Ziauddin Sardar has disappeared

Mr Ziauddin Sardar has disappeared. The police deny that he has been arrested. "We have no clue of Mr Sardar's whereabouts," says Karachi's police chief, Azhar Farooqi. He admits, however, that he has picked up with about 150 people under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance. They included prominent politicians, lawyers and activists. All of them, he declared, were going to "create problems". But Ziauddin Sardar was not one of them.

I am always "creating problems". This, I figure, is the job of a writer and a public intellectual. But, thank God, I have not disappeared. I am still very much here in London. Had I been living in Karachi, however, I would have evaporated into thin air, just like Ziauddin Sardar, the vice-president of the Karachi Bar Association. On 11 May, he left his house early in the morning and failed to return. His family has been searching frantically for him, but to no avail.

This is not unusual in today's Pakistan. Anyone who objects to the military dictatorship of President Pervez Musharraf can disappear at any time, anywhere. Lawyers are a favourite target because they are leading a nationwide campaign for democracy and against the army's involvement in politics. Karachi was in the grip of fear the day Sardar disappeared. A major demonstration was planned for the next day; a showdown was looming.

It came the following day with the arrival at the airport of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. In March, Chaudhry was suspended by Mu sharraf on trumped-up charges. His real crime was showing some independence and standing up to the military dictator. Since then, Justice Chaudhry has become the epicentre of a tor-nado of opposition, leading huge but largely peaceful demonstrations in most of Pakistan's major cities. Karachi, however, was going to be different.

A teeming, sprawling metropolis of 16 million, Karachi is Pakistan's largest city and the stronghold of the muhajirs - those who migrated to Pakistan from India after partition. Until recently, it was Pakistan's only port. It has always been the country's main economic engine, a cash cow that has been milked by every ruler without returning anything back. It is a seething, angry, decrepit, poverty-stricken, violent place. An upheaval in Karachi does much more than reverberate throughout Pakistan - it often brings the whole country down.

That's one reason why Karachi had to be different. But there's another equally important reason. Musharraf is pouring billions of dollars of American aid, given for his support in the "war on terror", into Karachi, which he wants to turn into a global city like Singapore. His main ally, the muhajir party, MQM, rules the city and has turned it into a boom town. A few months ago, the mayor of Karachi, Syed Mustafa Kamal, drove me around proudly pointing out new buildings, roads, bypasses, parks, sewerage projects, power stations and water desalination plants. The whole city looked like a gigantic building site.

Musharraf and MQM had decided to defend the city, knowing that an opposition victory would mean a serious setback for their ongoing building projects and their overall plans for Karachi. Shara Faisal, the city's main traffic artery, was blocked before the arrival of the chief justice. Areas where the opposition has a strong presence were barricaded by large vehicles and steel containers from early morning. Plans to stop a procession going to receive Chaudhry at the airport were rehearsed. The police and rangers were asked to step aside. What followed was nothing short of a massacre. Armed MQM thugs shot 36 people, hundreds were injured, buses and cars were torched and petrol pumps set ablaze.

It was a raw display of street power by MQM. The irony is that MQM was itself mercilessly hunted and became the victim of judicial killing by government agencies under the rule of another military dictator - General Zia ul-Haq. Two decades on, it is killing the citizens of Karachi on behalf of the very institution that sought to destroy it.

Every Pakistani is now asking how many others will disappear, how many atrocities will be committed, before General Musharraf realises that he has overstayed his welcome. Unfortunately, Musharraf is incapable of realising anything. He is determined to hang on to power come what may. So the body count in Karachi and elsewhere in Pakistan is set to accelerate.

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