Fourteen in a locked room 

“When they speak of inquiries, of compensating families, of resilience, of rebuilding, we know what they’re not saying: that this was preventable, that our loss was their failure.” 

I wrote that in January for Dawn, about a shopping plaza in Karachi. 

It was never about the plaza. I thought I was writing about a building I had known since I was a girl, about crockery and kitsch and a shopkeeper who could explain to me exactly how much heat a glass dish could take. But the last part of that column was not about Gul Plaza at all.

It was about the system and it would have fit any fire in this country, in any year, with the name of the building swapped out. 

That is what repeats. Not the fires. The buildings are all different. A shopping center on M.A. Jinnah Road. A garment factory in Baldia. A nursery on the third floor of a public hospital in Islamabad. What comes afterward is identical, and it arrives in the same order every time, so reliably that you could set a watch on it. 

It begins with paper, and the paper always comes before the deaths. Three weeks before more than 250 workers burned behind locked doors in Baldia, an international auditor certified that factory as safe. At Gul Plaza, the fire safety audits for the two years before the fire were produced after the building had burned and dated to look as though they had been carried out in time. At PIMS, the notices had been going out for seven years.  

Asked why fire safety had not been dealt with earlier, the minister of state for interior said the inquiry committee would find out.  

Nobody here failed to notice. They had already been told, in writing, for seven years. 

Within a day of the nursery fire, the government had convened two inquiries and removed the health ministry’s most senior bureaucrat. Fourteen years after the Baldia factory fire, nobody remains imprisoned on a conviction for the deaths. The speed is not urgency. It is the machinery doing the only thing it is genuinely built to do, which is to establish quickly that the failure belonged to a particular person and not to the arrangement that produced him. 

And the person responsible is always found further down. At Baldia, the owners left the country soon after the fire and were never sentenced, while the men who had been on the doors were sentenced to life. At Gul Plaza, two officers of the civil defense directorate were dismissed this month for failing to audit the building in the two years before it burned, and for writing the audits afterward with earlier dates on them. The police charge sheet in the same case named a shopkeeper’s 11-year-old son as the principal suspect for a fire in a building with no working fire exits, no alarms and no functioning firefighting system at all. 

The judicial commission on Gul Plaza handed its findings to the Sindh government in April, sealed, and a committee of three ministers was formed to act on them. Four months on, the report has still not been made public. A request to release it was filed with the provincial information commission in July.  

A lock and a guard cost nothing. A door that opens from the inside has to be bought and installed, and it never was. 

-Muna Khan

The PIMS inquiry will find that the ward had no working alarm, that the exits were locked, that the equipment was old and the wiring older, and that warnings had been issued and not acted upon. None of this will be a discovery. All of it was supposedly in the notices, which is why they were being sent. 

There is an explanation for the locked doors, and it is not a bad one. The hospital’s executive director told reporters that access to the neonatal ward has long been restricted because babies have been stolen from government hospitals. The health minister said the same thing at his briefing, and added that you would not see this anywhere else in the world, but that the problem exists here, so the door had to be manned. 

Somebody in that building had thought about a danger to those infants and acted on it with what was available, which was a lock and a guard. 

That is the whole distinction, and it is not about care or competence. A lock and a guard cost nothing. A door that opens from the inside has to be bought and installed, and it never was. 

The 14 were in incubators. None of them was old enough to be carried out by a mother who heard an alarm, and there was no alarm, and the door was locked. 

The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi. X: LedeingLady