Author Archives: Moosa Kaleem

Mega issue

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Muhammad Usman, 70, is concerned about the future of his native Keti Bunder town and its residents. The object of his worries is a proposed megacity – Zulfikarabad – to be built in Thatta district’s coastal areas, about 150 kilometres to the south-east of Karachi. The city will ruin the peace and calm of the area and will play havoc with the livelihood of the local residents, says Usman, who sells sweetmeats. “We do not want a big city in our area; we are happy with the calm and peaceful life of our small towns,” he says.

The work is yet to begin on the proposed city but most legal requirements are already in place. In November, 2010, the Sindh Assembly passed a law to set up Zulfikarabad Development Authority (ZDA) responsible for overseeing the project from start to finish and building the infrastructure required for it. The new city will be built over 1.3 million acres of land in Thatta district’s four coastal talukas — Keti Bunder, Kharo Chhan, Shah Bunder and Jati.

The balancing act

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On October 25, activists of Jeay Sindh Quami Mahaz and Jeay Sindh Tehrik, two small Sindhi nationalist groups, rallied separately in Jacobabad. These rallies were part of a long series of protests that nationalist groups have been holding across Sindh since the last two months or so, over the introduction of a new local government law in the province.
They have forced businesses to shut down in many towns and cities; sometimes they have scuffled with the police, leading to at least one death in Nawabshah; and in some places they have torched vehicles and set public and private buildings on fire.

A tale of two localities

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Advocates of donor-driven preservation projects say that the restoration work will yield great economic benefits for residents

Advocates of donor-driven preservation projects say that the restoration work will yield great economic benefits for residents

Shahid Mahboob, a resident of Muhammadi Mohalla inside Lahore’s Walled City, has been living in a small room with his wife and six children for the last many months, forced to do so neither by pecuniary problems nor by the whims of nature. He is the victim of a project which originally promised to make his life better by restoring his ancient house to its pristine historic beauty along with scores of other residential buildings in the locality.

The Project Management Unit (PMU), a Punjab governmental department responsible for carrying out the restoration and renovation of old houses in Mahboob’s neighbourhood, demolished the second floor of his residence approximately five months ago — and subsequently appears to have forgotten all about it. They haven’t returned even to retrieve the construction equipment deployed at the house, he says. “Now I am forced to sleep on the street and my family has to make do in a 7×8 foot room on the ground floor of our house in hot weather,” he tells the Herald as he points to the ruinous living conditions inside his residence, where debris and construction material lies strewn all around.

Others living in Muhammadi Mohalla, one of the many localities in Lahore’s Walled City that are being restored and renovated as part of the Lahore Walled City Sustainable Development Project, are similarly unhappy with the project’s management and its execution. During a visit to the neighbourhood in June, the Herald was unable to find residents who felt that the project was working towards its intended targets. Locals complain that the government, instead of ensuring the promised improvement in the physical appearance and atmosphere of their houses, has ended up achieving the opposite — inordinate delays, substandard restoration efforts and civil works have created more problems than they have solved.

Even a casual visitor to the area will find it impossible to ignore the unseemly changes brought about by the project. Fresh plaster on the façades of some houses is already peeling off; some wooden entrances are shoddily painted, appearing downright ugly; work on restoring the windows of the locality’s arched entrance has been left incomplete and its walls have been poorly refurbished — paint and plaster appears to crumble at the slightest touch; and the ‘improved’ drainage system simply does not work. Sewage and rainwater refuse to flow through the drainage and instead inundate the streets. The poor quality of plumbing in the locality often results in the accumulation of water inside the houses, which then finds its way into the fabric and foundation of the buildings. “Electrical wiring in the streets has not been carried out properly,” Shaikh Javed, a local resident explains. He adds: “Residents have been facing power fluctuations ever since the rewiring.”

Even in houses where the quality of restoration is better than in others, residents have serious complaints. This is the case with Shagufta Bibi’s house which, from the exterior, appears to have been restored, but the situation inside is not different from other houses in the area. “The entrance door [to one of the rooms] has not been properly fixed — it falls down unless it is opened carefully,” she says. “Gaps have been left in the wooden ceiling of one of the rooms and dust continuously falls down from these gaps.”

People living in the locality say they have lodged several complaints with the government but the relevant officers of the PMU have never bothered to address their problems. Orya Maqbool, who was director general of the PMU until February 2011, agrees that the complaints are genuine and the quality of the restoration work “carried out in the locality is poor”.
These grievances resonate even more loudly when residents make inevitable comparisons between the restoration work in their area and a similar restoration and renovation project carried out in two nearby localities by the non-governmental Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC). Those living in Gali Surjan Singh and Koocha Charkh Garan, both situated north of Muhammadi Mohalla, happily testify to the fact that conservationists and engineers working with the Trust have remarkably restored the façades of their houses and vastly improved the interiors. “The entire look of Gali Surjan Singh and Koocha Charkh Garan has changed for the better now and all residents are satisfied,” says Syed Ahmed Abbas, the custodian of a local imambargah and a social worker.

Their praise for the AKTC becomes all the more significant when seen in light of the fact that residents of Gali Surjan Singh and Koocha Charkh Garan had to bear some part of the restoration expenses themselves. “My house was built more than 150 years ago,” says 70-year-old Shaikh Muhammad Jahangir, a resident of Koocha Charkh Garan. The AKTC spent more than 1.7 million rupees on the works carried out inside his residence whereas he contributed 219,000 rupees from his own pocket, he tells the Herald. This was a large amount of money, he says, but believes it was well spent.

Official documents say the AKTC-led initiative is meant to be a pilot project, a means to test whether urban rehabilitation and infrastructure-improvement interventions can work in the conservation of older parts of the city without leading to the displacement of local residents. Its second intended purpose is to test and finalise design concepts and construction methodologies prior to the launch of a larger project in the Walled City.
The preservation work in Muhammadi Mohalla is part of the first phase – known as Package I in official terminology – of the larger project. The package includes schemes for infrastructure development and urban rehabilitation including façade improvements of all the buildings situated between Dehli Gate and Chowk Purani Kotwali (see map).

Unqualified public approval for the AKTC’s restoration efforts means that its model could have been replicated throughout the project with positive effects. In fact, local residents were so satisfied by the AKTC-led work that they willingly paid up even after the organisation raised the ratio of resident contributions midway through the project. “In 2010, we collected 12 per cent of the total cost of the interior works from home owners but in 2011, 15 per cent was raised from those who were interested in the restoration of the interior façades [of their homes],” explains Masood A Khan, the AKTC technical director. The AKTC contributed towards the entire cost [work done on the streets and on façades], he adds. In total, he says, the Trust has spent 230,000 US dollars on home restoration, with an additional 100,000 US dollars on improving the streets.

The government-run PMU, on the other hand, is financing its restoration project in Muhammadi Mohalla from the public exchequer and yet local residents are unhappy. Perhaps this is because the PMU, among many other things, is also unwilling to focus on the restoration of home interiors. “We are not going to carry out interior works; our focus is on façades, streets, electricity and sanitation works,” says Shahid Durrani, the PMU Project Director. “We will work inside of those houses where residents have altered the original buildings [by constructing additional structures such as kitchens and bathrooms],” he adds.

The estimated cost of this first phase, according to official documents, stands at 1359.778 million rupees, out of which the World Bank is providing 692.818 million rupees as a loan while the Punjab government is contributing 666.960 million rupees from the public exchequer.

The project also demands that solutions used for improving living conditions in Gali Surjan Singh and Koocha Charkh Garan are implemented across the entire area that falls under this phase — but the PMU performance so far casts serious doubts on its ability to maintain the pace and quality of the work within the parameters set by the AKTC. Durrani claims that problems have appeared because of the large scale of this project that his department is required to implement in the short amount of time at its disposal. “The AKTC has taken two-and-a-half years to complete restoration works around just two streets while we have to finish work on all 57 streets [earmarked for the first phase of the project] in one year.”

But the pace of work, by all accounts, is excruciatingly slow, with more than 80 per cent of restoration planned, yet to be completed. While such delays creating problems for residents like Mahboob who waits his turn so that his home is renovated, this state of affairs is also likely to jeopardise financial inflows to the project. The World Bank loan will expire if it is not utilised by November 30, 2012 and the Punjab government may also pull the plug on the project on June 30, 2013.

Another major challenge threatening the sustainability of the project is AKTC’s decision to quit providing technical assistance to the government (see Matters of Trust).

Durrani admits that the pace of work has been slow but says this is because “conservation work needs time”. But he hastens to add that the project is going ahead regardless of problems and bottlenecks — and will continue doing so. Restoration work is in full swing on 22 out of 57 streets in spite of such hurdles as the AKTC’s decision to withdraw its technical support as well the approaching expiry of the World Bank loan, he tells the Herald. “The work [during the first phase] will be completed by June 2013,” he claims.

A tale of two localities

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Shahid Mahboob, a resident of Muhammadi Mohalla inside Lahore’s Walled City, has been living in a small room with his wife and six children for the last many months, forced to do so neither by pecuniary problems nor by the whims of nature. He is the victim of a project which originally promised to make his life better by restoring his ancient house to its pristine historic beauty along with scores of other residential buildings in the locality.

Inside Lyari

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SSP Aslam Khan, working with Karachi’s Crime Investigation Department, is known for employing extrajudicial methods to apprehend criminals

SSP Aslam Khan, working with Karachi’s Crime Investigation Department, is known for employing extrajudicial methods to apprehend criminals. Photo courtesy: Fahim Siddiqui/White Star

Nearly 3,000 armed police personnel in bulletproof vests, armoured personnel carriers moving through rock-strewn streets, dozens of ordinary citizens dead or injured, hundreds of families displaced — these are the images and headlines that resulted from the week-long siege-and-search operation against alleged gangsters in the restive Lyari neighbourhood a few weeks ago.

The operation, that began on April 27 and ended on May 4, primarily aimed at clearing Lyari of strongmen who lead hundreds of well-trained and well-armed fighters and owe allegiance to the Peoples Aman Committee (PAC), which has changed many tacks over the last one year — from being an affiliated organisation of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), to an outlawed band of criminals and gangsters, to a political challenge to thePPP’s electoral dominance in Lyari. But the operation achieved none of its intended objectives: not a single gangster was hurt, killed or arrested — the police could not even enter their strongholds. Five policemen lost their lives to firing from the other side.

During the seven-day operation, the police mostly remained confined to Cheel Chowk, Faqir Eisa Khan Road and Gabol Park areas, facing strong resistance from well-positioned and well-armed supporters of the PAC. Every time they tried to step out of their armoured personnel carriers to capture pickets manned by gunmen, the police had to beat a hasty retreat due to heavy gunfire. When Interior Minister Rehman Malik announced that the government was temporarily “suspending” the operation on “humanitarian grounds”, it was effectively an admission of failure. The botched up operation exposed the police’s monumental inability in maintaining law and order, inKarachiin general and in Lyari in particular.

The announcement to suspend the operation was also the admission of another failure – that the government no longer has the ability to wrest the control of Lyari from the PAC and its many strongmen. Malik ended up issuing a 72-hour ultimatum to the “criminals” to surrender — a deadline that came and went without any action.

Could it have been different if the paramilitary Sindh Rangers had taken part in the operation along with the police? Perhaps. Since, Malik has requested Uzair Jan Baloch, the PAC chief, to surrender to the Rangers if he did not trust the police. It is highly puzzling, why the Rangers did not take part in this operation in the first place. After all, they are positioned inKarachito maintain law and order, so why did they balk at performing their duties in one of the most troubled areas of the city?

“The Rangers avoided joining the operation because they were skeptical about its motives,” says a police officer, not wanting to be named. “They considered the operation a move to replace one group of gangsters with another,” he adds. This sounds like the most plausible explanation for the absence of the Rangers from the operation as other sources within both the police and the PPP confirm that gangsters belonging to the Arshad Pappu group were active participants in the operation. The group was banished from Lyari when the PAC took control of the area in 2008 after uniting many criminal gangs operating in the neighbourhood under its command. Since then Arshad Pappu has been trying to make a comeback, sometimes with the alleged backing of the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM).

Another possible reason could be that the Army, which commands and controls the Rangers, does not want to antagonise the Baloch-dominated PAC. Some sources say that the PAC being a pro-Pakistan group works as a guarantee that Baloch separatists do not find a foothold in Lyari. The participation of the Rangers in the operation could have changed that, providing the separatists with an opportunity to enlist the support of Uzair Baloch and his associates for the cause of an independent Balochistan.  “We would like to believe that the Army is sympathetic towards us [since] we have never supported any separatist groups in Balochistan,” says Zafar Baloch, a PAC associate, when the Herald asked him why the Rangers stayed away from Lyari. The Herald made repeated attempts to contact the Rangers to get their side of the story but they declined to respond.

Sources in the police say another major reason why the operation failed was because senior police officers and even the Sindh government were kept in the dark about its objectives and tactics until the last few hours. “President [Asif Ali] Zardari wanted an across-the-board operation to end extortion and lawlessness caused by miscreants belonging to different parties or groups in Karachi,” says a PPP source. The president also wanted the police and the Rangers to do such an operation together, he adds. Background interviews with police officials, government functionaries and members of thePPP, however, reveal that Owais Muzaffar, a family friend of President Zardari, took over the planning and the execution of the operation, deciding to begin from Lyari.

“A day before the operation was launched, Sindh’s Inspector General Police Mushtaq Shah was called to the Chief Minister House where Muzaffar informed him that an operation was to be launched in Lyari early next morning for which he required 1,000 police personnel,” claims a source privy to the meeting. Muzaffar was confident that the police would take over the PAC-controlled areas in four hours, the source adds.  He is also known to have convinced Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah to appoint Aslam Khan, alias Chaudhry Aslam, a senior superintendent of police working withKarachi’s Crime Investigation Department and known for employing extrajudicial methods to tackle criminals and terrorists in the city. The combined effect of all this was that both, the Sindh government and police acknowledged the operation only after it was well underway.

Why would Muzaffar target only Lyari? Herald investigations reveal that he was very upset with the way Uzair Baloch was strengthening his personal credentials as the leader of Lyari. On March 2, Uzair Baloch organised Baloch Cultural Day at Lyari’s Dubai Chowk where other main participants included former Sindh home minister Dr Zulfiqar Mirza and former Sindh Chief Minister Syed Ghaus Ali Shah who is also a senior leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN). Instead of PPP flags or Benazir Bhutto’s portraits decking the venue, Uzair Baloch’s own portraits were ubiquitous at the event. “Muzaffar, who also attended the event, was irked by Ghaus Ali Shah’s participation,” says Habib Jan Baloch, a close aide to Uzair Baloch and the convener of the Friends of Lyari, a newly set-up group of people who until recently were active members of the PPP. An annoyed Muzaffar feared that Uzair Baloch and his team could join the PMLN, says Habib Jan Baloch.

Another factor which, according to him, fueled tensions between the PPP and the PAC was the latter’s exhortation to the people of Lyari to boycott the death anniversary of thePPPfounder Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Larkana on April 4. APPPleader concedes that the presence of Lyariites at the death anniversary was relatively thin this year but he blames it on the PAC’s strong-arms tactics. “Uzair Baloch and his accomplices forced Lyariites not to participate in the anniversary; they also threatened transporters of the area with dire consequences if they provided vehicles toPPPworkers for traveling to Larkana,” a PPP source. Zafar Baloch of the PAC admits that his organisation asked people to stay away from the anniversary to protest against “PPP’s wrong policies towards Lyari”. But, he adds that they did not force anyone.

Together the two incidents reportedly convinced Muzaffar to “take action against me, Uzair and Zafar”, says Habib Jan Baloch, talking to the Herald from the UK where he has been living there since leaving Karachi in the wake of the police operation in Lyari.

But Taj Haider, a seniorPPPleader, says,”it is a wrong perception that Muzaffar masterminded or initiated the operation … The operation was carried out following the directive of the federal government,” he says. “Gang wars in Lyari have been going on for so long and the area has been facing such a law and order problem that the authorities decided to launch the operation,” he explains. “Such a major operation cannot be launched on the will or orders of one individual.”

Leaders of the PAC also claim that they held 12 meetings with Muzaffar, in February this year, at Bilawal House – President Zardari’s family house inKarachi– and the Chief Minister House to address their “demands”. “Our demands included the provision of 10,000 jobs to Lyariites, appointment to party offices from district to ward levels in [Karachi’s] District South and the nomination of candidates for upcoming elections from Lyari through consultation with the Lyari Elders’ Committee,” says Zafar Baloch. “But these demands were rejected.”

The Lyari Elders’ Committee, recently formed by Uzair Baloch, comprises 30 senior residents of Lyari who represent prominent families, clans and communities living in the neighbourhood. To the members and the leaders of the PPP, this strongly suggests that the committee is being used to promote the electoral ambitions of its founder. This is one of the many reasons why the party wants action taken against Uzair Baloch and affiliates of thePAC.

The party fears losing the support of non-Baloch residents of Lyari, especially the Kachhi community which mostly votes for the PPP but, over the last few years, has suffered many excesses at the hands of the PAC associates who are also known to be involved in criminal activities including murders, kidnappings, extortion of money, gambling operations and drug-peddling in Lyari. The PPP leaders feel that the party’s proximity with the PAC was causing resentment among people of the neighbourhood.

This explains why Karim Shah, a leader of the Kachhi Rabita Committee, a Kachhi community organisation, endorses the police operation. He also believes that the PPP will face no problem in the upcoming election even if PAC does not support it. “The Baloch in Lyari are 30-35 per cent and even they are not all supporters of Uzair Baloch. So the action against him will not harm thePPPin the elections,” he says. In 2002, Uzair Baloch, in fact, lost the local government election to aPPP-supported candidate even when he had the backing of Jamaat-e-Islami, says a PPP leader from Lyari.

Even though a senior PPP activist from Lyari claims that Uzair Baloch’s supporters are only the families of hundreds of criminals who seek his protection, he concedes that the PAC has the ability to capture polling stations in Lyari in the favour of its own candidates or it can force people to stay away from the polling, especially in Baloch-dominated areas of the locality (see Lyari map on page 40). “If the gangsters of Lyari, who are united under Uzair’s leadership, take over the polling stations then PPP workers will not be able to counter them,” he tells the Herald, asking to remain anonymous for security reasons.

All this puts the PPP in a quandary: if it does not act against Uzair Baloch and his associates, its non-PAC voters will become unhappy; but if it continues to act against the PAC and its affiliates through ill-advised and ill-planned security operations, it risks strengthening Uzair Baloch and his supporters even further — either way risking its electoral prospects.

Inside Lyari

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The operation, that began on April 27 and ended on May 4, primarily aimed at clearing Lyari of strongmen who lead hundreds of well-trained and well-armed fighters and owe allegiance to the Peoples Aman Committee (PAC), which has changed many tacks over the last one year — from being an affiliated organisation of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), to an outlawed band of criminals and gangsters, to a political challenge to the PPP’s electoral dominance in Lyari.

The men behind the image

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Dacoit Nazroo Narejo (R) with his accomplice

This was going to be different from any interview that I have ever done in my two decades of journalism. My sources were setting up a meeting with Nazar Mohammad Narejo, a notorious criminal in upper Sindh who is also known as Nazroo Narejo.

On a sunny and pleasant February day, I set out on a motorcycle with my sources, for the riverine plain, known as katcha in local language. We crossed a dyke to enter the katcha area and after travelling on an uneven and dusty path for about 20 minutes we reached the river bank. A small boat is anchored at the shore and two men are lying leisurely in it. When we asked them to drop us to the other side of the bank, the boatmen looked surprised but did not question us and took us on aboard. It took the boat nearly 15 minutes to cross the river; it turned back immediately after dropping us without even charging any fare. We walked through a riverine forest overgrown with weeds and shrubbery. To our right, about 400 yards away from the bank, we spotted a small temporary settlement with few goats grazing and a teenage girl sitting on the ground, holding a stick.

We walked on a dirt track for 10 minutes and then noticed a tall young man coming towards us from the opposite side. When he came closer, he asked the name of my source. After confirming the source’s identity, he announced Narejo had “sent me to fetch both of you.” He was carrying a G-3 gun on one shoulder and a cloth bag on the other; the bag was stuffed with bullets, a torch, water bottle and packets of edibles. We continued walking on the occasionally thorny track for 45 minutes and finally reached a place surrounded by trees and bushes. In the middle of that patch of land, four men dressed in navy blue shalwar kameez and wearing Sindhi caps were sitting on a rilli (a traditional Sindhi quilt) under the shade of a tree, with sub-machine guns in their laps. When we approached them, they all stood up and greeted us.

“I am Nazroo Narejo,” said one of them, firmly shaking hands with me and my mediator. In his late forties and sporting a beard, he was the ‘dreaded dacoit’ I had come to see. Very courteously, he invited both of us to sit with him on the rilli. Clearly he did not fit the stereotype of the dangerous criminal that I imagined him to be. His deputy Mahboob Narejo also sat with us on the rilli. The others sat on the bare land. I observed five sub-machine guns placed against a tree, while an assault rifle was positioned next to Narejo.

After we were seated, Narejo narrated his life story. He hails from Khairpur district and is one of the most senior and notorious dacoits of Sindh. His father Rab Rakhio Narejo, alias Rabbu Narejo, studied at the Sindh University, Jamshoro. But then Rabbu allegedly killed Naseem Ahmed Kharal, a Sindhi short story writer, in 1978 following a land dispute. He was arrested but when released on bail he absconded and became a criminal. Rabbu would spend most of his time in forests after committing dacoities in the cities and Narejo Junior would often accompany him; soon he too turned into a dacoit. In the mid-1980s, Rabbu was killed in a police encounter allegedly at the behest of the Kharals.

His demeanour notwithstanding, Narejo carries two million rupees as head money for his alleged involvement in more than 100 murders and many cases of kidnapping for ransom. As my questions became more specific, his answers turned shorter; many of his responses to my queries were little more than murmurs, indicating that he did not want to explain everything. Often he would stop talking to look around. To make him less edgy, I asked him why he carried the beggar’s bowl with him. His answer was as surprising as it sounded naïve. “Everything I have to eat, I first put that in the bowl and wait. If the food is poisonous, the bowl will break. If the bowl doesn’t break, then I will eat it.”

Narejo claimed that he was unhappy with this life as a criminal as he was forced to live in ‘inaccessible’ katcha area to avoid arrest. It was certainly a difficult life and I asked him how he and his gang members coped when they fell ill. “My people bring doctors to the forest,” he responded.

Would he surrender to the police, I asked. “I would surrender on my own terms and conditions,” he said. “I would not quit killing or abducting people, if needed, in tribal clashes.” He said he did not have the backing of any tribal chief but admitted that he had connections in the police. Would not his friends in police help him in surrendering on his conditions? Narejo merely nodded his head.

Then I spoke to the members of his gang about their leader. They called him badshah (king) or waddo (elder). Badshah is very loving towards us but he gets very angry when any of us does not turn up within the stipulated time when we go to visit our families or friends, said one of his deputies. “He would say to us, it is fine, do not come back, I do not need you anymore. But when he says this we immediately come back to our den,” the deputy laughed. Even though we wish to be with our families, we can never think of leaving him for good, he adds.

A couple of days later, I met another notorious criminal, Shaman Shaikh, who was a police constable before he became a murderer and a kidnapper. To meet Shaikh, I travelled five kilometres in katcha area on a motorcycle before two of his armed companions joined me and took me to his hideout.

Shaikh, dressed in shalwar kameez with a blue cap inscribed with “Sindh Police” perched on his head, was sitting on a charpoy outside a couple of huts. He had his arms and ammunition all around him — I saw his G-3 gun and then in a bag there were bullets, a torch and some other items. I noticed that his fingers were adorned with two stone rings. He was also carrying a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes and a Nokia 1200 cell phone, with the ring tone set to a famous Abida Perveen number, Aray logo tumhara kya, main jaanu mera khuda jaanay [This is nobody’s business, it is between me and my God].

“I joined the Larkana police in 1996 but was implicated in a street crime case and arrested in 2004. I managed to flee from custody and came to a katcha area,” he told me. Since then, he has been leading a criminal’s life. When I probed deeper, he appeared frustrated. “I have not left katcha for 5-6 years and have become fed up of living in the forests,” he responds. Sometimes his family visits him quietly for a few days and then goes back to Larkana.

As for surrendering to the police, he said, “I want to surrender to the police, but only if they assure me that they would not kill me in a fake encounter and withdraw the cases registered against me.” He claimed that two of his accomplices – Saleem Shaikh and Naseer Shaikh – surrendered in February 2011 but the police, instead of taking them to the police station, killed them in Khairpur. He showed me a newspaper clipping in which the police had claimed that both were killed in an encounter.

In his late forties and speaking softly, he also denied being involved in kidnapping-for-ransom cases or, for that matter, any other criminal activity “The police has framed me in 10-12 false cases for murder and kidnapping for ransom,” he claimed. A police officer in Larkana later told me that Shaikh was “actually involved” in multiple robberies and kidnappings for ransom. It is because of these crimes that the government has announced half a million rupees as ‘head money’ for Shaikh’s arrest.

When I was about to leave, Shaikh urged me to talk to the home minister for his safe surrender and pardon for his crimes. Like Narejo, he too seemed to be hankering after a normal life.