By Aflatoon
Ninety-four people were shot in Karachi last night.
Not in a riot, not in a robbery, not in any of the ordinary ways. They were shot by people celebrating the independence of the country they all live in. Fifty-nine men, ten women, and seventeen children. A woman died.
They were hit by bullets fired upward in joy, which came down at the speed physics requires, into Lyari and Korangi and Orangi and Gulshan and Defence — the whole city, rich and poor, no discrimination at all in the descent.
I record it first because by Sunday it will be a statistic in a chart of previous years. Seventy-five injured in 2025. Ninety-five in 2024. Ninety-four this year. We have made a tradition of it. Thirty men were arrested, which is also the tradition, and which will end where it ended last year.
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Now to the speeches, which were about a different country.
The president spoke of independence as a responsibility each generation must carry forward, which is true and well put. He accused the Afghan Taliban of hosting a cocktail of terror groups, which is the government’s position and may well be right. He renewed solidarity with Kashmir.
The prime minister listed the achievements: economic stability over two and a half years, remittances up $11.3 billion, a defence agreement in Makkah demonstrating our emerging strategic strength. He stood the evening before under a Victory Monument completed, he noted with some pride, in eight months.
And then, at the end of his message, he said this. He invited “all the segments of society and political parties” to join hands and work constructively together for national integrity.
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I have read that invitation several times, because I want to be fair to it. It is the correct thing for a prime minister to say on the fourteenth of August. It has been said by every prime minister we have had, including the ones who were later imprisoned by the people they said it to.
But consider the postal difficulty.
The leader of the largest opposition party has been in Adiala Jail for three years. His sisters, his party says, have not been allowed to see him. Meetings have reportedly been stopped for nine months. On Monday the Supreme Court will hear petitions asking not for his release, not for a pardon, not for anything constitutional at all — asking whether somebody may be permitted to visit him.
That is the state of the hand being invited to join.
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I am not making an argument about his innocence. I have no view worth publishing on the cases, several of which remain before courts, and I am aware that his own record in office was not a festival of magnanimity towards opponents. That is precisely the point I want to make and it is not a partisan one.
Every government in our history has extended this invitation while holding the addressee somewhere he could not receive it. Then the government changed, and the invitation was extended again, by the formerly imprisoned to the newly imprisoned, in the same words, on the same date, from the same podium.
We have been passing this envelope back and forth for seventy-nine years, and it has never once been opened.
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There is a version of this that is not rhetoric, and it was described this week by a man who has no reason to flatter anybody.
The opposition leader in the Senate said the PTI would return to the parliamentary standing committees if a meeting were arranged. He explained why earlier talks failed — the party would not sit in the Prime Minister’s House or the Speaker’s office because that conferred legitimacy, but would sit in the Constitution Room of Parliament House. He said the plan had been taken to Adiala and back.
I do not know if it would work. It might collapse in a week, as these things do.
But notice how small the ask is. Not a release. A room, and a visit, and a distinction about which room.
That is what “join hands” costs, in practice, on a Friday in August. It is considerably cheaper than a monument, and it takes rather less than eight months.
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So: ninety-four shot celebrating a freedom, and an offer of unity posted to an address the sender controls the gate of.
I do not say this to spoil the day. It was a good day. Children waved flags, the gun salutes were fired properly and at the correct angle, and the country is seventy-nine, which is not nothing.
I say it because the two things that happened yesterday are the same thing. In both cases we performed the gesture with great sincerity and did not check where it landed.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
