This piece is not about Armageddon, Qiyamat, the army with black flags sweeping down to battle the Antichrist, or even the very real danger of a nuclear Holocaust to engulf our South Asian Subcontinent. My title today refers to the apocalyptic spasms of senseless destruction and violence that we have seen erupting periodically in our country.
To illustrate my argument, let me talk about the immediate aftermath to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007: the sudden and uncontrolled outbursts of public grief and rage. Angry demonstrations of protest and mourning erupted across the country. This was at least understandable.
But what happened that night in the province of Sindh at the one end, and the city of Peshawar at the other, gives pause for thought. I refer, of course, to the violent looting and arson that raged unchecked for three days in these places.
Now, I do not intend to go into the details of all that occurred during that extended spasm of senseless violence; the events have been graphically described elsewhere. Nor do I wish to speculate fruitlessly about who the looters were or which particular ‘conspirators’ had contrived the outbreaks. Violence and arson frequently accompany demonstrations of extreme public outrage, with the looters opportunistically following the protestors — still more so in societies afflicted by extreme deprivation, like ours. After all, even in the USA, looting accompanied the protests against the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr., who was himself one of the most outstanding apostles of non-violence and peace anywhere.
Now our profligate economic ways are heading towards some kind of climax of inflationary recession. Serious disorders in the streets are almost inevitable
Yes, such incidents, regrettable as they may be, do occur when civic order breaks down. My family and I were visiting Lahore and were due to return to Karachi the night the assassination tragedy occurred. Our flight, as chance had it, was cancelled. For the next couple of days, we watched on TV the violence in Karachi and other places, noting that while Lahore had become a grief-stricken ghost town of closed shops, with no traffic and patrolling police in sight, it escaped the extreme violence occurring in the south.
When, four nights later, we did return to Karachi, our long drive from Jinnah Airport to the upper end of Karsaz Road (to drop a friend, whose car and driver had rescued us from being stranded at the Airport) and from there all the way along Shahrah-e-Faisal to the FTC flyover, Kala Pul and eventually Defence Society, was very tense indeed.
Karachi seemed a city after an air-raid, with general silence and darkness, shattered shop fronts, broken glass on the roads all along the way and the remnants of burning tyres, some of them still smouldering. Near the FTC Building, we saw a car and a scooter still burning.
The assasination of Benazir Bhutto led to an outpouring of grief and rage on Pakistan's streets
As it happens (and no thanks to the then authorities), by the fourth day the rioters had lost their own steam, perhaps satiated with breaking ATMs and looting general stores, and the riot police and militia did finally emerge to patrol the shattered streets. It was as if the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had arrived, spreading flames and ruin – but only briefly, before disappearing back into their lair. Will they emerge again? For longer, more sustained spells of violence and disorder?
Let’s face it: our disaster-prone country has all too frequently experienced spasms of extraordinary violence. Indeed, the very dawn of our independent statehood was accompanied by what historians regard as the most massive of all non-wartime upheavals. Twelve million souls were displaced and fled homeless from one newly independent country to the other. Violence and bloodshed were the order of the day. More than a million men, women and children were massacred.
Yet, somehow, this new country, that many had not expected could survive beyond a few weeks, came through the firestorms and the bloodbaths of 1947. That it did is a testament to the political leadership of the time. No less, I would assert, it is a testament to the handful of ordinary functionaries of the government services, the police and the armed forces, who worked — for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in many cases — and successfully brought some kind of order out of the chaos.
Contrary to the ordinary competence and extraordinary dedication demonstrated in the past by our civil and military bureaucracies, we have seen how incompetently crises have more recently been handled by our bloated bureaucracies. A major political leader was assassinated in public and the government’s functionaries (who had, only too obviously, failed to provide effective security) rushed into making unnecessary and distasteful pronouncements about the killing being somehow due to the Toyota sunroof – as if the shooting and bombing that had taken place were somehow exonerated. The crime scene was washed down, eliminating potentially valuable evidence. This, to take the least of examples, was our level of governmental competence by 2007.
On the count of controlling mob violence and maintaining law and order following this tragic event, there was a total abdication of this responsibility by the governments in Sindh and in Peshawar. The city of Karachi was permitted to be looted for three days until the looters’ destructive energies were spent.
These have not been the only spasms of violence in our history. They have erupted all too frequently: 1953, Dhaka: 1954, Lahore; 1968, nation-wide; 1971, former East Pakistan; 1972-3, Karachi; 1977, nation-wide again; Sindh in the 1980s; the lawyers movement in 2007; the Islamabad dharnas of 2014 and 2018. This is without considering the Karachi turf battles of the 1980s and ‘90s and the massive waves of terrorism and sectarian violence rolling bloodily through the country from the 1980s to date.
We, clearly, are a nation given to spasms of extreme violence and disorder, so extreme as to pose serious existential threats. And now our profligate economic ways are heading towards some kind of climax of inflationary recession. Serious disorders in the streets are almost inevitable. Alongside this, there are real dangers arising from the very real resentment prevailing in the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (ex-FATA) and in Balochistan. There is a high probability of members of the Bar taking to the streets once again. Worse, we know that the governing party of the day – a party that won only 116 seats in the National Assembly, as against 148 seats won by other parties – continues to demonstrate an amazing lack of competence, a self-righteous obtuseness, and a self-destructive rigidity that do not generate confidence in its ability to ride the storms of many kinds that are now descending upon us.
Worse, the world beyond our borders today features leaders like the Saudi potentates and Chinese apparatchiks, on the one hand, and of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin on the other. It is a uniquely dangerous world today. And a dangerous time approaches rapidly.
