‘The Plot Thickens’—and Unravels?

The broadsides fired by Mr Zulfiqar Mirza are still reverberating a week later—not that he rested after the main event. He followed up with emotional and teary statements that expressed his loyalty to the Party and the President but continued to home in on his original targets—the MQM and the Federal Interior Minister. The up shot has been a push to get a chastened and muddied MQM back into the government fold knowing that their strong arm tactics on the streets of Karachi and their in and out dance with the ruling party was no longer an option after the Mirza tirade. In fact they are now in the business of warding off negative fall-out of the charges leveled against them by Mirza.  The Interior Minister could either get into a public slanging match—that he would have lost—or get on the high horse and soft pedal the allegations. The PM has opted for a judicial commission to investigate thereby sending a signal to the Judiciary and others to hold their horses.

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The City of Death

The bodies are piling up in Karachi because those struggling for power in the city are following a strategy of body counts. The dead are just names and statistics and in some cases they are nameless because that is how the media is reporting their senseless death. There is no mention of who they are, what they did for a living, whether they had a family and why they were shot dead on the street or snatched tortured killed and thrown like garbage in sacks. More than a hundred have died in five days with over 20 dead in the last two days—Sunday and Monday. Hundreds have died earlier. Today, Tuesday is a day of mourning In Karachi and Hyderabad because a political party has decreed that it be so but Karachiites do not know who they are mourning—just the dead in what has become the city of death.

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