by BEENA SARVAR
PHOTO/The News
Parveen Rehman headed the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi and helped empower an entire community, especially women, and spoke out against the land and drug mafias in the city. She was assassinated in Karachi on 13 March because she took on criminal and corrupt forces in Pakistani society on behalf of the poor.
The cold-blooded assassination of the gentle, soft-spoken development worker Parveen Rehman (56) sent shock waves around her native Karachi, around Pakistan and around the world. Her murder leaves bereft her octogenarian mother, two brothers and a sister (the writer Aquila Ismail). Not to mention other relatives and a huge number of friends, students and admirers, in particular the people of Orangi township, the sprawling low-income locality in the north-west of Karachi to the uplift of which she devoted her life.
‘Dharavi’ of Karachi
Karachi is a sprawling megapolis of over 18 million, spilling into the rocky desert that surrounds it, the Arabian Sea and the Indus River delta to its south. It is Pakistan’s largest city, business hub and major seaport. The hum of traffic – heavy industrial transport, interspersed with public and private transport, motorised and animal-driven – is a constant background noise. Many of the countless roads and flyovers that criss-cross the city have displaced human settlements inhabited by the urban poor. It was near a flyover known as the Benaras Pul that two masked men riding a motorcycle waylaid Parveen’s vehicle on the afternoon of 13 March as she returned home from work. They shot her at close range and sped away, the targeted nature of the shooting apparent in their leaving alone her driver, Wali Dad. By the time he got her to the hospital, she had breathed her last, hit by at least four bullets. Orangi where Parveen worked competes with India’s Dharavi for the title of “Asia’s largest slum”, winning hands down in terms of land area, 22 square miles compared to Dharavi’s one. Its population of about 1.5 million is a bit more than Dharavi’s million. But Orangi, Parveen Rehman always insisted, is “not a slum”. The word “slum”, she would say, does not do justice to its hard-working people. “People are poor but they are not destitute, they’re working class. It’s one of the poorest settlements. People have arranged their own schools, clinics and water supply. They are a great example of people helping themselves”, she told Dean Nelson of The Telegraph in 2009.
Economic & Political Weekly for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)