Free Aboard the Democracy Train by Nafisa Hoodbhoy

Although for months, they had ignored our investigative reports on dacoits, the kidnapping of a key industrialist appeared to have been a wake up call. All of a sudden, the forests were cut down across Sindh to prevent dacoits from taking hostages. District administrations, until now allowed to look the other way, were warned against sheltering the bandits. Ranger patrols were stepped up and dacoits were shot on sight.
    As the army branched across Sindh for “Operation Clean-up,” the poor villagers heaved a sigh of relief. It was also a signal to ordinary Sindhis and the PPP that the time was ripe to reorganize for a return to power.
    By 1992, Benazir had learnt that the road to Islamabad did not lie with the electorate but through currying favor with the military rulers. She began hobnobbing with the president who had once dismissed her, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, to convince him to sack Nawaz Sharif’s government.
    Four years in the knitty gritty world of politics had taught Benazir that securing the support of millions may be good for her populist image, but it would not make her the next prime minister of Pakistan. Eventually, it would be the PPP’s recourse to “palace intrigues” – a well-traveled road for politicians seeking power in Pakistan – that did the trick.
    Knowing me as the reporter who covered the PPP for the nation’s most influential newspaper, the party’s top brass began to contact me directly. Each evening, a key aide to Benazir – Nabil Gabol – cleverly timed his phone calls to give me information about Benazir’s meetings with the establishment, aimed at securing the dissolution of the assemblies.
    The PPP’s purpose was served, as I wrote lead stories in
Dawn
about indications that fresh elections were in the offing. It was also a genuine demand by the masses, who argued that Benazir’s last tenure had been too short to do any good.
    In the meantime, Benazir kept her “train marches” handy in her bid to return to power. One of her party loyalists, remembering the glowing image of Benazir I had presented in my newspaper, playfully asked me if I would be ready to join them again on the “Democracy Train.”
    By then, however, I had seen far too much anarchy and opportunism in the PPP’s policies to make me feel optimistic about their efforts to bring democracy.
    I retorted with a metaphor taken from the famous train accident at Sangi railway station in rural Sindh in 1990, when a train careened out of control at the station and killed hundreds of people: “Ah, but remember there’s Sangi ahead.”
    Over two decades later, my mind’s eye flashes back to the peasants of Sindh, whose half-shirts flapped in the wind as they ran barefoot along the railroad tracks to hear the PPP – then led by the charismatic Benazir Bhutto – promise them a better future.
    It is a promise that still waits to be fulfilled.

Chapter 2
ETHNIC
VIOLENCE IN
SINDH: THE
MQM SAGA
Two Days that Sinned
    On September 30, 1988, it was late evening at my newspaper,
Dawn
, in Karachi, when news came that terrorists had started a shooting spree in Hyderabad, a city north of Karachi. Dozens of those killed were Mohajirs – Muslim refugees from India.
    Although incidents of ethnic violence had for the last three years escalated across Sindh, the nature of the attacks struck me as extraordinary. It was the first time that the Mohajirs – also called Urdu speakers – were targeted in such large numbers. Even the residents of Karachi, inured by acts of daily violence, had grown anxious and the telephones rang off the hook.
    No one had claimed responsibility for the incident but ripples of fear ran through the community that it was an ethnic killing that would become the precursor to unspeakable bloody retaliation.
    It was an audacious attack that reeked of conspiracy. Hyderabad had more Sindhis than Mohajirs and the attackers could easily blend into the population. On the other hand, the planners had apparently calculated