All aboard the Super Savari Express: an armed tour bus for crime-ridden Karachi

Dubbed “the world’s most violent megacity”, armed muggings, carjackings and extortion are part of everyday life in Karachi, where political and criminal forces vie for ownership of the city. The result is a pervasive sense of fear – one that prevents many Karachiites from even leaving their own neighbourhoods, which are carved along wealth and ethnic lines.

“The culture of driving, and the security issue, disable you from visiting these other places,” says Farzana Mukhtar, an HR consultant. It’s 8am on Sunday, and the places Mukhtar is referring to are the streets of Saddar Town, Karachi’s former colonial centre. In contrast to the mid-week traffic, it is virtually deserted, leaving Mukhtar and his group of camera-wielding tourists to admire the remnants of the city’s colonial architecture and daily life with a sense of wonderment: the few hawkers who have woken early, and the tea shop owners preparing for the breakfast crowd. It’s a scene common to tourist sites everywhere; what’s unusual about this group is that many of them are from Karachi itself, on a tour to explore their own city.

Mukhtar and the group are part of a city bus tour organised by Super Savari Express, the first of its kind in the city. At 2,000 Pakistani rupees per ticket (£13), the tour, which launched late last year, attracts a relatively wealthy clientele: Mukhtar, who lives in Clifton, one of the city’s most affluent neighbourhoods, is typical.

“We have about 30 to 40 people on each tour, and they all know the political situation and the safety situation – and yet they’re here because they’re hungry to see they can explore,” says Atif bin Arif, managing director of Super Savari Express. “These are the same people who fly to the Vatican to see the Sistine Chapel, even though we have beautiful churches here; or go to India to see temples, when we have Hindu temples here.”

 Karachi is demographically diverse. Members of each of Pakistan’s ethnic groups as well as refugees from across the region call the port city of more than 21 million residents home. Even so, urban space is highly fragmented, with little provocation needed for ethnic and political tensions to flare up. Turf wars between the country’s main political parties over the past three decades have wrought havoc on the city, with the rise of the Pakistani Taliban exacerbating the violence. “Unlike in South and North American cities, which top the list of the world’s most dangerous, in Karachi, no neighbourhood is entirely murder-free,” says Laurent Gayer, author of Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City. “Violent crime is only one source of insecurity among others, including inter-party rivalries, ethnic riots, Islamist terrorism and sectarian conflicts. This contributes to the general sense of insecurity of Karachi’s populations across the social, ethnic and religious divide.”

The group is ferried around in one of the city’s gloriously kitsch public buses, painted with technicolor flowers and peacocks and festooned with pink and red feathers, tassles and tissue-paper flowers. For many on the tour, people who are used to being driven around in air-conditioned cars, travelling by public bus is a first. Others recall how in safer times in their youth they would take the bus to school or university.

In addition to showing off the former capital’s architectural heritage, the five-hour tour aims to highlight the city’s diversity by stopping off at a Hindu temple, a cathedral, a Parsi fire temple and mosques belonging to two minority Muslim groups, the Memons and the Dawoodi Bohra, all part of Bin Arif’s goal to demonstrate Karachi’s “mosaic of cultures, ethnicities and religions.” Although a sense of freedom sets in as the tour progresses, six armed guards, close by at all times, serves as a reminder of the city’s day-to-day reality.

The gap between rich and poor adds further complexity to the city’s design. While the destitute live in inner-city slums or in katchi abadis, unplanned ghettos on the fringes, the wealthy live isolated in Karachi’s most prestigious neighbourhoods, Clifton and Defence, in walled-off homes manned by 24-hour armed guards. In these enclaves, residents and private security companies have taken matters into their own hands, resulting in a proliferation of walls topped by razor wire, checkpoints, CCTV cameras and barriers of all shapes and sizes that would not be out of place in a war zone.

“We have a social divide across the city, meaning those in Clifton and Defence live inside a bubble. So when they move out of their comfort zone they are more worried than they should be,” says Farooq Soomro, the founder of The Karachi Walla, a blog documenting the city’s architectural treasures. “I’ve been robbed at signals, so this danger is clear and present. But it shouldn’t stop me from living in the moment, because the city has a lot to offer which probably balances out this risk.”

Back in Saddar Town, the tour group, who almost all live in the wealthy neighbourhoods, have, for a few hours at least, forgotten about their security concerns. “I’m here with five or six family members, all from Karachi, but we’ve never seen the city like this before,” says Bilal Khan, a businessman. “I’m 38 years old and I never knew about some of these places.”

Mukhtar agrees. “I’m not so worried about security right now because we’re in a group and it’s a Sunday. Plus you have to take a bit of a risk to enjoy yourself. But frankly speaking, it’s a daring thing to do in these times.”