Karachi: An Elusive City

Samira Shackle’s Karachi Vice is a sleek knit of anecdotes, tidbits off reporters, rides through the contentious terrains of the city; billowing adrenaline and numbness, at the same time. The Lyari shit, with Uzair and Rahman working in unison, the ambivalences of Aman Committee, the simmering pots of violence around, shows of naked power, horrors exuding from a mammoth like Bahria Town. She writes about how people like Karim Baksh Kachehlo – whose land in Kathore was forcefully drafted into the scheme – sought to write to the National Accountability Bureau: only to be replied two months later by the NAB, so ‘Your complaint has been examined. It does not disclose any offence under the National Accountability Ordinance 1999 and therefore cannot be processed any further’ (p.235).

The grabbings, the sly regimentation put in place regarding access, the thrumming of bulldozers mowing down farms and sheds in the thick of the night, whooshing away those with queries to the credence of the project, beatings in handy, the show of impunity in cahoots with people like Rao Anwar all are encapsulated here.

It reminds me of Mbembe’s influential Necropolitics, he writes, ‘late modern colonial occupation is a series of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical. The combination of the three grants the colonial power absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory. The state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows for a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire populations are the target of the sovereign. Besieged villages and towns are sealed off and isolated from the world. Daily life is militarised. Local military commanders have the discretionary freedom to decide whom to shoot and when. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits. Local civil institutions are systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived of their means of income. Invisible killing is added to outright executions’ (p.82–83).

I hereby also pluck an excerpt off Daechsel’s biting article, who also talks of a ‘power-triad’; ‘Sovereign power is the power to decide on the building of a new capital city on virgin territory; disciplinary power drives the spatial isolation of problem categories like criminals, sexual deviants, or plague victims within city space. And there is a new and third modality, initially called ‘security’. In contrast to the first two – already well-known from Foucault’s previous work on penal regimes — this third form of power does not seek to make decisive and comprehensive interventions at all. Instead, it works through the management of ‘circulation’, facilitating as much as possible people’s own desires to do what they want, while calculating the need for any interventions carefully according to a ‘risk-benefit model.’ (p.252, State and Subject Formation in South Asia).

Karachi remains an anomaly and could not possibly be likened to America, of which, D’Mello says to Taneja, ‘Kya baat hai America ka!, Udhar peene ka paani alag, gattar ka alag.’, in Naseeruddin Shah’s incisive Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro; of which Jai Arjun Singh has made an intuitive study in his book on the flick. Lyari, for example, is as strange as it comes, and brews with a fire of its own; as Nida Kirmani minutely makes a study of its enigmatic contours – like the people tilting towards Uzair Baloch’s PAC during the killings, allegedly perpetrated by MQM over ethnic concerns. It remains to be seen whether the bile of the place would ever cease to be.

The contributor is an independent writer and an aspiring novelist.