‘Brothers in arms’? A police-paramilitary partnership in Karachi

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between two state institutions, a civilian police and a paramilitary force, jointly tasked with maintaining law and order in Karachi. I describe this system of pluralised policing as a ‘competitive-network model’, in which unstructured cooperation between police and paramilitary officers coincides with competition and inter-agency conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Karachi between 2015 and 2019, I analyse the impact of the competitive-network model on the civilian police. I argue that this relationship model causes institutional disruptions within the civilian police, reinforces the belief that militarisation of routine police work is necessary, and creates a crisis of self-legitimacy for civilian police officers who identify their institution as the ‘younger brother’ in such relational dynamics. This is the first study to investigate the partnership between two public policing providers in Pakistan. In doing so, it makes an empirical contribution to an expanding scholarship on the pluralisation of policing that currently lacks an understanding of partnerships between state officials and entities jointly tasked with public policing. It therefore raises important questions about the effects of police pluralisation, and prompts in-depth ethnographic research that assesses the impacts of pluralised policing on civilian police officers, particularly from contexts where the diversification of security actors may be politically motivated and detrimental to the professionalisation of civilian institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Pluralisation
• militarisation
• self-legitimacy
• Pakistan

Acknowledgements

Fieldwork conducted for this project was supported by the Department of War Studies Small Grant Scheme at King’s College London. I would like to thank Professor Anatol Lieven, Professor Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Yasser Kureshi, Dr Sobia Ahmed Kaker and anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 To learn more about Pakistan’s law enforcement infrastructure, see Abbas (2011).

2 Dupont defined ‘political capital’ as the capital that ‘derives from proximity of actors to the machinery of government and their capacity to influence or direct this machinery toward their own objectives’ (2004, p. 85).

3 To protect the anonymity of my participants, I have numbered all interviews and assigned participants letters based on their affiliation: P = police officers, R = paramilitary officers, J = journalists, B = businessmen and industrialists, respectively.

4 A detailed exploration of Karachi’s politics and its connections with Pakistan’s broader civil-military relations is beyond the scope of this paper. For further analysis, see Verkaaik (2004), Frotscher (2008), and Gayer (2014) on Karachi’s ethno-political trajectory and Rizvi (1998), Shah (2014), and Jaffrelot (2015) for a history of civil-military relations in Pakistan. On the military’s involvement in Pakistan’s economy, see Siddiqa (2016).

5 Ordinance XXXV of 1995, section 131A.

6 Role and Tasks, Pakistan Rangers Sindh. Available from: http://pakistanrangerssindh.org/roles.php [Accessed 23 July 2019].

7 The Rangers do not transfer all suspects to the police and may release some directly. In relatively few reported incidents, suspects have died in custody (Ali 2016). Official data on suspects held in paramilitary custody were inaccessible.