Fighting the shanties

Islamabad’s Capital Development Authority demolished the I-11 katchi abadi in a major operation last week. Appalling as it may be, the use of overwhelming violence to dispossess the poor is not surprising.
The Pakistani state and ruling elites are in the habit of targeting, killing, torturing, disappearing, and displacing their own people. Neither can we pretend that the CDA was merely implementing rule of law, as has been amply demonstrated by activists, academics, and journalists who have written on the issue. The operations violated housing laws, constitutional right to life, and the state’s responsibility to provide adequate housing. The operations also breached several international treaties and human rights conventions.
The more troubling thing is that large sections of society, especially the middle classes, cheered and applauded these illegal, illegitimate and barbaric operations. What drives them to applaud the use of batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and bulldozers against thousands of unarmed women, men, children and the elderly? What induces the celebration of the displacement of thousands, the arrest and torture of hundreds? What causes the dismissal of the death of a six-day-old child due to suffocation, or the unfortunate young ones that survived and will suffocate slowly, everyday?
Mere self-interest does not explain such behaviour. The real reason for the support of violence seems to lie in the anxieties, fears, and desires of middle classes that are still stuck on the lower rungs of the exploitative capitalist, neocolonial, and neoliberal system. Their anxieties are further aggravated by the exploitations of the moneyed, landed, capitalist, and military elites.
Consider for instance, the issue of housing and the desire by middle-class families to own a house. Building a house, especially for lower middle classes can be an intergenerational and all-consuming project. The desire is more pronounced in urban areas, where housing anxieties transform social formations by influencing decisions about education, lifestyle, jobs, location, and marriages. The same anxieties can be found in rural areas as well, but given the centrality of agriculture, concerns with water and food are more constitutive of rural social formations. So when it comes to the issue of katchi abadis, it doesn’t matter how rationally one can argue the case for katchi abadis. The question that concerns middle classes the most seems to be: How dare these poor get land and build houses without ‘legally’ paying for it?
The fact that the poor pay through their sweat and blood is not important. Belief and compassion are suspended. Empty signifiers of ‘illegality’ and ‘corruption’ triumph over the more humane sentiments. It doesn’t help that the mainstream discourse around corruption also posits the problem as the moral failure of individuals, rather than a systemic failure.
Systemic failures are evident in the case of the I-11 abadi, which was founded in the early 1980s. The CDA developed the sector and sold several plots away from the abadi residents in the 1990s. Many of the plots were allotted on quota to CDA employees below market rates. The new owners belong to the professional and middle classes, unable to detach their own interests from the issue of social justice. Others from the same classes can more readily relate to the fears and anxieties of the owners. Thus emerges a strong desire for injustice – unwitting and even subconscious. On the other hand, speculative buying and selling of land continues to raise rent and prices and the CDA does nothing to provide alternative arrangements for the I-11 abadi residents.
So when the CDA claims that it is merely enforcing court orders and private property laws, it is merely trying to distract us from gross and criminal negligence. The laws and policies on katchi abadis require alternative arrangements to be made in consultation with residents before evictions, whether the land is public or privately owned. Demolishing homes, using violence, and preventing the free movement of abadi residents is not legal.
But when it comes to middle-class anxieties none of this matters. ‘They must be illegal, corrupt, criminals, Afghans’ – these are the common refrains, all lies and falsehoods. Why are the real facts not taken into account by the supporters of the evictions?
Part of the reason for that is that we have forgotten that adequate housing is a basic need for life, not a commodity or a privilege. This right to life is enshrined in Article 9 of the constitution; Article 38-D makes it the responsibility of the state to make provisions for adequate housing for all of its citizens. We must all be thankful to the residents of katchi abadis, for they serve as a reminder to us all that when the state fails to deliver – and the state always fails to deliver for the poor – the poor have the capacity to self-organise and create breathing space for them and give birth to amazingly complex living arrangements.
Yet the existence of katchi abadis rubs the middle classes the wrong way, because it taps into their housing anxieties, which gradually transform into desires for injustice. Not that they want injustice – but their desires either stop them from supporting this issue of social justice, or compel them to actively oppose the organising efforts of the poor.
These desires for injustice are transformed by structural changes in the housing sector. Starting in the early 1990s and coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism, the government’s five-year development plans started encouraging private development of land. The situation exploded by the early 2000s, as private developers dominated the housing sector. Public land was and is still being transferred at cheap rates to private developers who in return offer commissions and plots to military officers and civilian bureaucrats. Some of these plots are distributed among the lower rungs of society through ‘file’ lottery systems and speculative deals on this land allows some among the middle classes to make huge profits. But this in turn raises the land and housing prices which further fuels the housing anxieties of the middle and lower classes. The poor and low-income groups are completely excluded from this bandar baant.
As a result of these policies, the country suffers from a severe housing crisis. In 2010 the shortage was six million units which can provide housing for over 30-40 million people – a number that coincides with the people residing in informal settlements in Pakistan. Thus emerge katchi abadis as a natural consequence of an inadequate and unequal system.
Informal housing also gives the moneyed classes opportunities to extract profit through illicit means. The CDA itself is part of this land mafia, taking commission from people and letting katchi abadis stand for several decades without making alternative provisions and then suddenly and violently destroying them. This is the life, and death of the poor – excluded and living in cities that are hostile to them. Consider Islamabad, which has 42 katchi abadis, and guess how many low-income housing schemes have been developed by the CDA. One – to house the 150,000 urban poor.
The middle classes, filled with anxieties and desires for mobility, unfortunately cheer on as the state unleashes its violence on the urban poor. Perhaps the middle class fears slipping on the ladder and ending up among the poor. Desperately clawing to climb higher on the graves of the poor, perhaps this intimate violence momentarily purges them of their anxieties.
But we have many who are guided by desires for justice. It doesn’t take much to inculcate such desires. All you need to do is to stand with the excluded and not buy into the falsehoods propagated by the state. There’s ample evidence on this. Even the CDA officials took a U-turn on their statements of the presence of Afghans, terrorists, and criminals in the I-11 abadi.
Sadly, there’s a remarkable absence of middle classes from the real struggles for justice, dignity, and equality. But it’s never too late to start. We can start by demanding that the CDA stops these evictions. We must demand that the CDA makes provisions for settling the thousands displaced. We must hold the CDA accountable for using unnecessary and overwhelming violence. And through these demands, we will strengthen our resolve and our desire for justice.
The writer teaches politics and history at Quaid-e-Azam University.