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: hr2353columbua.edu
Twitter: hashimbr