I spent New Year’s eve at a friend’s house. Luckily for me, this friend lives less than a five minute drive from where I live, and that drive is on two fairly main roads.

Many of Karachi’s residents, of course, did not quite have freedom of movement last night. The authorities made sure to block almost all thoroughfares connecting the rich parts of the city with the rest of the city. When these arrangements first started in the 90s, they were highly circumscribed; essentially the main Sea View road used to be blocked, mainly to ward off motorcycles with their silencers taken out, but everything else was okay. Yesterday was just above and beyond that. Intentionally or not, the walls between the elite in Karachi and the rest are just getting higher.

It’s one thing to have inequality in the material aspects of everyday life. So when we have loadshedding, the elite put their generators on, and everybody else sweats. When we have security issues, the elite get private armed guards, and everybody else gets robbed. And so on.

But what I saw yesterday was qualitatively different. This was not just about the rich having more and better things (something which is true in every country in the world). It was about the rich having the right to have fun and the rest not.

Again, I am not claiming that the traffic police is designing their policies in order to exacerbate social and economic divisions in the city. But that is certainly an implication of their policies. On the margins, roadblocks on every second main road discourage people from different parts of town to visit the sea on New Year’s, a time honored tradition for many. It appears now that even the sea is only for the rich (the ironic thing is that the rich never actually visit Sea View beach themselves, instead preferring Hawkesbay or French beach).