Demolition state

Islamabad showed its true colours on Thursday. The demolition of the I-11 informal settlement near the Sabzi Mandi after two days of resistance by its residents came in the most brutal fashion. Teargas shelling, baton charging, beatings and arrests were the order of the day. With one six-year-old child killed, the CDA and the police decided that it was the residents of the three-decade-old settlement that were the terrorists. Anti-terrorism charges were filed against 1,500 people, which basically gave the licence to the police and Rangers to pick up any resident of the settlement at will and put them in jail on the apparently non-bailable offence of trying to save your home from the state’s clutches.
The event was a reflection of the increasing fascism of the Pakistani elite. Many in the Islamabad elite cheered the operation on as a way of getting rid of ‘criminal and terrorist’ elements in society, forgetting that the settlement actually supplied most of the informal labour that keeps their lifestyles as posh as they are. The media continued to call it the demolition of the ‘illegal Afghan Basti’ and argued that women and children were being used as ‘shields’ by ‘elements’ trying to thwart the operation.
There were certainly people trying to thwart the operation. Organised under the left-wing banner of the Awami Workers Party, the residents of the settlement had decided to stick together and form a human chain between the CDA’s bulldozers and their houses. The residents of the settlement were politically mobilised and recognised their right to shelter much more than the upper classes which comfortably cheered the operation from their living rooms.
The history of the settlement that the CDA has labelled ‘Afghan basti’ must be reiterated. Electoral lists of the settlement go back to the 1985 election under dictator Ziaul Haq, the year when a policy to regularise all informal settlements of over 40 dwelling units was also announced. Back then, the settlement was known as Miskinabad. Later, it was renamed Benazirabad before it gained its current name ‘Afghan basti’ after some Afghan refugees were allowed to live there after the 2001 war in Afghanistan was started. It current population is estimated to be around 8,000 people.
The so-called Afghan presence in the settlement became the key lie that Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan and the CDA continued to tell people as they prepared for the operation. As if being an Afghan makes you a natural Taliban sympathiser, but even more so, the statement was a lie – admitted after the operation by a CDA official to the media who confirmed that Afghans had left 4-5 years ago. Moreover, it would be a joke to argue that an entire settlement should be demolished because a few illegal immigrants lived there.
The joke became reality. On Thursday, around 20 percent of the houses in the settlement were demolished. CDA officials set people’s possessions on fire. The narrative of the CDA also changed. A CDA spokesman told the media that this was no longer state land since it had been sold to around 800 people. When or why that interchange took place, when a settlement was already there, is a question they are unwilling to answer. Neither are they willing to answer why this particular settlement was never regularised much earlier given that it has existed for over three decades. Legislation around the country recognises the legal right of informal settlements for the poor to exist; it is bizarre if the CDA does not follow the same laws.
The reality is that the CDA, like many other property developers, is another land speculator in Islamabad which has the power of the state behind it. The case of Chak Shehzad is a critical one here where land apparently allotted as farmland was converted into lavish farmhouses. The CDA feels that with new property development in the area, including DHA and Bahria, falling outside its ambit it must cash in on the land under its control. The easy targets are informal settlements which it has let operate in a legal quagmire over decades until the time was ripe.
That time was the time of the PML-N and its interior minister Nisar Ali Khan. The decision to demolish informal settlements in Islamabad was announced over a year ago by the interior minister, who claimed that ‘terrorists’ were hiding in them. These were certainly brave words from the interior minister of a country where the world’s most wanted terrorist was discovered living a walking distance from the country’ s premier military academy. The imaginary claim of ‘sending people back home’ discounts the fact that many middle-aged residents of the settlement were born there and have known no other home. In his more moderate moments, the minister would call the land grabbers part of a scam.
The trouble with that little detail is that it is not informal settlements that are scams. It is the so-called ‘formal’ schemes being built for the elite that are the true land scams. No one in a katchi abadi speculates on the value of the land in the abadi. Each house is occupied. This is unlike the barely 10 percent occupancy rates of the thousands of new elite housing schemes cropping up across the country, most of whom should be considered illegal under the same perimeters the I-11 settlement was.
In Islamabad, 80,000 people live in around a dozen informal settlements that the CDA calls illegal. If the precedent of I-11 is to be followed, then the poor have no home in Islamabad. Perhaps that is why Islamabad got a metro bus for Rs60 billion while no new housing schemes were announced specifically for its working class. Keep them away and let them come to work in their master’s houses in the prime minister’s new toy.
Islamabad was built as a city with no housing for its working class. That must not be its future.
The writer is a lecturer at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.
Email: hr2353@columbua.edu
Twitter: @hashimbr