By Zoha Waseem

Emergent Conversation 19

This essay is part of the series PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 19 on Racism and Policing in Global Perspective. It also appears as a Directions Essay in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Volume 46, Issue 1.

“Too Politically Controversial”

Some time ago, I approached a senior police officer in Pakistan, hoping to pitch a participatory action research project. The one I had in mind, I hoped, would help improve police–community interactions, especially in the context of migrant communities and those social groups rendered vulnerable due to their contested citizenship status or because of their race, religion, or ethnicity. Pakistan’s Bengali community has had particularly tense and distrustful relations with law enforcement agencies and the state bureaucracy, but, I proposed, an exercise to build trust with that community might improve police legitimacy and public perceptions of such institutions. I urged that it could be worth initiating such collaborative dialogue, especially if such work could have an impact on those particularly vulnerable and marginalized. I was thinking here specifically of Bengalis and other irregular migrants who are routinely subjected to procedural and bureaucratic discrimination, delays, and injustices. The officer heard my proposal patiently, before finally speaking. He said calmly:

This would be too politically controversial. Bengalis are involved in too many crimes, such as narcotics, and they are illegal migrants. This is an issue about their citizenship, not of the police or policing. The police would not feel comfortable sitting with and exchanging ideas and views with this community. It would be too politically controversial for us.[1]

The officer encouraged me to abandon this project, restricting the possibility of policy-oriented research that could help bridge gaps between the police and a racially marginalized group.

I was disappointed but not surprised. For months after this conversation, I discussed this rejection with journalists and political analysts in Karachi, who explained that the ruling provincial party of Sindh—the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), to whom the police report—considers Bengalis and other irregular migrants to be a threat to their vote banks (a pattern we find among other political parties that are similarly competing for political power in a socially and ethnically diverse electorate within Pakistan’s most populous city). With full citizenship, they said, and with the right to vote, the representation of these migrant communities in electoral vote banks could result in demographic changes and threaten the political and economic gains made by the PPP and other provincial and local parties seeking to monopolize governance, coercion and control, and resource provision in Karachi. The situation resonates with what Zaheer Baber writes in the context of race and racism in India: “Racialization and racial projects can be found in any situation where relations of domination, subordination, exploitation and monopolization of resources are present” (2022, 156). As a result, governments of Pakistan have furthered colonial-racial logics and subsequent discriminatory narratives and policies that have kept irregular migrant communities and other “noncitizens” on the margins: deprived of basic human rights, such as access to education, healthcare, and employment. Their citizenship status also renders these communities especially vulnerable to routine police abuse, extortion, stereotyping, and criminalization.

This article examines the intersection of policing and racism in the Global South, focusing particularly on communities with contested citizenship status in Pakistan, a country in which conversations around race and racism remain muted. How does racism against irregular migrants and other “noncitizens” translate into policework and interactions with members belonging to these communities? How do racialized perceptions and practices by the police toward these communities shape their everyday experiences and impede their access to justice? To explore these questions, I rely on ethnographic findings from Karachi, based on fieldwork I conducted between 2020 and 2021, during which I carried out semi-structured and unstructured interviews with members of Karachi’s Bengali community. These conversations were also supported by interviews I conducted with lawyers, journalists, politicians, police officers, civil society and human rights activists affiliated with local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as members of other migrant communities, including Afghan refugees.

Intersections of Policing and Racism in the Global South

While there is growing literature on institutional racism in policing in the Global North demonstrating that institutional racism facilitates the criminalization of certain minority ethnic groups and the racial profiling of foreign nationals (Aliverti 2020; Parmar 2020), interdisciplinary postcolonial and decolonial perspectives on policing and racism in the Global South are gradually emerging. These critical perspectives are questioning racialized, classed, and militarized forms of policing (Cavalcanti, Squires, and Waseem 2023; Stuurman 2020; Yonucu 2022). In The Anti-Black City, for instance, Jaime Amparo Alves offers a rich ethnographic exploration into the manifestation of “police terror” as inflicted upon black racialized youth in Sao Paulo, Brazil, resulting in spectacular forms of police violence, including killings, and enforced disappearances (2018). Similarly, Roxana Cavalcanti’s (2022) work explores how political developments in Brazil have led to the persecution of racialized and marginalized populations within favelas. Cavalcanti writes how “systematic institutional racism generates a vicious circle of criminalization—the more black people are overrepresented in the penal system as offenders, the more they are the subjects of surveillance and the targets of police work” (2020, 4). Deniz Yonucu’s work on policing and counterinsurgency similarly shows how the stigmatization and criminalization of the working-class youth—in this case, Turkey’s racialized Alevi and Kurdish populations—result in the continuation of racial-colonial logics and the traveling of counterinsurgency policing tactics and techniques over time and across borders (Yonucu 2022).

In South Asia, there is a growing interest in investigating how racism, stigmatization, and securitization intersect to profile, criminalize, and “other” communities, arguably to the advantage of majoritarian groups such as Hindus in India or Punjabis in Pakistan. Sonia Sikka, for instance, shows how anti-Muslim rhetoric and discrimination enable the disproportionate and discriminatory policing of Muslims in India, where this community is “more likely to be suspected of crimes and become victims of police violence, and less likely to be protected or receive justice in the case of crimes against them by non-Muslims” (2022, 471). In cases of communal riots, lynching, and vigilante violence, Muslims are therefore unlikely to receive the protection of law enforcers. Racial profiling that has enabled extrajudicial police violence has been all too common in Pakistan as well. For the Baloch community, it has resulted in excessive surveillance and state violence in the form of extrajudicial killings (“kill-and-dumps”) and enforced disappearances in the province of Balochistan (Ahmad and Mehmood 2017). For the country’s Pashtun community, it has enabled similar forms of coercive policing and facilitated state efforts to curb social mobilization and Pashtun movements against such state violence. Such racialized policing techniques against these communities are justified through narratives that cast these entire groups as affiliates of armed insurgencies and threats to national security (Akhtar 2021).

Scholarship on the intersections of policing, racism, and citizenship is steadily expanding as well. Perspectives from the Global South demonstrate, for instance, how the securitization of migration within territorial boundaries of certain states results in “projects of illegalization” that can render minoritized populations as “stateless” and “illegal” “aliens” who are dispensable and disposable (De Genova and Roy 2020). Such state-generated insecurity for racialized groups exacerbates the “security-migration nexus,” leading to further policing of noncitizens as security threats, even when they are extensively utilized for labor in the interest of state and capital, as noted in Shona Loong’s (2018) work on Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. Sanaa Alimia’s (2022) work on Afghan refugees in Pakistan similarly demonstrates how central migrants have been to urban transformation and the expansion of Pakistani cities, such as Karachi and Peshawar. Even then, such migrants continue to be susceptible to police harassment, which serves as “a mechanism for extortion,” a mechanism that has become “a routine affair” (Alimia 2022, 139. In my own work on policing and immigration enforcement in the city of Karachi, I have shown how police interactions with noncitizens (Afghans and Bengalis) are influenced by prejudiced security policies (Waseem 2022). In this article, I develop these ideas further, specifically with respect to Karachi’s Bengali population.

“Cash Cows”: The Racialization and Vulnerability of Migrants in Postcolonial Pakistan

More than two million Bengali migrants live in Karachi, many of whom lack legal citizenship and are thus considered “stateless.” This is even though, as per the constitution, those born in Pakistan possess the right to citizenship. Bengalis, like Afghan refugees and Burmese immigrants, continue to be deprived of this basic right to Pakistani citizenship and nationality, which restricts their access to fundamental and essential services (Zaman, Hasan, and Bhatt 2022). They live in predominantly underdeveloped neighborhoods and in informal settlements, such as Machar Colony and Ibrahim Hyderi, and they work in fishing or garment industries or as domestic workers. The Pakistani state has periodically defined them as “illegal aliens” and “threats to national security” in attempts to classify them as criminals and terrorists (Zaman, Hasan, and Bhatt 2022). The police officer’s reservations, at the beginning of this article, about the possibility of dialogue with Bengali migrants, were premised on the oft-repeated narratives that “these are all criminals” who are involved in “heinous crimes.”

Such common racialized perceptions are typically grounded in colonial and postcolonial framings of certain communities—such as Afghans and Bengalis—that influence everyday police response to and behavior toward these migrant communities in postcolonial contexts. These framings are rooted in how Bengalis have been historically seen as “impure” or “not having good ‘genes’” and described us “inferior,” “lazy,” “effeminate,” and “‘fish-eating and cowardly’ unlike the ‘broad-boned, tall, fair, wheat-eating, warrior-like, resilient, manly, brave Muslims of the rough topography of Pakistan’” (Mookherjee 2012, 1582) During Pakistan’s war with Bangladesh in 1971, such perceptions led to the routine gendering and humiliation of Bengali men by Pakistani soldiers, including “the processes of the rape of men and the checks on their penis” (1578). In contemporary Pakistan, these historically racialized tropes and frames continue to shape the routine humiliation meted out to Bengalis in their everyday interactions with law-enforcement agencies.

In the early 2000s, Pakistan’s then military government established NARA (National Alien Registration Authority), now known as NADRA (National Database and Registration Authority). Promising the long-needed registration of Bengali migrants with false hopes of improving their formal citizenship status (and thus their sense of belonging to the country), NARA forcefully registered scores of Bengali residents in Karachi as “aliens.” In so doing, even Bengalis who had acquired citizenship through informal means (such as paying brokers), were stripped of their citizenship. And family members of those registered as “aliens,” who had acquired citizenship through more “legitimate” means had their citizenship status revoked and their identification cards blocked. An already vulnerable and impoverished population was further marginalized, having now been rendered stateless through a technology of digital authoritarianism. NARA’s forceful registration process, which was aided by raids on Bengali neighborhoods conducted by police teams, was justified by an official as follows:

A child born to an alien in Pakistan is also an alien. Look, over the years, Bengalis had too much time, so they had too many kids. They grew in number. They became engaged in human smuggling, prostitution, and organized crime. They were involved in street crime, beggar mafia, etc. They were an open door for all sorts of crime because they had no record. They needed to be tracked. (Interview with author, December 2020).

Although the government stopped issuing “alien cards” some years later, police and state officials continued to opine that Bengalis should be registered “because of how criminal they are” (Interview with author, December 2020). Due to such securitization processes and the racialized and criminal frames through which this community is seen, Bengalis in Pakistan are especially vulnerable to police harassment and abuse. As one human rights activist explained, the police stereotypically identify and discriminate against Bengalis:

Police do not treat them like other Pakistanis. They will say things like, “You look Bengali, you sound Bengali, you’re walking like a Bengali.” In some ways, their status, and that of Afghans, is worse than other vulnerable groups in Pakistan. (Interview with author, February 2021)

Unsurprisingly, therefore, a relationship of mutual distrust and suspicion has been cemented between Karachi’s Bengali residents and the Karachi police. As one lawyer told me, “There is zero level of trust in the police. They are terrified of going to the police because of the harassment they might face. This creates daily fear and insecurity” (Interview with author, January 2021).

Police harassment can take multiple forms in Pakistan, but for these Bengali residents, the police presence serves as a “nuisance value.” The local residents with whom I spoke routinely reported police extortion at various locations and opportunities as a manifestation of such “nuisance value.” A common practice has been police use of khabris (informants or “police touts”) to badger Bengalis to pay their way through various professional and personal struggles. In one instance, a Bengali resident described how such extortion plays out:

If we buy a property, or if we make an earning by going on a fishing launch for several months, a khabri will know that we are in possession of money. So, he will inform the police. Then everyone will come to take their cut: the port trust authority that owns the land, the local police station guys. People like us will pay what they can to get their home built here. Sometimes, we will negotiate because we are poor. If someone cannot pay, the police will pick up the property owner. Who wants to go to jail and drag out the problem? So, we pay. (Interview with author, January 2021)

For the police, the vulnerability of migrants becomes an easy source of income through informal means. As an NGO employee working for migrant rights in Karachi explained:

These migrants are cash cows for the police. They will be criminalized by being treated as drug users and peddlers. The police won’t file a [formal complaint], so it stays off the books, but there is a lot of intimidation and threatening that happens to the young Bengali boys. (Interview with author, December 2021)

Faced with such routine harassment and racialized practices on the part of the police and bureaucracy, Bengalis have similarly preferred to bypass formal channels and methods to acquire citizenship or evade arrest, knowing that turning to the formal criminal justice mechanism for their rights may yield greater risks. Many have chosen instead to rely on dalals (brokers) to acquire fake identification cards or to procure formal documentation for buying properties or renting shops for their survival and subsistence (Anwar 2013). On their part, state institutions—including the police—work with such brokers in informal settlements to “take their cut” and “look the other way.” This centrality of informality in police interactions with vulnerable migrants echoes a pool of interdisciplinary scholarship that places informal relations, practices, and transactions at the heart of both formal state practice and governance, as well as the survival of socially and economically marginalized groups (Helmke and Levitsky 2004; Jaffe and Koster 2019; Roy and AlSayyad 2004).

Caught in a Cycle of Violence

While such informal practices may temporarily enable noncitizens and irregular migrants to negotiate with street-level bureaucrats for their existence in the city, the lack of citizenship sustains their vulnerability not just to police extortion and other forms of harassment (such as racially profiled stops and searches), and more overarching socioeconomic marginalization, but it also shapes their proximity to criminal enterprises. In the words of a Bengali resident, “If the right way does not work, what will a young person do instead of resorting to crime?” In cities such as Karachi, Bengalis frequently reside in informal settlements, where drug abuse and addiction is known to be rampant. A lack of state intervention—or, in some cases, because of the collusion of the police—criminal enterprises are allowed to foster.

Perhaps more concerningly, beyond such enterprises, Bengalis’ contested citizenship situation also risks their exploitation by political and religious elites seeking to entrench their own political and economic interests. In October 2022, a telecommunications company sent its workers to Machar Colony (a predominantly Bengali neighborhood) on a routine job. A religious cleric affiliated with a local mosque allegedly spread misinformation that these workers were part of a gang behind the abduction of children. As the rumor gathered momentum, a mob consisting of local residents, including Bengalis, lynched and killed the two workers (Ali 2022). In the police and paramilitary raids that followed, dozens of young Bengali men were detained, while others fled the neighborhood out of fear. My interlocutors told me that the cleric reportedly “paid off” the local police to evade his own responsibility in this tragedy. Meanwhile, the local police harassed Bengali women in the area to locate the whereabouts of the men suspected to be involved. Local political parties associated with other ethnic communities used this incident to enflame public sentiments against Bengalis, reinforcing the stereotype that they are “illegal immigrants” who “are time and again found involved in various crimes” (Express Tribune 2022).

Weeks later, when a government-led inquiry committee released its findings (Yousafzai 2022), it pinned the cause of this incident on Machar Colony’s “high crime index,” where “most young people either fall victim to drug addiction or become members of criminal outfits” and where residents are “suspicious of strangers.” In adopting this stance, the fact-finding committee reinforced the idea of this Bengali neighborhood as being “crime prone” and thus in need of more police check posts and stations. The responsibilities of the cleric who had provoked the mob and the ethnopolitical group that sought to enflame the issue and exacerbate racialized narratives against Bengalis were largely ignored.

Therefore, with limited formal pathways and mobility to social and economic advancement due to problematic security and immigration policies, racially marginalized communities, such as Bengalis in Karachi, are vulnerable to recruitment into criminal gangs, armed militias patronized by political parties, and religious extremism, creating a vicious cycle that exacerbates and empowers securitized, racialized, and classed state narratives against these communities. This, in turn, legitimizes state violence against them. At the heart of this cycle is police, state, and capitalist disinterest toward some of this region’s most vulnerable populations, a vulnerability continually reproduced by racist and elite-centric security policies. So long as the cash cows continue to serve, everything else is “too politically controversial.”

Zoha Waseem is an assistant professor at the University of Warwick and co-coordinator of the Urban Violence Research Network. She is the author of Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters, and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2022) and coeditor of Southern and Postcolonial Perspectives on Policing, Security, and Social Order (with Roxana Cavalcanti and Peter Squires, Bristol University Press, 2023). Her work is interdisciplinary and focuses on policing, militarization, migration, and the politics of crime and counterinsurgency in the Global South, with a focus on Pakistan.

Notes

1 I conducted all interviews in Karachi and then anonymized, translated, and transcribed them.

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