The Need for Speed: Traffic Regulation and the Violent Fabric of Karachi

Speed and Its Discontents

The brightly painted and sometimes heavily decorated minibuses of Karachi provide a cheap form of transport for the poorer residents of the city. Unlike the larger, better maintained and thus more expensive coaches, they also have the advantage, for the residents of peripheral goths (urban villages) and katchi abadis (squatter settlements), of serving remote localities where the roads are often in poor condition. This did not prevent these minibuses from becoming objects of fear and resentment, a sentiment which crystallized in the mid 1980s and which was epitomized by the nickname given to them by Karachiites during that period – the ‘yellow devils’. This epithet found its origins in the tendency of minibus drivers to drive at breakneck speed, racing at 70 mph to pick up customers. Some passengers encouraged drivers to go at full throttle to reach their place of work on time. But the primary incentive for such speeding was the nature of the contractual relations between minibus owners and their drivers. Until the end of the 1970s, the number of minibuses in the city remained quite low, and they were operated by a handful of bus owners known as transporters (most of them Pakistani Pashtuns), ² who hired drivers and ‘conductors’ (young men in charge of attracting passengers and collecting the fares from them). This situation started changing in the early 1980s, as a substantial part of the profits generated by the emerging trade in Afghan heroin were reinvested in Karachi’s transport sector, which by then was already largely privatized. ³

While some owners of route permits continued to operate vehicles themselves, by hiring drivers who received a share of the day’s earnings, others shifted to a leasing system by granting loans (generally with huge interest) to prospective buyers. These operators had to maintain the vehicles at their own cost while repaying their loans in monthly instalments, and, if they failed to do so, the bus would simply be taken away from them, without any financial compensation. This encouraged prospective owners to drive the buses themselves and their situation resembled that of bonded labourers, as the longer they took to repay their loans the more indebted they became. Most of these drivers were newly settled, single, migrant workers from upcountry, with no roots in the city. Among them, the largest chunk came from the rural areas of the Hazara Division of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), or, less frequently, from Azad Kashmir. Their lack of familiarity with Karachi’s urban environment distinguished them from populations with a longer presence in the city, such as Mohajirs (Urdu-speakers tracing their roots to the urban world of North India or the Deccan plateau, who settled in Karachi in the aftermath of Partition and who remain Karachi’s dominant community, in terms of numbers, political influence and economic clout). At the same time, their ethnicity made them an object of contempt for their patrons – to this day, Pashtuns tend to look down upon the Hindko-speaking Hazarawals, whom they consider less manly and more ‘Indianized’. Besides being confronted with xenophobia from all sides, these migrant workers had to bear the pressures of their creditors and deal with the notoriously greedy police, who extorted money from them through bhatta (bribes) or under the guise of challans (fines for traffic violations). If that wasn’t enough, drivers and conductors also had to contend with Karachi’s potholed roads, its numerous traffic hazards, its unruly passengers and free-riders. The only way to cope with these challenges was to drive fast and work long shifts (a typical working day would start at 7 a.m. and extend till 11 p.m.), save money on the rent by pitching a hammock in the bus at night, and resort to various stimulants throughout the day, from hashish to loud music (with a predilection for raunchy Indian songs).

While speeding partook of emancipatory projects – or, more simply, survival strategies – on the part of debt-ridden drivers, it also nurtured and showcased the sense of autonomy of these freshly settled migrant workers. Although they were never endowed with the same ‘daredevil masculine aura’ as the kombi-taxi drivers of South African cities (Hansen, 2006), the drivers of Karachi’s minibuses enjoyed a similar autonomy from the existing road traffic legislation. The sense of freedom procured by this autonomy from traffic laws was epitomized by their racing contests, which were irreducible to their economic incentives (outracing competitors and, for the drivers who operated these ‘yellow devils’ on a lease, reimbursing their debts quicker to become their own masters). For these men, freshly arrived from the countryside and exposed to the hostility of Karachi’s more urbane population, speeding and other forms of traffic violations were also proclamations of independence – a way to reclaim control over their lives and, however precariously, over their new urban environment.

If we lack evidence to substantiate the claim of a self-conscious freedom among these drivers – there are no ethnographic studies of the transport sector and these often illiterate workers left no personal accounts of their experience – press reports of the time attest to the autonomy with which they were endowed and the tensions that it nurtured with transport users. Consider the following extracts from an article published in the daily Dawn on 26 April 1985, ten days after riots erupted following the death of a young Urdu-speaking student, Bushra Zaidi, after she was hit by a minibus racing with a competitor:

From the cleaner and the two conductors who shove you in and out of the minibus to the person who is supposed to be the driver, the manpower that runs Karachi’s transport is a rural transplant in an urban setting. […] Invariably in their teens (sometimes underteens), the yokels are surprised at the ease with which a display of rural toughness tames the urban commuters. The university professors now travel by minibuses with one strategy in mind – to mess up as little as possible with the underteen conductors. […] As things stand today, young men coming from villages […] suddenly find themselves in control of shiny minibuses in city streets and accelerate, zigzag, honk and race just to signal to their buddies driving other minibuses that they are enjoying life and having fun! (Siddiqi, 1985)

Analysts of Karachi have already underlined the contribution of various struggles for the city and its resources (land, transport, narcotics) to the violent escalation of the mid 1980s (Gayer, 2007, 2014; Hasan, 1987; Hussain, 1990). Much more rare are the accounts that put the idea of the city – both as a horizon of possibilities and a form of sociality – at the heart of the analysis. ⁴ What the Bushra Zaidi incident revealed, however, was the intensity of the conflicts nurtured by desires to live city life to the fullest – and the fastest. The resentment against migrant workers ‘eating’ the city without feeding it (to use the metaphor of a public servant interviewed by anthropologist Oskar Verkaaik, 2009) or treating it like a prostitute, used and abused by its customers (as in Parveen Shakir’s poem ‘Karachi’ [Shakir, 1988]), became a common trope among Urdu-speakers during the mid 1980s. Press reports such as the one quoted above make a valuable addition to this corpus of proto-ethnic hatred by suggesting that the problem with minibus drivers and conductors was not so much their rural origins as their pretensions to becoming city-dwellers on their own terms, thus giving up the values of docility allegedly informing the rural moral economy:

A word here about the boys: nothing wrong with them in their own rural setting. They are polite, meek and well-mannered. But once in Karachi’s transport jungles, they give up all time-honoured rural values – values which are in their bones, like respect for women. (Siddiqi, 1985)

Struggles for the City and the Battle for Pace

The 1985 riots have already been analysed in detail elsewhere (Azam and Shaheed, 1987; Hussain, 1990; Tambiah, 1997 [1996]) and I do not aim to retrace the chronology of this episode of civil strife, which officially cost 50 lives and inaugurated a long series of public disturbances. Instead, I would like to insist upon the emergence of new forms of street violence during these riots, which combined physical movements of acceleration and tactics of deceleration. These disruptions of public order, which would be emulated by later aspirants to authority, all endowed speed with a bellicose quality, be it through its maximization or its exhaustion. After providing a terrain for divergent claims to the city, speeding and the control of pace were weaponized, turning the city against itself in the process – on the one hand by unleashing hit-and-run attacks that built upon the city’s ‘phenomenology of density’ (Rao, 2007) and on the other by using vectors of connectivity as instruments of blockade which, in the opposite direction, inverted the original function of these vehicles to hamper the movement of bodies and commodities across the city – circulatory devices turned impediments to the normal flow of traffic. This was the opening act of a struggle for the city that proceeded through the government of speed, that is, through the control of the possible pace of action of others.

While Pashtuns and their vehicles were at the receiving end of this violence on 15 April, they retaliated the following day by calling a strike that paralysed the city. Strike calls would become one of the favourite weapons of the transporters’ lobby from then on. Besides preventing commuters from tending to their daily working routines, and thus affecting the city’s economy at large (particularly in the textile industry, where the chain of production is highly vulnerable to workers’ absenteeism), these strikes would greatly disturb the education system, as schools would generally remain closed, while universities and colleges would have to postpone exams. Such attempts to hamper circulatory flows on the part of those who usually specialized in facilitating them only fuelled public resentment against the transporters’ lobby, as well as popular representations of this interest group as a ‘mafia’. In some localities, such as Orangi (Karachi’s largest unofficial settlement [katchi abadi], which has been one its major battlegrounds since the mid 1980s), these pressure tactics also reinforced the ethnic divide by contributing to a siege mentality among non-Pashtuns, who felt trapped and surrounded by hostile neighbours, who inspired all the more fear that they were often heavily armed (Irshad and Aslam, 1985: 44). From the point of view of the transporters’ lobby, however, these collective actions, which weaponized public transport while capitalizing on the physical estrangement of workers from their workplace as a result of ill-conceived urban planning initiatives, yielded important political dividends. Thus, in the aftermath of the April 1985 riots, during which they demonstrated their capacity to shut down the city, transporters not only obtained a relaxation of the legal sanctions against homicidal drivers but were generously compensated for their losses during the disturbances (this, however, would change in later years, as state authorities proved increasingly reluctant to cover the costs of these short-lived but destructive violent outbursts).

As they tried to shut down the city, Pashtun transporters also orchestrated attacks against houses (a dozen were ransacked), as well as police cars and motorcycles. Attacks against motorcycles specifically targeted students, who were at the forefront of the disturbances. ⁶ Throughout the riots, cavalcades of students drove across Mohajir-dominated neighbourhoods of west Karachi, from Nazimabad to Orangi, to sustain and expand the protests. On 16 April, for instance, 40 youngsters rode through the streets of Nazimabad and encouraged shopkeepers to close down in protest. The shops responded and the entire Nazimabad commercial area went dead (Azam and Shaheed, 1987). This disruptive tactic, using vehicles in motion to hamper economic and financial flows, also became a weapon of choice of the MQM in later years. This party, which provided Mohajirs with ‘support, defence and retaliation’ against Pashtun transporters and traffickers (Verkaaik, 2004: 65), went one step further in the militarization of transport, however. It also formed squads of motorized hit men (known locally as ‘shooters’ or ‘target killers’) resembling Colombian sicarios, who combined speed, manoeuvrability and intractability to settle the party’s accounts across the city.

Rioters and Highway Patrolmen

The 1985 riots and those that followed (in particular the Qasba and Aligarh Colony massacres of December 1986, which were more related to the new politics of real estate in the city [Gayer, 2014: 46–7]) ⁷ instilled a sense of existential fear among Urdu-speaking populations, which paved the way for the rise of the MQM at the helm of city politics. In 1986, the MQM organized its first mass meeting in Nishtar Park, and in the following years it swept municipal and national elections (in 1987 and 1988, respectively). These electoral victories made it a political force to be reckoned with by more mainstream national parties, such as the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) of Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League of Nawaz Sharif (PML-N), with which the MQM allied successively during the 1990s. While inserting itself into the ‘establishment’ it had so vehemently derided in its infancy, the MQM continued to cultivate an oppositional image, employing various forms of disruptive tactics to obtain concessions from its partner of the time. The MQM used to its advantage the status of Karachi as Pakistan’s economic capital. In a more generic way, it built upon a chronic tension of urban life – the opposition between a regime of velocity, where urban agglomerations appear as ‘a point on the synoptic path of a trajectory’, accelerating the traffic flows crossing them, and another where the city operates as ‘brakes against the acceleration of penetration’ (Virilio, 2006 [1977]: 31, 33). The MQM’s strike calls struck at the heart of city life by bringing things to a halt – bazaars would have a deserted look as shopkeepers pulled down the shutters, for fear of being targeted by party activists; schools, colleges and petrol pumps remained closed, while the streets took on a ghostly appearance, as they were emptied of vehicles. Stick-wielding and (more rarely) gun-toting MQM activists would make their presence felt by setting up road blockades, burning tyres and, occasionally, torching trucks or minibuses. In the past, these strikes were often accompanied by large-scale disturbances, as MQM supporters launched attacks against buses, banks or public buildings. Karachi’s economy was hit hard by these disturbances, which culminated during the mid 1990s. ⁸ By then, the hartal (general strikes) had become a common occurrence, each bringing its own wave of disruption and destruction. They were all over the news and even became fit subject matter for poetry, as reflected in Zeeshan Sahil’s collection of poems, Karachi aur Dusri Nazmen (Karachi and Other Poems, 2011 [1995]), which conveys the sense of fear that gripped the inhabitants of a city confronted with episodic violent outbursts.

These city shutdowns aimed to show that nothing could move in Karachi without the MQM’s approval. As such, these city shutdowns amounted to proclamations of sovereignty through the emptying of public space – a reductio ad vacuum, where the MQM’s public authority was manifested through a void. Such statements struck at the heart of city life itself, by challenging the ambulatory and intersecting proclivities of all things and beings passing through the city, and, more generally, by slowing down the pace of urban life in the most buoyant parts of town (such as the central neighbourhood of Saddar, where most banks and offices are located, as well as the Old City, where Karachi’s wholesale markets are concentrated, or the industrial areas of Landhi and Korangi in the south-east, all of which are located in MQM strongholds). This ambition to regulate the flow of traffic is reminiscent of Virilio’s remarks on state power as police, that is, as ‘highway patrol’ (voirie). When statesmen operate as highway patrolmen, the control of social order becomes confused with the control of circulatory flows, while traffic disorders (traffic jams, encroachments, illegal parking, accidents) amount to revolts against this power exerting itself through the regulation of movement on the streets (Virilio, 2006 [1977]: 39). The MQM’s ‘police’ is of a messier kind, however. As a claim to authority over movement and its pace, it is as much an attempt to regulate traffic flows as to disrupt the circulatory order of things. These disruptive tactics carry their own negation and celebrate the possibility of being overcome by the disorderly forces that give them strength. The risk of losing control over these forces looms large over all attempts to rule on the edge of disorder and gives them their efficacy, allowing strategies of negotiation or legitimization that oscillate between the demiurgic and the most mundane forms of racketeering. Thus, when Karachi faced one of its worst episodes ever of political violence, following the resignation of the MQM from the PPP-led government, during the summer of 2011, its leaders in Karachi claimed that the party, far from instigating violence, was in fact restraining the Urdu-speaking population of Karachi. In the process, they claimed to have spared the city ‘such mayhem and bloodshed that the people would not be able to count the bodies’ (HRCP, 2007: 14). This valorization of the regulating capacities of the MQM could obviously be read backwards as a veiled threat, by suggesting that the party had the ability to unleash an urban apocalypse at will.

Militarizing the Transport Infrastructure

As ‘political’ and ‘criminal’ violence – two categories that can never be taken for granted in Karachi – turned into chronic forms of instantiation of the urban, ⁹ circulating across the city became an increasingly perilous affair. More than the vehicles driving through it, the city itself became a source of insecurity. Traffic hurdles were rethought as life threats and new forms of monitoring the environment, as well as new commuting routines, were developed to minimize these threats, with various amounts of success. While contributing in a major way to this diffuse sense of danger, the MQM also tried to address it during the second half of the 2000s, when it headed a local government with unprecedented resources as far as urban development was concerned. Once again, speed became a major terrain of negotiation for conflicting views of the city and the respective place of its various components. This time, however, the need for speed was no longer a risky tool of emancipation on the part of freshly settled migrant workers, but a privileged ground for the realization of more elitist fantasies of circulation. Through an ‘infrastructure fetishism’ (Anwar, 2014: 8) investing in expressways and interchanges with fantasies of seamless connectivity, the MQM municipality experimented with a new modality of moving-power. Without entirely relinquishing its disruptive tactics hampering circulatory flows, the party also committed its unprecedented resources to monitor and facilitate them moving at greater speed. These mega projects, and the efforts of urban planning that informed them, went a long way to rehabilitate the MQM in the eyes of its constituents, from a violent and disruptive political force to a responsible manager of city affairs. In a more pernicious way, however, some of these construction projects brought together the MQM and its constituents around a politically loaded programme focusing on the ‘bypassing’ of troublesome neighbourhoods. As such, these construction projects partook of a form of military thought which, by virtue of functional planning, aimed to reduce the possibilities of fortuitous encounters with the other and the unknown, that is, to eliminate the element of chance inherent in city life, with all its potentialities for mishap (Virilio, 2006 [1977]: 42–3).

Following the victory of the MQM in the 2005 municipal election, the new City Nazim (mayor), Mustafa Kamal, set for himself an ambitious objective: transforming Karachi into a ‘world-class’ city on a par with Dubai. With this goal in mind, the young and dynamic mayor devoted himself to the alleviation of Karachi’s structural transport problem through the development of a long-delayed mass transit system. For Kamal and other promoters of the ‘world-class’ city dream, mass transit was essentially a matter of ‘smooth and hassle-free traffic flow’, as a promotional document issued by the City District Government of Karachi (CDGK) in 2009 emphasized. The first section of this document advertising the accomplishments of the MQM city government is devoted to ‘flyovers’, ‘underpasses’ and other ‘interchanges’, with their promises of a fluid and unpromiscuous circulation: ‘First time [sic] people are enjoying the driving pleasure, which had been a dream in the past’ (CDGK, 2009: 18). The flyover was the fetish ¹⁰ of the hyperactive mayor and his entourage, the symbol of their commitment to speed and urban modernity. Five of them were completed in 2007 alone, another five the following year and six in 2009, before Kamal completed his term (Maher, 2014).

As of 2015, Karachi had 46 flyovers – completed or under construction. Originally, these interchanges were meant to reduce traffic hazards at clogged intersections. Thus, the first flyover built in the city was located at Nazimabad No. 2, the very intersection where Bushra Zaidi was crushed to death in April 1985. Although city officials had been talking about this project from 1983 onwards, it was not approved until 1985. Its construction was delayed by red tape and a volatile law-and-order situation and it was only completed in 1993. In the following years, construction continued at the pace of roughly one flyover a year, until this number exploded under the mandate of Mustafa Kamal. By then, the primary motive for these constructions was no longer to reduce the number of accidents at busy and dangerous intersections but to facilitate road traffic. Many of these flyovers were thus part of ‘signal-free corridors’, a concept invented by Mustafa Kamal and his team of young technocrats, which involved linking major thoroughfares with flyovers at every intersection. Far from reducing the number of accidents, these corridors promoted speeding and, without substantially reducing traffic, led to a spectacular increase in accidents, as pedestrians got in the way (Maher, 2014). This new transport infrastructure was also accused by its critics of aggravating the partition of the city into ‘safe rings’ and ‘tension-prone areas’ by ‘bypassing’ the latter. Although this new infrastructure, superimposed upon the existing road network, was not reserved for those who were ready to pay for it (as it remained free to access), it did partake in what Graham and Marvin, in their examination of the new splintering urbanism, refer to as ‘infrastructural bypass’, as valued users were provided with increased speed and safety-in-connectivity, while less valued users were literally left behind (Graham and Marvin, 2001).

What makes this ‘unbundling’ of the transport infrastructure specific, here, is the role of political rather than economic considerations. The valued users being given precedence by the MQM municipality were not only middle- or upper-class car owners in a hurry, but also working- and lower middle-class commuters transiting daily through ‘hostile’ neighbourhoods. More than their class position, what made certain commuters eligible for a preferential access to this new infrastructure was their ethnicity and political affiliation, most of them residing in localities with a long record of voting for the MQM. This transport infrastructure was not inherently political – its construction and maintenance did not require political relationships of a particular kind (such as, say, nuclear power; Winner, 1980). Neither was it political by design (flyovers are not, per se, an obstacle to mass transit), but rather by virtue of its arrangements (flyovers as components of ‘signal-free corridors’ preventing public transport stopping and picking up passengers along the way) and its location (flyovers as impediments to social contacts across ethnic and political divides). And if it ended up supporting a process of splintered urbanism, it was not so much on socioeconomic lines as by reinforcing the pre-existing partition of urban space on ethnic and political lines. At the same time, this segregation through movement and infrastructure was concomitant with a desire, on the part of the promoters of the ‘world-class’ city and their constituents, to engage full-on with the larger world. Through the production of a neatly segregated city, they proclaimed their eligibility for a larger world of possibilities – ‘a globalized world of efficacy and accomplishment’ (Simone, 2010: 140).

While facilitating rapid movement between Mohajir localities, such projects also made it easier for the MQM to shut down the city at short notice as these key nodes were located in its ‘jurisdiction’. ¹¹ In other words, the same constructions served the MQM’s capacities of mobilization and its coercive tactics, which aimed to disrupt the normal flow of traffic across the city. And while these two forms of regulation of traffic flows might seem contradictory, they partook, in fact, of the same logic of ‘kinetic channelling’, through ‘the accumulation and direction of the energies and flows of the populace as a whole’ (Douglas, 1997). Key to the MQM’s predominance, in an increasingly fragmented and contested city, has been its ability to maintain a disequilibrium in interdependencies, which makes it less dependent on others than others on it. Strengthening its capacities to regulate traffic flows through infrastructure – either by facilitating or disrupting them – has been essential to preserving its predominant position. Maintaining close relations with ‘friendly’ transport operators, for its part, has been the best way to ensure that the party’s constituents were not affected by the attempts of its rivals to replicate its disruptive tactics. Thus, when the Pashtun-dominated Karachi Transport Ittehad, which maintains close links with the Awami National Party (ANP), calls for a strike, the MQM will ensure that the transporters affiliated with the Karachi Bus Owners Association (most of whom are Mohajirs and Punjabis) will continue to run their bus services between Landhi/Korangi and the central district of Saddar, where many lower middle-class Mohajir residents of Landhi and Korangi are employed as office clerks, bank employees, etc. In contrast, when it is the MQM that calls for a strike, both transport associations will suspend their operations, for fear of attacks by MQM activists on their vehicles. ¹²

Although this was certainly not the intention of those who commissioned it, this new transport infrastructure has lent itself to more literal military uses, inscribing it further into a double-edged urbanism, which does not so much aim to securitize Karachi and its infrastructure (on the lines of what Graham [2010] refers to as ‘military urbanism’) as it entertains the possibility that this infrastructure be converted, at least periodically, into a military asset. Over the last few years, newly commissioned flyovers have become shooting posts for snipers affiliated with various militant groups. MQM militants were the first armed fighters to use this new transport infrastructure to gain tactical advantage over their rivals. As the city erupted into gun battles between the MQM, the PPP and the ANP on 12 May 2007, ¹³ gunmen affiliated with the MQM took up positions on the city’s interchanges, especially those overlooking Sharah-e-Faisal (one of Karachi’s major thoroughfares, linking the city centre with the airport) to target the rallies organized by rival political parties (HRCP, 2007). The MQM played a critical role as far as the militarization of this infrastructure was concerned. As one participant in the gun battles of 12 May 2007 told me, the capture of these vantage points and their use as shooting posts was premeditated and involved careful planning and logistics. While party activists were not briefed in advance, they found weapons shipments waiting for them as they were being dropped off at various flyovers. ¹⁴ Such diversions are no longer solely the responsibility of the MQM, however. In recent years, this trend was emulated by other groups, and in particular by religious militants affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban, who turned to their advantage the partition of urban space between those flying over these elevated structures and those living (or, in this case, dying) down under. Thus, in December 2013, the offices of the Express newsgroup were targeted by Islamist militants who fired shots from the adjacent KPT interchange – before vanishing into the flow of traffic. In October 2014, another group of militants threw an explosive device at a police van from the Hassan Square flyover, injuring two constables. By becoming routine, these creative uses of newly built flyovers came to confirm that the militarization of Karachi’s infrastructure is irreducible to securitization agendas and, more broadly, to the initial intentions of city planners and engineers aiming to re-inject order into the inherently messy domain of urban life.

The Government of Speed

For the various aspirants to public authority in Karachi, ‘speed’ – the control of pace or the movement of movement – has been a means and an end in itself. It has been an instrument of their (in)security policies, a tool of political bargaining, a gift to their constituents, or a terrain to actualize and publicize their claims to authority. The capacity to make things and people move at a certain pace, or on the contrary to bring the city to a halt, is essential to the public authority of the various political, religious and criminal groups competing for the control of Karachi’s population and economic resources. While the MQM perfected the art of governing – structuring the field of possibilities for others – through the control of pace, Karachi’s government of speed is not the prerogative of any particular group, however predominant it might be at a given time. It also involves the engineers designing the transport infrastructure, the transport owners, the drivers, the conductors and the munshis (‘time keepers’ regulating the flow of bus traffic along their route), the transport associations and their political protectors, the shipping companies and authorities (which occasionally lend containers to protesters or the police to block traffic), the traffic police, the wardens (the MQM’s unofficial traffic police), and, last but not least, the army. All these actors, each in his own right, has been exerting power effects, even though none of them can be said to ‘own’ this moving-power, which is shared among them and disseminated through a myriad of regulatory controls, protest routines and fast-transforming technologies of motion.

In true Foucauldian fashion, the study of this ‘government’ would require a meticulous unearthing of these technologies of power, especially as they colonize the social, up to the most private domain (moving-power as yet another form of ‘capillary’ power). More modestly, what I would like to do, in the remaining section of this text, is to point out some of the tensions running through this ‘government’, and how conflicts around the control of pace in Karachi are not a zero-sum game. Thus, if the MQM’s capacities of mobilization and disruption have recently been curtailed by new instances of military intervention, these evolutions did not merely translate into a transfer of authority, as far as the regulation of traffic flows is concerned. The army’s attempts to regain control over these flows, as it moved against the MQM and various criminal groups (such as the gangsters of Lyari), have also been productive of a new regime of motility, with new forms of traffic regulation disrupting everyday life in the working-class neighbourhoods where the army is literally racing against its opponents.

In September 2013, the government of Nawaz Sharif launched a crackdown against ‘criminal elements’ and ‘terrorist groups’ in the city. Like all previous security operations launched in the city since the 1990s, this attempt to ‘restore the writ of the state’ involved the local police, but also a paramilitary force under the command of the army, the Sindh Rangers. As relations between the Nawaz Sharif government and the military deteriorated, the latter tried to reassert itself on the national scene by taking control of the ‘Karachi operation’. In the process, the Rangers assumed an ever-increasing role in the policing of the city. The paramilitaries launched a series of raids against MQM offices – including its headquarters, known as Nine Zero – and arrested hundreds of its cadres and activists. This repression greatly curtailed the capacities of mobilization of the party and, more generally, its claims of ownership over Karachi. For the first time since the late 1980s, when it came to the helm of political affairs in Karachi, the MQM was no longer able to control the pace of traffic flows in the city. In September 2015, it called for a day of mourning to protest the death of three of its activists – allegedly at the hands of the Rangers. In the past, this call would have brought the city to a halt. This time, however, transporters and shopkeepers defied the party’s call and went on with their activities. Even more than the invasion of its turf by the Rangers, this failure to shut down the city was a major blow to the MQM’s authority, which until then had been actualized regularly through the control of population movements and their pace.

This was not the only engagement of the army, through its local proxies, with moving-power. In the inner-city neighbourhood of Lyari, which has been the theatre of deadly ‘gang wars’ between criminal groups since the early 2000s, the Rangers went after local gangsters and their political patrons. Once again, speed was essential to their repressive tactics. On the main roads of the neighbourhood, the Rangers built speed bumps which, as a local school principal explained to me in April 2015, were meant to restore the advantage of law-and-order forces over local criminals. With their fast, manoeuvrable motorbikes, Lyari’s gangsters often outpaced the Rangers’ heavier vehicles. Regaining the ground lost by disrupting free-flowing traffic was essential to the success of their mission. Besides this attempt to decelerate traffic flows on the principal arteries of the neighbourhood, the Rangers penetrated the labyrinth of lanes through which the gangsters would often escape after being chased by the police or the paramilitaries. With the help of local informants, they developed an extensive topographic knowledge on the basis of which they started walling-in certain lanes used as escape routes by the gangsters. These security-driven initiatives showed little concern for the patterns of movement of local residents and greatly disrupted them. Although everyday life in these narrow lanes had already been upset by gang-related violence in the preceding years, these continued to function as ‘quasi-domestic’ spaces, extending the private sphere into the public (Verkaaik, 2009). I was thus told by an elderly shopkeeper maintaining a small shack in one of these lanes that women (especially those in purdah) ¹⁵ felt uneasy walking on major roads and preferred to circulate across smaller lanes. The construction of these new walls disrupted their movements and exposed them to new anxieties. The same shopkeeper even claimed that he sometimes got lost on his way home, while children found it more difficult to find their way to school, even as family and neighbourly relations at large were being affected by these new boundaries. The battle for speed had invaded everyday life and the resentment that this invasion generated among local residents compromised the attempts of the forces of law and order to regain the ground lost to the gangsters. More than ever, the control of pace in the city remained a contested terrain, generating along the way several forms of violence, which ranged from the strategic (speed as a military asset) to the symbolic (speed as a mode of mobilization and incarceration of the population).

If Karachi, to date, has not witnessed the same levels of destruction as major sites of urbicide in the recent past (Coward, 2009), the disruptions briefly sketched out here are a reminder that, in all cities affected by chronic political and criminal violence, the realities of urban destruction are not limited to the targeting of architecture as a symbol and structure of city identity (Abujidi, 2014). More insidiously, urban violence – and in more extreme cases, urban warfare – infiltrates the everyday, disrupting routine moves and sociality, to the extent of making the city un-navigable and unrecognizable by its residents (as exemplified by the above remark by the shopkeeper claiming to get lost in his own neighbourhood, or by another of my informants, a social worker managing a Lyari-based non-governmental organization, who told me in 2013 that ‘such a strange environment has developed in our city that it seems to have become a foreign place’). In this context, even the hermeneutic of danger developed by local populations in the course of the conflict to decipher their volatile environment and anticipate threats to their life and properties (Gayer, 2014: 246 ff.) becomes ineffective. The growing un-legibility of the city is not merely reflected in the realm of cognitions, even as the ‘epistemological uncertainty’ characteristic of protracted conflicts (Shah, 2009) increases. It also translates into a state of kinetic confusion, which yet again feeds into the control of pace, this time at the micro-sociological level of the individual – should you or should you not run, when running will make you a target for law-and-order forces, while staying put will expose you to public humiliation, arrest and possibly torture or ‘disappearance’? ¹⁶ At this point, speed truly becomes a matter of life and death, while the control of pace, rather than being a biopolitical instrument aiming to regulate and eventually multiply life, becomes terrain for the reassertion of sovereign power and its inalienable right of death.

Conclusion

By reinterpreting Karachi’s history of violent transformation, since the mid 1980s, as a speed contest between the city’s various contenders for public authority, this contribution does not promote a form of vehicular reductionism. It does not claim, for instance, that battles for the control of pace have entirely displaced battles for the control of space in the city, especially as land conflicts have played a major role in the escalation of violence in Karachi and in the criminalization of its politics (Hasan et al., 2015). Where I beg to differ from existing interpretations of Karachi’s conflicts is in their tendency to perceive these conflicts as pathologies of the urban form (the result of ill-conceived planning initiatives or of state failure in delivering basic public services). On the contrary, this contribution argues that Karachi’s conflicts have been drawing upon the very forces that give every city its vitality – flows of things and people, running parallel to each other, intersecting, sometimes colliding. These forces – this vitalism of speed, to paraphrase Virilio – also explain that moving-power always exceeds the deliberate attempts to order things and people by making them move at a certain pace.

Without assuming that traffic violations, and speeding in particular, were the sole factors behind the 1985 riots, or that this violent mobilization was merely the product of factors pre-dating it (thus neglecting the mobilizing effects of mobilization itself, and the performativity of violent rituals, which give reality to the ethnic categories they enunciate), I aimed to re-inscribe this violence in what was much more than an urban ‘context’. For drivers and their passengers, the need for speed was the terrain where distinct ideas of the city, and of one’s place in the city, met and clashed with each other – a point which until now has been missing in the accounts of this episode of violence, which precipitated the descent of Karachi into ‘ordered disorder’ (Gayer, 2014). The technologies of warfare that emerged in the course of resulting incidents of violence were also quintessentially urban, as they targeted and militarized vehicular units to hit at the heart of city life. From then on, every proclamation of public authority in Karachi would be made on similar lines, with the respective power of each protagonist being measured by his capacity to regulate the flow of bodies, things and capital across the city, either by hampering it through disruptive tactics or by accelerating it through infrastructure.

For all the hubris that they nurtured among those who designed them and translated them into action on the ground, these strategies of dis/ordering through the regulation of traffic had unanticipated effects, pointing at the ‘circumventions of functionality and planning’ (Rao, 2007: 227) that make cities living entities. Nothing exemplifies this better than the ‘killer’ history of Karachi’s flyovers (Maher, 2014), from pieces of infrastructure partaking in an integrated ideal of safe and sound circulation for all to elements of a more exclusive project of faster, smoother and less promiscuous driving, to weaponry turned against the very same flows they were originally meant to facilitate.