Speaking at an exhibition organised by leading business people at Karachi Expo on Friday, Sindh chief minister Murad Ali Shah said his government won’t allow anybody to disturb peace and harmony in the country’s financial capital, Karachi.
Apparently, he was alluding to the terrorist attack that struck Saddar, which is considered the heart of this city of teeming millions, where a bomb blast killed at least one person and injured several others on late Thursday evening. It is important to note that this terrorist incident occurred on a street, Daud Pota Road, which, for example, houses Parsi community’s place of worship. That the blast occurred in the close proximity to historic Empress Market, St Patrick’s cathedral, St Patrick’s schools and different Parsi chawls, etc, is also a fact.
This neighborhood largely comprises people from different faiths such as Muslims, Parsis, Hindus and Christians. Insofar as the Christian community of this area is concerned, there are still a sizeable number of Anglo and Goan Christians, although a majority of them has emigrated to the US, Canada, Australia and other countries in the last three decades in particular.
The residents of this neighborhood still have grim memory of the devastation that attended them in the shape of back-to-back car bomb blasts that claimed lives of hundreds of people, most of them visitors who, as usual were present in those deadly hours of 1987 in Saddar in the days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Saddar is still the most cosmopolitan face of Karachi as well as Pakistan’s. It needs to be preserved and protected at all cost. The Sindh government is, therefore, required to pull its socks up.
Saleem Nasir (Karachi)
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