Champion of Choice: The Life and Legacy of Women's Advocate Nafis Sadik

4 Karachi

60 4 KARACHI Even the bureaucrats charged with locating lodging had none. A tent village housed six hundred government clerks and messenger boys, who shared their camp with meandering livestock, the animals’ pungent fragrance hanging in the sultry heat like a suffocating cloud. Pakistan was now home to six million impoverished Muslim refugees who had emigrated during Partition, and as they struggled to right themselves in this topsy-turvy world, many of them rolled into Karachi, the eye of the storm, looking for shelter. In October 1947 the Shoaibs fled the dangers of unrest in Delhi, taking a train to Bombay, then boarding a ship that sailed across the Arabian Sea, docking in Karachi Harbor. They strolled down the gangplank to find Pakistan’s freshly starched green flags, emblazoned with a white star and crescent, snapping in the breeze above a city in pandemonium. Foreign observers noted that the new seat of government “was not much of a capital.” At age eighteen Nafis saw the city that would be her new home as “a beautiful place—the beaches beautiful, the sand beautiful. And the streets were so clean, the air clean. The city had only about 400,000 people then—as opposed to eight million today. We’d really not lived in a place with a beach like that, and even then Calcutta was very, very crowded. So in contrast to Calcutta, Karachi was this clean, beautiful spot we’d come to.” KARACHI 61 Another observer, Pakistan’s first president, Mohammad Ali Jinnah , peered through a monocle to watch his birthplace become the epicenter of his political creation—the world’s largest Muslim nation. There was even talk of renaming Karachi Jinnahabad. When his health permitted, he toured the city to shouts of “Quaid-e-Azam Zindabad,” meaning “long live the great leader”—a command he would disobey within the year. And still other observers labeled the capital of Jinnah’s realm a “one-camel town,” a reference in Life magazine to the beasts of burden used for hauling goods along Karachi’s roads—many of them unpaved, yet grooved with streetcar tracks that ran crosstown until they ended in the desert. Karachi bore the birthing pains of statehood more visibly than the rest of the union. As one historian noted, “Within a year its 400,000 population had more than doubled and the metropolis was blighted by incredibly sordid refugee hovels.” In spite of the chaos, the newly created Pakistani citizens worked alongside their leaders; they built the dream as their officials drafted it, balancing the documents on top of packing crates in lieu of desks. The populace was infused with a contagious enthusiasm that extended from the president down to the youngest schoolchild. Pakistanis had been given an opportunity to create the homeland they wanted, and the upper classes—shielded from the all-consuming burden of daily survival—realized that few people in the annals of history could say they had taken part in anything like this. And in this respect, Nafis’s father, Mohammed Shoaib, was very much a man of his time. As the joint secretary of finance, he was helping to form the government of the new Islamic state. This was no small feat, under the circumstances. The Hindus who had vacated the western subcontinent during Partition used to own most of the businesses in the region. The Muslims who flooded in to take their place were largely farmers—without farms or implements—and bitter battles ensued between them and the fabulously wealthy feudal landowners of the region. The Soviets were working to interest the 62 CHAPTER 4 poor and disenfranchised, including younger, more liberal members of the Muslim League, into adopting Communism, a step the new Pakistani regime worked feverishly to quell. As part of this strategy they knew they needed to develop the republic’s economy at light speed, and that meant attracting foreign investment—an enormous challenge considering the instability of the world’s newest country, and the fact that the West was still recovering from the ravages of World War II. In 1948 Pakistan’s income was estimated at 450 million rupees and its expenditures at 800 million. A general acrimony toward their Indian neighbors continued with the dispute over Kashmir and the feeling that Pakistan had been severely shortchanged in the division of assets during Partition. Only 4 percent of the population could read, and even fewer could...