THE discourtesy of the Rangers who informed the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan that a scheduled meeting with their chief had been cancelled when the team arrived at their headquarters in Karachi, underscores the paramilitary force’s reluctance to discuss the operation under way in the city.

A fact-finding HRCP team asserted that the 310-day-old operation against lawlessness had failed to achieve its objectives. The operation was launched, they said, without “appropriate planning”; it was begun on “an ad hoc basis” but had become “open-ended”; there were differences between the federal and provincial governments over the campaign’s ownership; and a political vacuum existed.

The Rangers were asked to lead the campaign on the assumption that the police lacked the capacity to take on Karachi’s powerful underworld. But the results, the HRCP said, were far from satisfactory and nothing had been done to enhance the police’s capacity to handle crime. The team admitted that the daily number of murders had gone down — however, the overall crime situation remained the same.

The mission’s findings must be taken seriously based as they are on extensive interviews with those representing a wide cross-section of civil society, including families of the ‘missing’. Since there is no oversight of the operation by an independent commission, which the government failed to set up, the Rangers hardly consider themselves answerable to anyone when told to do a job that should essentially be handled by the police.

The flaws inherent in the police force are not to be denied, but the cops know a given area better than the Rangers. Sidelining the police was perhaps not the government’s intention when it tasked the Rangers with carrying out the operation. But the kind of “chemistry” the HRCP mentioned has failed to develop between the two forces.

This lack of genuine cooperation between them brings us to two other vital issues: the absence of local government representatives and the political parties’ indifference to the Karachi situation. Despite orders from the judiciary, the provinces have not held local government polls, nor have the cantonment boards bothered to have elected administrations.

As for the political parties, the PPP and MQM, the two parties that represent Sindh’s rural and urban constituencies, both have failed to play their expected role. The MQM has been lying low for obvious reasons, while the PPP chief minister doesn’t show the same zeal to serve Karachi as does Punjab’s chief minister where Lahore is concerned.

Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2014