IT may not be mission impossible but is certainly a massive

challenge to transform a battered megalopolis. It’s not just the

matter of fixing the basic civic infrastructure; it’s also about the
politics of it. While the trillion-rupee package announced by the
prime minister last week marked the most serious move yet to
address the chronic problems of the country’s financial hub it has
also intensified the battle for Karachi.

For the first time it seemed that all the stakeholders had joined hands in an
effort to salvage the country’s economic lifeline. Yet the political tussle
between the federal and provincial government remains a major problem in
the implementation of this ambitious project. Hours after the announcement
of the package, the two sides were engaged in a bitter war of words over the
ownership of the plan.

More than a conflict between the federal and provincial authorities, this
wrangling underscores the battle between the PPP that rules Sindh and the
PTI that sees itself as the sole representative of the city and thus wants to take
credit for the Karachi transformation package.

Read: Centre, Sindh spar over contribution to Karachi package

It manifests the new political dynamics that emerged in the 2018 elections.
The PTI, which hardly had any representation in the national and provincial
legislative bodies from Karachi in the past, swept most of the seats in the city.
It created a unique situation in which a party that is in power at the centre
politically dominated the provincial seat of power. So the conflict was inherent
in the new political matrix.

The political tussle between the PPP and PTI is

obstructing plans to transform Pakistan’s economic hub.
In the past, Karachi had been represented by the MQM, whose political base is
restricted to urban Sindh. The party’s overwhelming representation from
Karachi and other Sindh cities would make it critical to any coalition
government in the centre as well as in the province. It was the reason for the
MQM being part of almost every government at the centre and in Sindh
province for nearly three decades.

With its disintegration, chiefly as a consequence of the crackdown by the

security forces, the MQM lost its electoral support base in urban Sindh. The
fast-changing demography of Karachi also contributed to the shrinking
political space for the group that exclusively represented the Urdu-speaking
population. The 2018 elections provided an ideal situation for the PTI, which
claimed to have appeal across the ethnic divide.

With the split in MQM ranks and with a sympathetic security establishment
behind it, the PTI unsurprisingly swept most of the seats in Karachi and
emerged as the second largest party in the Sindh Assembly. Its electoral
victory in the country’s largest city put the party on a strong footing in
provincial politics. This completely changed the political dynamics of the
troubled province.

Being the government at the centre gave the party a heady sense of power.
Karachi has huge representation in the federal cabinet, and the president also
belongs to the city. The statements from the federal ministers and the PTI’s
provincial leadership are a clear manifestation of the power syndrome at play.

The MQM also being part of the coalition at the centre has enhanced the PTI’s
political clout in the city. This also explains the demand by some PTI
lawmakers for imposition of federal rule in the province. But anyone with even
a little political sense knows that such a move would invite a serious political
backlash.

Meanwhile, with the PPP having lost its position as one of the major national
parties and virtually reduced to rural Sindh, matters have become more
difficult for the provincial government. Although it still enjoys autonomy
under the 18th Amendment, its lack of effective control over Karachi has
weakened its authority.

The situation has become more complex with the virtual collapse of even basic
civic facilities in Karachi. The havoc wreaked by the recent torrential rains has
further eroded whatever support base the party has in the urban areas. The
Sindh government faces a serious dilemma: while it badly needs federal help
to deal with the worsening urban crisis, it is also apprehensive of the
increasing role of the federal government in the affairs of the city.

This predicament is reflected in the statements of the PPP leaders claiming

that the provincial government is the major stakeholder in the efforts to
transform Karachi. The ongoing stand-off between the provincial and federal
ministers over their respective shares of resources in the project is part of
political one-upmanship. What makes the Karachi situation more complex is
the absence of an elected city administration that is fully responsible for
providing basic civic amenities.
A large chunk of the financial package is allocated for cleaning the city,
improving public transport and developing infrastructure. But for managing a
city of over 20 million people, there is need for an empowered city
government. It’s not clear when the local government elections would be held
in the province. But whenever that happens, there is no likelihood of any one
political party getting control of the city.

While the PTI has been able to sweep the general elections, the dynamics of
the local government are completely different. Despite its overwhelming
representation from the city in parliament, it does not seem to have the kind
of grassroots-level organisation required for success in local-level elections. It
was evident in the last local government polls when the party failed to make
any significant inroads. Interestingly, despite its erosion, the MQM still has
the grassroots base that could allow it to maintain a significant presence at
least in local politics.

Notwithstanding the war of words between the two parties, the project is most
likely to go ahead with the security establishment assuming the role of arbiter.
It’s also not in the interest of any party that the plan to uplift the city be
derailed because of infighting. Yet complete implementation on the
transformation plan require the two sides to act more prudently by putting
aside their vested interests. This is a rare opportunity to fix things in the
country’s economic engine.

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2020

HISTORY is revealed quite slowly in the US. This is particularly

true of its presidential history. Long, painstakingly compiled
records of telephone calls, conversations, memos and everything
else imaginable from each and every president are kept. As the
years pass, and if court requests are filed, these materials, which
are usually kept in presidential libraries, are unclassified and
released to whoever requests them. More often than not, the
information is only the sort that would interest historians: details
of a conversation, menus of state dinners for visiting leaders, and
so on.

Last week, statements of a more controversial sort came to light. Historian

Gary J. Bass, author of The Blood Telegram, which deals with the creation of
Bangladesh and the mass atrocities that accompanied the event, revealed
some surprising information. In 2012, Bass had requested details of
conversations and other materials from Richard Nixon’s presidency. It took
until May 2018, and all the way until this past May, for the material (with
many parts redacted) to fall into Bass’s hands.

The surprise is not so much a matter of diplomatic controversy as it is an

illustration of endemic racism. In one conversation that took place in the Oval
Office in June 1971, president Nixon says, “Undoubtedly the most unattractive
women in the world are Indian women.” Continuing, he adds, “The most
sexless nothing, these people. I mean, people say, what about the Black
Africans? Well you can see something, the vitality there, I mean they have a
little animal like charm, but God, those Indians, ack, pathetic. Uch.”

Nor is that all of it. In a tape from Nov 4, 1971, during a break from a tense
meeting with Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, president Nixon rants at
his national security adviser Henry Kissinger once again about the
unattractiveness of Indian women. In fact, Nixon confessed, “They turn me
off, they are repulsive and it’s easy to be tough on them.”

The surprise is not so much a matter of diplomatic

controversy as it is an illustration of endemic racism.
On Nov 12, he again rants at Kissinger, “I don’t know how they reproduce!”
Nixon’s statements held diplomatic weight. At the time, he was in discussions
with prime minister Gandhi over the possibility of imminent war with
Pakistan. Earlier in June, blaming the Indians for the flow of refugees caused
by the conflict, he described them as “a scavenging people”.

Pakistanis, programmed as we are to celebrate any criticisms of Indians,

particularly those that resonate with already familiar racist critiques, should
hold themselves back. This is a good time to remind themselves that, for racist
white people like Nixon, no actual difference exists between the origins of
Indians and Pakistanis. They may apply different sorts of racist stereotypes to
each, but the fact of their racism remains. No fanciful theories identifying
Pakistanis or Indians as ‘Aryans’ can change their minds.

The real problem is the mindset that certain races or skin colours have certain
characteristics. We all know where that argument ends up: white people are
forever judged superior and attractive and intelligent, while all others are
inferior versions of white-skinned greatness. Nixon’s words reveal this, but so
do those of his interlocutor, the much-celebrated statesman Henry Kissinger.

“They [Indians] are superb flatterers, Mr President,” Kissinger tells his boss,
“They are masters at flattery. They are masters at subtle flattery. That’s how
they survived 600 years. They suck up — their great skill is to suck up to
people in key positions.” Kissinger was not about to spare Pakistanis. In the
same conversation, he says, “I tell you, the Pakistanis are fine people, but they
are primitive in their mental structure. They just don’t have the subtlety of
Indians.”

The entire regurgitated mess of these racist comments should (but likely will
not) teach Pakistanis and Indians a lesson. When a large number of white
people continue to be raised up as mediators to settle the squabbles of the
‘primitive brained’ and ‘repulsive’, then all their racist beliefs about white
supremacy are affirmed. So many in the Western world do not walk away with
the belief that one or another band of brown people are better, more deserving
of their support and most crucially their equals. They walk away with an
unearned sense of superiority in an affirmation of their own repulsive and
racist beliefs.

It is not, of course, the fault of brown people that Nixon and Kissinger are
racist. That two well-educated men could think in this way and share their
views with each other without any hesitation at all reveals that white
supremacist beliefs and racism have not only riven America internally but also
seeped deep into its foreign policy. It is also a cautionary tale of how childish
similar attacks are, even when lobbed by Indians against Pakistanis and vice
versa. The means to defeat this sort of racism against brown people is not to
abuse each other in the same way but, rather, to realise that the world has
several white racist regimes and only unity against them can dismantle these
vestiges of colonial pasts.

There has not been any kind of official response from India or Pakistan to the
revelations in the newly released material. What wars and the anguish of their
people have prevented, instances of white racism even of this flagrant sort are
unlikely to accomplish. However, since hope reigns supreme, this could be a
moment in which both countries — one maligned for being obsequious, the
other for having primitive brains — can come together and issue a single
statement. How powerful it would be if the foreign offices of India and
Pakistan were to issue a historic joint statement denouncing the venomous
racism and misogyny of the remarks of an American president and his right-
hand man.

THE nullahs of Karachi have lost their water-carrying capacity

because of markets, administrative and related buildings and car
parks of the Sindh government, road infrastructure, elite colonies
and katchi abadis have been built on them. However, whenever it
floods, the katchi abadis are blamed and their demolition is
ordered. No other action is taken.
This time too, on the night of Sept 2, the Gujjar nullah residents were
informed that at 7 o’clock the next morning the bulldozing of their homes
would commence, so they should remove their belongings and vacate their
houses.

You have to see an eviction to understand what it means: women weep, they
join their hands and beg the police and bulldozers to give them more time,
sometimes they curse them; men try to organise to demonstrate; older
children try to recover what meagre household items they have before the
bulldozer crushes them; and the smaller children hide behind the rubble,
many of them frozen with fear. On many occasions, the bulldozer drivers and
the police have not been able to hide their tears while carrying out demolition
orders.

As a result of such bulldozing, families are forced to live under the sky,
without a kitchen to cook food; women can no longer work because they
cannot leave their children without the protection of a home; also, in the open
there is no water or toilet facilities. In addition, men cannot work for they have
to go and search for another affordable location to live, which can only be in
another katchi abadi.

One has to see an eviction to understand what it means.

However, the most serious result of demolition is that children can no longer
go to school. It was estimated that about 3,000 children could not take their
Matric, pre-Matric, and Inter examinations due to the Lyari Expressway
demolitions. This led to a senior bureaucrat recommending that there should
be a law that demolitions should only be allowed after the Board
examinations!

The state has often promised relocation for displaced families. On the orders
of the Supreme Court, more than 1,000 houses were demolishes so as to
facilitate the revival of the Karachi Circular Railway. One month was given for
this. The court also ordered the government agencies to provide alternative
accommodation to the affectees within one year. Since that was not specified,
they continue to live on the rubble of their homes even after a year has
elapsed.

However, no scheme for alternative housing for them has been initiated by the
Supreme Court, nor has the KCR service been restored, and nor has the court
issued any notices to the government agencies for non-compliance of its
orders. There are a number of other similar cases.
Research by a number of organisations has established that relocations of
evicted families is invariably to places far away from employment zones,
social-sector facilities and transport routes, and in the process the bulldozed
residents become far poorer than they were before demolitions. Most of them
fall into debt, and many others become renters in their old neighbourhoods.

Clearly, there are two different standards at work here: one for the rich and
the other for the poor. Elite societies and infrastructure in a number of cases
have blocked the outfalls to the sea, but that is never mentioned by officialdom
let alone any action taken against it. Land reclamation from the mangrove
marshes continues; one wonders why stopping it is not a priority.

When DHA residents agitate against the flooding of their homes, an FIR is
lodged against them and there is pressure for its withdrawal. When katchi
abadi residents protest the demolition of their homes and demand appropriate
relocation, they are lathi-charged and arrested in large numbers.

The existence of these two very different standards has already divided the city
politically, socially and physically. This division is increasing and with it
poverty and resentment, especially among the younger generation. Already,
public spaces used by the poor have been taken over for elite functions in elite
and middle-class areas. The repercussions of this process do not bode well for
the establishment of peace in Karachi.

What is required is a mapping of the areas that have been flooded and the
removal of the micro-level causes for it. It also requires the clearing of the
outfalls to the sea and the cancellation of development schemes that are likely
to cause major ecological damage.

Meanwhile, a list of the people who need to be displaced should be prepared.

A paper promising them alternative accommodation should be given to them
so that when accommodation is available, they can go and take it over. Till
then, they should be permitted to live where they are. After all, this is how the
plot townships developed in the post-Partition years were settled. So why not
now?

THERE may come a time when Donald Trump proclaims himself to

be the saviour of the American publishing industry. After all, never
before have the first four years of any US presidency witnessed so
much verbiage.

The phenomenon itself is hardly novel. Americans tend to be fascinated by the

‘imperial presidency’ (‘imperialist’ might be a more appropriate adjective) and
the concomitant status of their head of state/government as the most powerful
person in the world and, to boot, the leader of the so-called ‘free world’. Hence
journalists, historians and political scientists are habitually keen to describe
and/or analyse presidencies as they are unfolding — or folding up: Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All The President’s Men was published just
weeks before Richard Nixon became the first US president to resign, in August
1974.

More recently, Barack Obama’s first term reportedly occasioned 500 titles,
both critical and laudatory. His predecessor, George W. Bush, was also the
subject (and usually the target) of hundreds of books during the early years of
his disastrous incumbency. Neither of them came close, though, to the 1,200
unique titles Trump has inspired thus far. And the hits just keep on coming.

Woodward is still at it: two years after Fear, his Rage will be released next
week. This week’s contender for the lightweight crown, though, is Disloyal, a
memoir by Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, a long-standing
acolyte who can’t quite explain his still smouldering infatuation with the man
he describes as “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a conman”.

Donald Trump has inspired 1,200 unique titles thus far.

The descriptions fit, but they were all common knowledge four years ago.
Cohen offers details about how porn star Stormy Daniels was paid off to keep
her mouth shut (which, to her credit, she didn’t, contributing to the Trump
genre with Full Disclosure), and the extent to which the president’s racial
hatred extends all the way from Obama (a faux version of whom Trump
crudely disparaged and dismissed in a video intended for the 2012 Republican
convention) to Nelson Mandela.

“Nobody loves Hispanics more,” the president declared at a 2019 rally in New
Mexico. Cohen cites him as declaring a few years earlier: “I will never get the
Hispanic vote. Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re
not my people.”

He also quotes his former boss as saying about his supporters, “I bet they’d
think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star,” but that’s hardly more surprising
than his hero worship of Vladimir Putin — because, in Trump’s eyes, he rules
Russia like a CEO and has thereby become the richest man in the world — or
his recently revealed disparagement of deceased American soldiers as “losers”
and “suckers”. Even his repulsive perception of the lawyer’s then 15-year-old
daughter as a sex object is hardly revelatory, although one is also compelled to
wonder how Cohen could possibly remain in Trump’s employ thereafter.
No president before Trump inspired even a fraction of the diatribes (and the
odd panegyric or two) from former subordinates, aides and associates; in fact,
most of them, including Obama, scored zero in that respect. It’s arguably more
intriguing, though, to delve back into a past that illuminates the present,
reminding us that Trump didn’t spring out of nowhere.

Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America has lately been turned into
an HBO miniseries, but there are echoes of the Trump phenomenon to be
found almost 70 years earlier, in the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen
Here, which envisages a ruthless populist called Buzz Windrip masterminding
a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party and winning the White House,
before being cast aside by an aide who comes across as a hybrid of Steve
Bannon and Mike Pence, followed by a military coup.

Perhaps more pertinently, a recent biographer of the 1950s virulently anti-

communist crusader Senator Joe McCarthy says that “in secret transcripts of
closed-door hearings, I realised that if you crossed out McCarthy’s name, you
would think you were listening to our 45th president”. It’s not entirely
surprising that McCarthy’s infamous colleague Roy Cohn subsequently served
the Trump Organisation as an indispensable fixer and lawyer.

Then there’s this question: “When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so
bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American
consensus, ever gone so far?” It was raised just ahead of a presidential election
by Richard Hofstadter in The New York Review of Books. He sympathises with
the Republican moderates’ twin task, “first of retaking the party from the cult
that now runs it and then of finding for it a program that steers clear of right-
wing ultra commitments”. He was writing in October 1964 about Barry
Goldwater.