Bringing down the statues.

Byline: Peerzada Salman

KARACHI -- After the shocking death of 46-year-old black American George Floyd on May 25 at the hands of a white policeman, the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and Europe has once again, this time around perhaps in a more concrete way, given the entire world a chance to reflect upon the unsavoury parts of our collective history.

The movement is putting pressure on authorities to revisit history and bring about necessary reforms to improve the criminal justice system and put in place laws that can end discrimination against minorities. To drive their point home, the protestors in the US and UK have uprooted statues and other monuments to individuals depicting their societies' racist past. On the second day of protest, slave trader Edward Colston's statue was torn down in Bristol and chucked into the harbour. The images of uprooting the figure went viral in no time.

Karachi, with the city's colonial maazi, has had its fair share of monuments, some of them carved in marble. Interestingly, and it doesn't matter which side of history you stand, a majority of them have disappeared from their original places.

There used to be an obelisk near the Native Jetty Bridge that reminded everyone of Napier's rule. Where it went is anybody's guess

It has been documented that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's statues, among several others, were removed in the 1960s when Gen Ayub Khan ruled the country to prevent the ire of right-wing forces prior to the visit of a leader of a Muslim country. Those sculptures were plopped into the warehouse of the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC) and in a certain section of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) building. Attempts, ever since, have been made to restore some of them.

It has to be said, though, that when it comes to Sindh in general and Karachi in particular the first British name that springs to mind without thinking twice is of Charles Napier, because he was the one who conquered the province in the early 1840s - remember the phrase 'I have sinned!' So the logical question that history buffs need to ask with reference to monuments in Karachi: was there ever a Napier statue, such as the one in Trafalgar Square in London, in the Sindh capital? Difficult to answer. What can be said with certainty is that until a few years after the country's...