Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi
By Zoha Waseem
Hurst, UK
ISBN: 978-1787389236
364pp.

"This is all because of the British,” said Divya Aunty, her chin pointing in the direction I was looking, face contorted with despair, her tone accusatory, as if she knew what I was thinking.

It was August 15, India’s Independence Day. I had accompanied my maasi [maternal aunt] to national celebrations at the convent school in a suburb of Bombay [Mumbai] where she taught. Divya Aunty, my maasi’s colleague, seemed to believe that I — raised in Canada, the West — required a timely lesson in history.

In my recollection, I hadn’t been looking at — nor had my adolescent brain noted — anything in particular, other than distaste for how the city seemed to become a grey, amorphous sludge following the rains. Aunty was referring to the potholed, cracked pavements and the open gutters that annually collapsed and overflowed under the pressure of incessant downpours. Perhaps she had known what I was really thinking.

How the British were historically responsible for contemporary economic underdevelopment in its former colonies was an understanding introduced to me in university, which later became an analytical practice. I learned that the kinds of statements Divya Aunty made reflected a form of national shame, that the expression itself was a people’s “postcolonial predicament”, that the ‘real’ India of the past was, regrettably, irretrievable.

Zoha Waseem takes an empathetic look at the colonial structures and subpar conditions that constrain the development of a modern and efficient law enforcement force in Karachi

Later, working in Islamabad in the non-governmental sector, where I moonlighted as an ethnographer of neo-colonial discourse in a developmentalist state, I would come across a related postcolonial conundrum. It showed up when I spoke to Karachiites who grew up in the 1990s, and the conversation would inevitably turn to the spates of violence that had marked their youth.

Where they were when an explosion went off was coupled with memories of growing up playing street cricket, adjacent to stories of mobile phone snatchings, carjackings and hold-ups at gunpoint. In my work, as well as socially, I tried to understand how a socio-economically mobile group had witnessed violence and felt fear. Terms such as ‘uneducated’, ‘corruption’, ‘extremism’ and ‘mindset’ trailed off interjections — dekhain, main aap ko bataata hoon [look, I’ll tell you] — to my layered questions and ended nowhere.

By the time I arrived in Islamabad in 2016, the military counterterrorism operations in the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) were largely complete and deemed a success, and the region’s ‘reintegration’ underway.

This period is the departure point for Zoha Waseem’s new book, Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi, an ethnographic analysis of the Karachi police force and its everyday operations attempting to handle the influx of militant outfits in Karachi — a spill-over of the war in Afghanistan — compounding decades of sectarian, ethnic and politically driven crime.

Waseem provides a dizzying list of incidents and organisations, and their ideological and political dispositions, that mushroomed across Karachi from the 1990s to the mid-2000s. She asserts that only through a close-up examination of routine policework and how it is embedded in hierarchical dynamics is it possible to understand why the police are unable to fulfil their custodial responsibility of keeping communities safe.

She further asserts that an understanding of the institution’s colonial legacy is essential to disrupt commonly held beliefs that corrupt, extortionate and extra-legal force characterises policework because of a few ‘bad apples’ or a danda-happy and lackadaisical thaana [police station] culture.

The author sets the scene in the colonial origins of Sindh’s governance, where she shows how policing structures were set up primarily to protect British rule from threats to its sovereignty. These allowed for the ‘necessary’ creation and legalisation of extraordinary measures to quell rebellion.

Moreover, the work of enforcement was disproportionately tasked to native officers from working-class backgrounds, who had to maintain order among impoverished communities, oversee agricultural production, resource extraction, and rent and tax collection. Underpaid, undertrained and disallowed from moving up in rank, this level of officers resorted to tactics of coercion, intimidation and punishment to ‘suppress rebellion’.

With reference to this colonial blueprint, Waseem observes two processes in tandem throughout her fieldwork: procedural informality and militarisation, which centre the police as at once subjects and agents of violence.

Waseem notes that, following Partition, the province of Sindh failed to create a policing structure responsive to Karachi’s demographic growth into the country’s financial hub and as a home for internal and cross-border religious and ethnically diverse migrants. Under the city’s fractured and contested governance, she identifies the police as an overburdened stop-gap to protect against all forms of public disorder that are defined as ‘national security threats’ — from civic unrest to gang warfare, to petty crime, to political dissent, to religious militancy.

The police’s discretionary use of violence, expedience and covert methods are underscored by, as Waseem puts it, “state or bureaucratic policies that are designed with the tacit knowledge that the police will need to engage in informal procedures, practices and behaviours to implement and realise them.”

This thesis unfolds around chapters that show the myriad-level ranking system that most officers are barred from climbing, pitiful descriptions of subpar living conditions in the police lines, harrowing staged encounters and — the most telling example of the militarisation of policing — the deployment of Rangers to supplement the remit of law enforcement.

Yet, how imperialism continues to impact formerly colonised regions remains a niche area of understanding, even though it is a 45-plus-year-old field of study.

Often, popular social media understandings in the South Asian diaspora tend to set the stage for a big reveal: Why do desi uncles have potbellies? Because of the Bengal famine! Is it uncivilised to eat with your hands? No, it actually makes food taste even better; watch this Bollywood actress show you how to shape the perfect nivala [morsel].

More interestingly, following British monarch Elizabeth II’s death and the predictable debate about whether it is unsavoury to speak ill of the dead, scholars around the world shared research of the British crown’s violent plundering of the world’s natural and cultural resources, ultimately beleaguering any possibility of global economic equality in the 20th century.

Waseem reminds readers that the dynamics and techniques of Karachi policing are permutations of colonial conditions of governance that were designed to criminalise a suppressed population. When it comes to the plight of middling police officers, she remains empathetic, while her interviews and observations at stations and beat patrols show how police personnel sheepishly make opportunistic choices, aware these are morally questionable, arguing this is the only way to work in the system and gain informal access to financial security.

A little less than three weeks after the bombing of a mosque inside Peshawar’s police lines on Jan 29, 2023, the police headquarters in Karachi were attacked by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), emboldened by the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The gun battle triggered old feelings that most knew were only temporarily calmed, and the official response of amping up security and ‘restoring law and order’ did little to address.

Karachi is not a city I am from, and I doubt understanding its fraught history can fill the void of empty promises. I can only reflect on what it must mean to people to continue to lose belonging in a city they call home, even if it is one that has never been safe.

What I do know is that it is important to understand that intellectual malaise is not the answer for those who care about the state of their country, though despair is an understandable starting point. Waseem’s book compels readers to sit with these competing emotions in order to move beyond the limitations of police reform that is “unlikely to shake off colonial legacies”, and meaningfully engage in a “sociology [...] of the police.”

The reviewer is a researcher at a migrant domestic worker rights organisation in Hong Kong. She tweets @radhapshah

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 26th, 2023