I Love Pakistan. But With Rampant Cruelty in the Country, There’s Much To Mourn
As Pakistan celebrates 77 years of independence, it's time we acknowledge the rising abuse and endless governmental failures across the board.
In the massive, overburdened metropolis of Karachi, millions of ordinary citizens struggle to survive. The hardships are too numerous to list adequately: a fragile law and order system presided over by a mercenary police force, a corrupt provincial government growing fat and rich while impoverished citizens labor tirelessly for salaries that ought to be illegal in the 21st century with almost zero basic services provided to them – not healthcare, not education, not even potable water. Last April, two children in Karachi’s northern district of Nazimabad died from drinking water that was so polluted it was contaminated with worms “that could be seen with the naked eye.” Experts later classified the water as turbid, so filthy that even chlorine tablets were ineffective in rendering it drinkable.
Karachi, my hometown, is an urban mess run by gangsters and thugs if it runs at all. Cruelty is endemic to the city. Though it is an ethnically diverse city, more than any other in Pakistan, minorities have suffered here. A violent campaign saw Shia Muslims assassinated in the 1990s. Ethnic Pathans from Northern Pakistan or refugees from Afghanistan are often set upon by political parties even though they make up an integral part of the city and survive in neighborhoods without even the minimum of public services.
Such services are hard to come by, however, no matter where you live. Try to file a police report and experience humiliation at the hands of a notoriously corrupt force, try to survive the summer months – with temperatures easily cruising over 100 degrees with no electricity. K-electric, formerly the Karachi Electrical Supply Company, is one of the most incompetent and feckless companies nationwide. The amount of load-shedding is so obscene that large swaths of the city go without electricity for hours while continuing to receive astronomical bills. If you don’t have the money, you cannot pay for a generator. If you don’t have the means, you cannot afford the cost of a private water tanker and must forfeit running water at home too. It is a rough city.
We inherited a bloated civil bureaucracy from the British, and yet the only thing that the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC) seems to do with any enthusiasm or efficiency is poison stray dogs. District municipal authorities have killed hundreds of thousands of stray dogs over the years, even though a “fully fledged” provincial rabies control program exists. In 2021, Pakistan killed an estimated 50,000 dogs by poison alone. Photographs shared in newspapers showed hundreds of dog carcasses lined up on busy roads – a shocking image of savagery. The authorities' preferred method of what they call “dog culling’” is to leave parcels of poisoned food all over the city. As a result, stray dogs, starving and trying to feed their young, die horribly in full view of pedestrians: convulsing with pain, frothing at the mouth, and howling on the streets.
In all the years I lived in Karachi, I never saw KMC do anything capably – the garbage is piled sky high and ignored for months, the roads are horribly constructed, and there are no working sewage systems; there are barely any public spaces that are free and well looked after – the only one I can think of that’s free is the beach and it is certainly not well looked after, littered with garbage and the sand soggy with slicks of oil. Karachi traffic is notoriously terrifying and seemingly out of the control of city authorities. But they poison dogs with aplomb.
In December 2021, a KMC supervisor was arrested after a toddler picked up a poisoned sweet intended for a dog, ate it, and died. Five other children also ate the toxic sweets that the official was carrying with him to leave around the city and had to be hospitalized. “The fact that innocent children and animals have had to pay the price for the heartlessness and cruelty of adults is disgusting,” Ayesha Chundrigar, who founded Pakistan’s first and largest animal shelter, the ACF Animal Rescue, told VICE World News at the time.
For a long time, I was one of the many Karachiites who said, ‘Yes, it’s terrible so many animals are suffering but what about the people?’ We have to solve the problems people face before we can turn to the animals – there are shortages of cooking gas, overcrowded public hospitals often short on medicine, and millions of women across the country don’t have the ID cards that are required to vote because voting in Pakistan is not a right but a luxury: you have to pay for the ID card. This week, UNICEF officials announced that 98% of infants under 2 years old in Sindh, Pakistan’s southernmost province, are undernourished – a shocking statistic. But it has become increasingly hard to ignore that these are interconnected systems of degradation, abuse, and governmental ineptitude.
A Spate of Cruelty
I have thought a lot about cruelty over the last few months. There is seemingly no respite from it, no shelter from the constant barrage of news of violence, torture, and pain no matter what country’s newspaper you are reading.