Police, corruption and provincial loyalties in 1950s Karachi, and the case of Sir Gilbert Grace

Abstract

So-called ‘ethnic’ – or provincial – rivalries have been an endemic feature of Pakistani life since its earliest post-independence days. Muslims from different parts of British India might have been brought together by their support for the League’s Pakistan demand in the months leading up to independence, but it took very little time once Pakistan had been created for pre-existing distinctions to re-emerge. For all the rhetoric about becoming ‘Pakistanis’, the identities of its new citizens usually depended on, and were linked to, the provinces from whence they originally hailed, whether this was the Punjab, Bengal or places that had become India. One of the major divides was between those who migrated to Pakistan and those already living in what became the state in August 1947. This article, drawing on official records and contemporary newspaper reports, engages with the question of these rivalries in the context of the federal capital Karachi’s security apparatus in the decade that followed independence. In particular, it highlights the intense rivalry that developed between the Karachi Police and the Pakistan Special Police Establishment (set up in 1948), which eventually resulted in the ousting of Sir Gilbert Grace from his post as British Inspector General of Police in Karachi, in 1956 amid mutual accusations of police corruption and malpractice. While the vast majority of Karachi’s non-Muslim police officers had left for India by the beginning of the 1950s, a new power struggle quickly emerged in the federal capital between ‘refugee’ displaced officers on the one hand and officers from the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) on the other. In effect, this ‘provincial’ competition mirrored the wider manoeuvring for power and influence that was taking place as Pakistan’s newly established services sought to accommodate the different sets of interests that came together after 1947. The resulting power struggle can also tell us a great deal about the role of the police in the everyday lives of the ordinary citizens who had made Karachi their home, demonstrating just how far people relied on possessing the right social connections to protect their interests in the context of Pakistan’s early years.