On October 9 this year, the website of the British tabloid
Daily Mail ran a piece on a street robbery taking place on Limestone
Street in Ipswich — an urban town near the state of Queensland in
Australia. The website also posted an accompanying video in which two
very South Asian-looking (and shalwar-kameez clad) men can be seen
robbing another South Asian-looking gentleman at gunpoint. The report
claims that two members of a ‘vicious’ Asian gang mugged another Asian
man on Ipswich’s Limestone Street.
However, the website’s
comments section was almost instantly flooded by remarks wondering why
Limestone Street looked “so shabby”. After one commenter finally
realised that the street was not Limestone or, for that matter, the
footage not even from any street in Australia, he quipped, “Maybe it is
Bali (Indonesia).” Truth is, it certainly wasn’t Australia and nor was
it Bali. It was Karachi. It was CCTV footage of a street crime unfolding
on a street in Karachi’s Gulistan-i-Jauhar area. Australia’s popular TV
news show Media Watch confirmed this in its episode aired on October
16. So what happened?
Well, according to Media Watch,
Daily Mail bought the footage from a news agency called Newsflare. The
latter buys footage from the pubic and then sells it to media outlets.
Media Watch reported the footage that Daily Mail used was originally
titled, “Limestone Street, Ipswich, 22 September, 2017”. Most probably
the person who sold this footage to Newsflare was from Ipswich.
According to Media Watch, Daily Mail ran it without bothering to check
exactly which side of the big bad world the footage was from, believing
it was of a crime taking place on Limestone Street in the Australian
town.
The only Pakistani city which continuously figures as a street name in faraway countries is Karachi
A friend of mine now residing in Brisbane, Australia, had
shared this story with me. But he wasn’t entirely convinced by Media
Watch’s explanation. In an email, he told me that it is highly unlikely
that Daily News did not check the exact location of the crime. Instead,
it did so in a rather “amateurish” manner. My friend wrote that whereas
the raw footage is titled ‘Limestone Street, Ipswich’ (as Media Watch
also reported), on Newsflare’s own site there is an additional caption
that mentions Karachi as well.
So by “amateurish” my
friend meant that Daily Mail simply Googled the two titles and came up
with “Karachi Street, Crestmead, Queensland, Australia”.
Karachi
Street? Yes. My friend apologised for not clarifying that there
actually was a street called Karachi in Crestmead — a suburban area in
Australia’s Queensland state. Why? He did not know. What’s more, he
added that there was also another street called Karachi in Midway Point
area of Hobart in Australia’s Tasmania state. Midway Point is a suburb.
According to my friend, the mentioned street here was named Karachi
because some of the first people from South Asia who travelled to
Australia were from Karachi. They arrived on ships which sailed out from
the port of Karachi during British rule in India during the Second
World War (1939-45). They had settled in this area. However, there are
hardly any South Asians living there now.
Some further
research on my part discovered that the only Pakistani city which
continuously figures as a street name in faraway countries is Karachi. I
discovered a wonderful little piece on this by one M. Ayaz Abdal
(penned in 2010). He names at least seven streets called Karachi
(including the two I have already mentioned).
He writes of a Karachi Street in the Lenasia area in the
South African metropolis Johannesburg. Figuring out why a street there
is called Karachi is not that hard. Before the demise of apartheid in
South Africa in the early 1990s, Lenasia had one of the largest
racially-segregated ‘brown’ populations in South Africa. Most of them
had roots in pre-partition India and one of the streets here was named
Karachi. It’s still called that and the area still houses a large South
Asian population with roots in areas of North India and the (now
Pakistani) city of Karachi.
There are at least two
streets called Karachi in the United States. One is in West Bloomfield
in the state of Michigan and the other is in the city of Socorro in New
Mexico. The Karachi Street in West Bloomfield is located in an upper-end
suburb. I could not quite find out why a street here is called Karachi,
except a Facebook page on the area suggested wealthy
Pakistani-Americans residing here. The one in Socorro, New Mexico, is
actually called ‘Karachi Way’. It is located in a lower-end (but
spacious) area of Socorro. Near Karachi Way is Burma Road. This suggests
that the area is probably populated by Asian-Americans, including
Pakistanis. According to a Pakistani-Christian friend of mine, who has
been living in New Mexico’s capital Santa Fe since 2001, a majority of
Pakistanis living in the mentioned part of Socorro are Catholic
Pakistani-Christians who migrated from Karachi from the late 1980s
onwards.
There’s an area called Karachi Close in the
small town of Tidworth, south-east of Wiltshire in England. It’s a tiny
town but my research could not figure out why an area here is called
Karachi Close. The research only managed to trigger more questions
because this town also has an area called Lahore Close! Yet, according
to the town’s statistics based on a 2011 census, Tidworth is an
overwhelmingly white middle-class town and just has a handful of
Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi residents. But since it’s described as
a ‘garrison town’, most probably it once housed officers and soldiers
who had served in British India.
In New Zealand’s
beautiful city of Wellington, there’s a zone called Karachi Crescent. It
is located in Wellington’s Khandallah area which is near the city’s
harbour. Many of the zones and streets here carry Asian names. Apart
from Karachi Crescent, there’s a Delhi Crescent, Agra Crescent, Kashmir
Avenue (spelled ‘Cashmere’) and a Burma Road. This area developed around
a homestead built by one Captain James Andrew in 1884 when he returned
to New Zealand after serving as a soldier in British India.
In
case the Daily Mail gets any more ideas, I must emphasise that none of
the areas mentioned in this piece are known particularly for ‘vicious’
street crimes.
