Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
recreation to dekho :bummer:
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Ziaul Haq during a visit to Karachi’s busy shipyard: In the early 1980s, though Karachi did return to becoming the country’s economic hub again, this time much of its booming economics was based on a parallel ‘black economy’ fuelled by the large amounts of money floated by drug, land and gun mafias. Instead of addressing such issues, the regime stuck to offering moralistic eyewashes through highly propagated and hyped postures of piety and certain draconian laws that were imposed in the name of morality and faith …
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Women activists protesting against Zia’s ‘moral policing’ outside the Sindh Chief Minister House in Karachi (1986).
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Chairperson of the PPP and Zia’s leading opponent, Benazir Bhutto, waves to the crowd during her wedding ceremony (held in Lyari) in 1986.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
After so many years, the story remains the same. The representative of victims created a new story of victimisation.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
In 1987 a massive bomb exploded in the busy Saddar area of the city, killing dozens of people. This was the first such incident in a Pakistani city and Karachiites were left shocked and badly shaken. The regime accused ‘communist agents.’
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
As the exhilaration of the superficial and contradictory economic boom experienced by the city in the early and mid-1980s began to recede, Karachi looked like a city in shambles with a rapidly growing population and a crumbling infrastructure. Its slums and many low-income areas were now crawling with drug peddlers and drug addicts and its lower-middle-class areas taken-over by armed youth, patrolling the streets, extorting money in the name of protecting the areas from possible hostile infiltration by members of ‘enemy ethnicities.’ Prosperity had mutated into becoming paranoia.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
A young MQM supporter wearing an Altaf Hussain T-Shirt in Karachi’s Liaqatabad area (1989). When the MQM swept the first post-Zia election in 1988 in Karachi, this was the first time (ever since the city’s status as capital of Pakistan was withdrawn in 1962) that its representatives became a direct part of the government at the centre and in Sindh. The PPP had been returned to power in the election and it formed a coalition government with the MQM.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Benazir and Asif Zardari meet Altaf Hussain in 1989 to form PPP-MQM coalition governments in the centre and Sindh. The new government struggled to come to grips with the shock that the country’s economy and politics experienced after generous hand-outs from the US and Saudi Arabia began to dry out considerably at the end of the so-called ‘anti-Soviet Afghan jihad.’
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
A Pajero belonging to a leader of a religious leader in 1990 in Karachi: The cultural dynamics of the society had been radically altered. Amoral and cynical materialism nonchalantly ran in conjunction with a two-fold rise in the need and impulse to stridently exhibit ones ‘piety.’
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Najeeb Ahmed – the Karachi President of the PPP’s student-wing, the PSF – during a press conference in 1990. He was killed in an armed ambush: The permanent matter of Karachi’s ever-growing population, depleting resources and tensions between its various clustered ethnicities soon triggered a wave of violence as MQM and the PPP went to war in the streets and campuses of the city. The violence in Karachi became the pretext of the dismissal of Benazir Bhutto’s first regime and the controversial election of Mian Nawaz Sharif as the new prime minister in 1990.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Nawaz, Altaf and Jam Sadiq at a rally in Karachi in 1991: Sharif vowed to turn Karachi into an economic hub again and for this he chose a former PPP member, Jam Sadiq Ali, as Sindh’s new Chief Minister. Jam had been a member of the PPP till he was ousted by Benazir in 1986. Sharif used his grudge against the PPP to undermine the party’s influence in Sindh. In Karachi, Jam gave a free hand to the MQM. Though MQM used this opportunity to launch a number of developmental projects in the city’s mohajir-majority areas, at the same time it unleashed its activists against Jam’s ‘enemies’ (both real and imagined).
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
COAS General Asif Nawaz (left) and Nawaz Sharif in Karachi in 1992: By 1992, with the country’s economy still showing no signs of recovery, and the corruption that first began to rear its head in the 1980s was continuing to grow, Karachi now truly looked like a crumbling city held hostage to the whims and tantrums of the MQM-Jam nexus. Alarmed by the situation, the military forced Nawaz to launch an operation against extortionists and MQM activists. Nawaz reluctantly agreed and in 1992 the operation was launched.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Cops encircle a dead body of an MQM activist in Karachi’s Burns Road area during the Govt-Military operation in Karachi in 1992: Karachi would see a total of three intense operations against the MQM across the 1990s. This decade is still said to be the most violent in the city’s history. Hundreds of civilians, cops and members of paramilitary forces lost their lives.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Pakistan playing against South Africa at Karachi’s National Stadium during the 1996 Cricket World Cup.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
A pop concert at Karachi’s KMC Complex in 1996.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
1996: By the end of the 1990s, the city’s infrastructure had almost completely collapsed, crippled by ethnic and political violence, strikes and curfews. Major businesses began to move out from the city, factories began to close down and incidents of extra-judicial killings, revenge murders, extortion and kidnapping became a norm. Heaps of garbage dumps unattended for months symbolised what had become of this once ‘Paris of Asia’ and a bastion of economic ingenuity. The turmoil in the city finally came to a sudden end when General Pervez Musharraf toppled the second Nawaz Sharif government in 1999.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Musharraf distributing gifts to a child from one of Karachi’s slum areas in 2003. This was the year when the MQM regrouped and regenerated itself and got into an alliance with the Musharraf regime.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
A fashion show being held at a Karachi hotel in 2003: In the first five years of his dictatorship, Musharraf managed to inject a sense of stability. Ethnic violence greatly receded, the economy bolstered, and neo-liberal capitalist manoeuvres strengthened the economic status of the middle-classes.
Re: Visual Karachi: From Paris of Asia, to City of Lights, to Hell on Earth
Karachi’s Seaview area in 2004.