KARACHI: Seeking to dispel some long-standing impressions, senior lecturer in Human Geography at the Royal Holloway, University of London, Dr Ayesha Siddigi`s talk, hosted by the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) here on Thursday, was based on her book In the Wake of Disaster: Islamists, the State and a Social Contract in Pakistan, which forces one to look beyond the narratives of Pakistan as the perennial `failing state` falling victim to an imminent `Islamist takeover`.

`Disasterscreatemoments where potential change takes place. With 20 million people affected and one-fifth of Pakistan`s land under water, the floods of 2010 in Sindh were so significant that it made me ask about what kind of political space opens up in the aftermath of a disaster and what happens to the relationship between a state and its citizens in the aftermath of a disaster? Also what kind of spaces open up for those who might want tochallenge the state and step in to provide disasterrelated services while forging their own relationships with citizens and trying to fill the vacuum,` the scholar explained.

`Often it is said that in such situations there is a dangerous vacuum beingfilled by hard-line Islamist interests which can also be bad for the people and Western interests in the country,` Dr Siddiqi said.

Therefore, she added, she went about doing seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Thatta, Badin and Tharparkar districts to investigate ideas such as the social connection between the state and citizens beingfractured, missing citizenship, disaster management and the Islamist question.

`But I actually found out that there was a very alive and tangible relationship between the state and its people and that it really manifests every day. My interactions with the communities, bureaucracies, politicians and my asking them who they thought was responsible for providing disaster relief or disaster services in the aftermath of a disaster or where does that responsibility lie got me the almost categorical acrossthe-board response that `the responsibility lay with the government`, and not the power brokers that people of ten talk about.

`There was a very clear demand that it was the job of this abstract entity, the state, to provide what is needed in the aftermath of disaster along with that basic human security that people should be kept safe lies squarely on the shoulders of this abstract entity, the state, and no one thought that the state should be replaced. So the state exists despite unfulfilled expectations or the enor-mous expectations of people,` she added.

Another thing that the scholar mentioned was that within the Disaster Management Act, disaster relief was not a right but through ex gratia or favour. `Everyone domiciled, with Nadra [National Database and Registration Authority] cards, got disaster relief. So it didn`t come through political agents. It was through their citizen number. Being a citizen entitled them to the aid. Thus quite accidentally, the state pushed a really progressive form of citizenship because the state linked disaster relief to citizenship, she pointed out.

`I am really glad that what I found in my fieldwork challenged my own ideas and kind of showed me just how naive I was in my own thinl(ing as well as those ideas within a wider scholarship and literature. I didn`t find the big strong man who twirls his moustache and neither did I see local Islamist groups challenging the local systems or presenting an alternative development paradigm to the state, the scholar concluded.