EIGHT years ago this month, 264 men and women were burned alive in an inferno that engulfed the garment factory in Karachi where they worked. It is only now that some measure of justice has been done (albeit Dawn is opposed to the death penalty) in that ghastly tragedy which ranks among the world’s deadliest industrial disasters.
An antiterrorism court on Tuesday awarded capital punishment to two former MQM activists and sentenced four gatekeepers of the factory to life imprisonment, while acquitting party leader Rauf Siddiqui. It appears the men, acting on the orders of the then chief of MQM’s Karachi Tanzeemi Committee Hammad Siddiqui, set the building ablaze after the factory owners did not pay Rs250m extortion or offer a share in their business.
When the crime was committed, the party had a mafia-like grip over much of Karachi. A story was put about that the fire was caused by an electrical short circuit due to poor maintenance and the police filed an FIR against the factory owners. It was in early 2015, by which time the Karachi operation had defanged the MQM, that the case took a dramatic turn. A Rangers report, based on an MQM activist’s confession from nearly two years earlier, held the party — then led by Altaf Hussain — as being squarely responsible for the fire.
However, one of the main accused, Hammad Siddiqui, is still ostensibly on the run. A report some three years ago claiming he had been arrested in Dubai was denied by law-enforcement authorities; whether that is true, or whether a ‘confessional’ video will surface at an opportune time in the future, is difficult to tell. There are always some trump cards that are kept in play by the powers that be — and the ones that have outlived their usefulness are discarded. Saulat Mirza is a case in point.
Nevertheless, the convictions of most of the accused will bring some solace to the victims’ families. That said, the Baldia fire stands out because it was an unparalleled atrocity; the thuggish regime on whose watch it took place thrived on criminality as a matter of course. MQM cadres, armed to the teeth, would paralyse the entire city at a moment’s notice, disrupting people’s lives and livelihoods on the whims of their leader-in-exile in London. The party’s network of ruthless sector and unit ‘in-charges’ in collusion with some of the party’s top leaders was involved in multiple rackets including extortion, china-cutting, etc. Those who put up any resistance or simply happened to come in the way, paid the ultimate price.
While the Karachi operation managed to nab several MQM ‘assets’, those higher up the ladder — including the ones who gave the orders — are now part of the MQM-P and the Pak Sarzameen Party. The politics of expediency has given them a new lease of life.
Circular debt worries
PAKISTAN’S circular debt challenge is getting bigger by the day and the government is struggling hard to get a firm handle on the problem, which is threatening the very stability of the power sector. Notwithstanding the claims by ministers and other government officials of having controlled the pace of increase in the power-sector debt stock, the latter has almost doubled over the last couple of years to reach Rs2.1tr. The government has time and again declared that the pace of monthly growth in the quasi-fiscal debt size had been arrested and brought down to Rs10bn-12bn from Rs38bn during the last PML-N government. But in effect, the debt rose by almost Rs45bn a month during the previous financial year. A recent study by a private power company has predicted the size of the circular debt — or the amount of cash shortfall within the Central Power Purchasing Agency system that the agency is unable to pay to its power suppliers — to double in the next five years if it is not brought under control. That would be quite a scary situation given that the country is still being run on borrowed money and its economy is groping in the dark.
The growing power-sector debt is generally considered one of the biggest threats to the stability of the sector, as well as the government’s budget. There are numerous reasons for the appearance of circular debt in the mid-2000s and its increase, ranging from expensive power purchasing agreements with private producers and exorbitantly high system losses to unrecovered bills, corruption and mismanagement of state-owned distribution companies. However, it is surprising to see a federal government minister simplify the problem by putting the entire blame on the previous rulers. Indeed, the present government has inherited the issue from its predecessor. Yet the people have a right to ask as to what it has done in the last two years to manage it and why it has been pursuing the same power policies followed by the previous administration. After all, it is the people that have to bear the brunt of wrong power policies and gross mismanagement of the sector in the form of electricity rates that are higher than the regional average. With the PTI into its third year in power, the public expects it to come up with a tangible short- to long-term power-sector reform programme to fix matters instead of constantly looking back.
Tips for a neighbour
A NUMBER of factors have been identified in the investigation to ascertain the reasons behind the huge outbreak of Covid-19 next door in India. It is said the lockdown was hastily and clumsily imposed and the resultant mass return home of millions of workers from the cities led to a spread of the virus to a point where India is only behind the US in terms of the countries worst hit by Covid-19. Over 5m cases of Covid-19 have been diagnosed in India. Of these, no less than 90,000 people have lost their lives. As yet, there are no signs of the pandemic subsiding. The stories from across the border, highlighted in the official bulletins of the highest Pakistani government functionaries in an effort to prove the success of their own anti-coronavirus strategy, raises one basic question that has the tendency to crop up frequently in the history of Pakistan-India affairs: was there something that one neighbour could learn from the other?
There is no running away from comparisons between the two countries. Over time, knowledge gained through experiences in one country has benefited the other, especially in the area of healthcare, given the similarities in health conditions. To say that there have not been queries from across the border to find out what strategies Pakistan has employed to keep the situation from worsening would be implausible. There have been more than 307,418 recorded Covid-19 cases in Pakistan and so far less than 6,500 deaths. Matters could have been worse, considering international trends and initial local projections. Not all answers may be known as yet and we will need a full-scale socioeconomic study to understand the causes for the spread and containment of the virus. But surely there are some handy tips that India could pick up right away. Pakistani officials have repeatedly pointed out where the Narendra Modi government was going wrong in its tackling of the Covid-19 pandemic. They could also offer the neighbouring country some help in correcting the lapses.
