged in transactions when the route reopened after the Afghan-Soviet war. “Small-time gangs,” Hussain explained, “became transnational drug syndicates [because] the passage of opium and heroin … was grown in Afghanistan and transited through Karachi.” Such smuggling has since become politicized with the rise of organized crime, and Karachi remains at the center of slick dealings.
Dawood Ibrahim—pudgy, mustached, and, more often than not, wearing shades that tint ash puffed from his cigarettes—is Karachi’s paragon crime lord. A confidant of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the 59-year-old is India’s worst nightmare. Infamous for orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai grenade attacks, Ibrahim does not shy away from harming his birth nation through the D-Company, his massive crime collective, with headquarters in Dubai and Karachi. Ibrahim’s most recent alleged mission to assassinate Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonstrates this well. Yet more importantly, perhaps, his amity with the Pakistani government points to motivations other than cash for covert operations—motivations that could land gangs like the one that used the Karachi shopkeeper into positions of political authority. “[Some] gangs nurture political ambitions and also want a seat at the table,” Hussain notes.
The ANP and MQM have noticed. And they are fighting 
to keep their seats. In a joint petition issued last month, both parties announced their anti-Talibanization and gang program. Staging a walkout, ANP Senator Shahi Syed demanded Sindh’s provincial government combat “genocide” against Pashtuns. “Launch a military operation in Karachi to clean it of filth,” he cried. “Don’t force us to pick up weapons.” While it appears that weapons have become a commodity of choice in Karachi, so too have words—they are all politicians have left.
 
Image sources: Wikimedia Commons / Igel B TyMaHe
Update (5/21/15): This article has been updated to a more recent version.