In Karachi, beggars help muggers and the
police can’t follow the law
Child beggars
have to give everything they earn to the beggar mafia who kidnap them and force
them to beg. PHOTO: STOCK IMAGE.
I saw him 20 years ago, perched on a stool outside the Sulemania
Mosque in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. He had no arms and no legs, and was fair
complexioned like most of the western tourists
that throng Istanbul. I will never forget the huge smile he
gave me when I dropped a coin in the box held by a little boy standing next to
the stool. Behind him on the wall, hung the license issued by the government
allowing him to make a living through begging. Perhaps such licenses are issued
to beggars and those who beg without a license are put behind bars.
Compare this with the
beggars in our cities, particularly Karachi. The distance from my house to my office
is eight kilometres, and I see about 20 beggars on my way to the office every
morning. Most of them are perfectly
healthy and even run to your car when it approaches the traffic
signal. In the parking lot outside my office building, there are men, women and
children who surround my car and I can’t get out of it without bumping into one
of them.
Two weeks back, women and child beggars in the parking area
surrounded a motorist, and while he was trying to get away from them, a couple
of motorcyclists came, pointed
a gun at him
and took away whatever he had in his wallet and his cell phone. It was obvious
that the beggars had helped the motorcyclists in carrying out the robbery.
Eventually, the shopkeepers called the cops and had the beggars shifted
somewhere else. But I have no doubt they’ll be back in a few days, using the
parking lot as a huge toilet, and doing what most Pakistanis are very good at – increasing
the population exponentially. And when their children grow up, they too
will become beggars, adding to the misery of the unlucky people who live in
this mega city.
To give you some idea of how
much these beggars earn, let me relate an incident which took place 40 years
ago. There was a near-blind beggar near Rimpa Plaza who would be picked up from his
home every morning and then taken back at night by a rickshaw driver. Someone
told my father that he belonged to our community and was from our hometown in
India. Our community elders immediately decided to help him. They arranged to
pay him Rs500 every month (that would be equivalent to 20, 000 in today’s
money). When their representative went to the beggar’s house, he was amazed to
see it well-furnished. Apparently, this beggar was a very rich man. He laughed
when he heard of the offer.
“You can keep your money”, he
said. “I earn more than 10 times that much!”
Every year, and particularly during the holy
month of Ramazan, beggars from all over the country swarm into the cities and
make life miserable for us. You can’t go anywhere without running into them. At
every traffic signal, they persistently tap on your car windows and demand
payment, as if they are doing us a favour by asking for money. Then there are
the eunuchs, whom
our illiterate folk regard as the chosen few who will have your prayers
answered. They don’t have the sense to realise that if eunuchs had the power to
persuade the Almighty to do anything, why would they themselves remain
poor? But no, our gullible folk have been told repeatedly to give
alms to beggars and eunuchs otherwise their prayers won’t come true. Hence,
they continue doling out their hard-earned money, which would be better spent
on if donated to charitable organisations like the
Edhi trust or SIUT.
A beggar in the parking lot
near my office once told me,
“Sir, I don’t want your money.
Just buy this medicine for my ailing son on your way home.”
He handed me the prescription,
which entailed a very expensive course of injections. I decided to help him out
and went to the nearest medical store. When I gave the prescription to the
pharmacist, he said,
“The beggar will sell this to
another pharmacy for half its cost.”
Upon examining the prescription
closely, I realized that it was clearly forged since the doctor’s name was not
decipherable and there was no phone number on it either. The next day I went
back and returned the prescription to the beggar.
A
child beggar once approached me in Clifton and whispered,
“Sir, don’t give me any money,
it’ll be taken away by the man who is standing on the footpath. Just buy me a
bun kebab, I’m really hungry.”
This is what happens all over
the country every day. Child beggars have to give everything they earn to the
beggar mafia who kidnap them and force them to beg.
Then there are the child
beggars who insist on cleaning your car windshield. You plea and scold them to
stay away from your car but to no avail. They take their own sweet time wiping
the windshield even when the signal has turned green and the cars behind you
are aggressively blasting their horns at you.
There is no solid data regarding the number of beggars present
the city. However, I did come across an
article according
to which there are 25 million beggars in the country. Since one in 10
Pakistanis resides in Karachi, we can assume that there are two and a half
million beggars making their living in the metropolitan. They can be seen
outside shopping malls, near mosques and shrines and on all the roads and
footpaths.
“Any police officer may without
an order from a magistrate and without a warrant, arrest and search any person
who appears to him to be a vagrant…”
Section
49 of the Sindh Child Act 1955 also prohibits children
from begging, and makes it a punishable act. Beggars and those who force
children to beg can face jail time for up to three years.
“Whoever employs any child for
the purposes of begging or causes any child to beg of whoever having the
custody, charge of care of a child connives at or encourages its employment for
the purpose of begging and whoever uses a child as an exhibit for the purpose
of begging shall on conviction be punished with imprisonment of either
description for a term which may extend to one year or with fine which may extend.”
I remember a time when the
police would round up all the beggars in the city and take them away. But now,
the same law is no longer enforced, probably because beggars or the mafia pay
the cops to look the other way. So it looks like we’ll have to suffer the agony
of being harassed by beggars for a very long time.
Shakir Lakhani
Engineer, former visiting lecturer at NED Engineering College,
industrialist, associated with petroleum/chemical industries for many years.
Loves writing, and (in the opinion of most of those who know him), mentally
unbalanced. He tweets @shakirlakhani (twitter.com/shakirlakhani)
http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/43988/in-karachi-beggars-help-muggers-and-the-police-cant-follow-the-law/
Post a Comment