Islamabad has fallen

Fifty-five years after the foundation stone of Pakistan’s capital was laid, an elected local government has taken charge of Islamabad for the first time. It is an idea whose time had come, not only because of democratic development but also because Islamabad, with its ever sprawling informal settlements, has turned into Slumabad, much like any other city in Pakistan – a change resulting from the successful invasion of the citadel of the ruling elite by the people of Pakistan.

The new local government has inherited a vibrant and real city where there are more beggars than babus and more khwaja saras than parliamentarians, but it has also inherited a city that is sick at its heart due to five decades of greed and injustices. It should not take long for the public representatives to realise that beneath a thick layer of foundation, the real face of Islamabad the beautiful is not so pretty after all.

There is something wrong with the way Islamabad was imagined. Why did the ruling junta felt the need for a new name when the settlement was an extension of a historic, culturally rich and beautiful city with a nice sounding name – Rawalpindi? What was the harm in making Greater Rawalpindi the capital of Pakistan? If a new name was needed at all, why did they not realise that this area was once the suburbs of a great civilisational city named Taxila, a city that is still alive with two millennium old heritage. Why was the capital not named Taxila, a town that it will soon absorb?

The new city was no more Islamic than most other cities in the country, or the Muslim world for that matter. Perhaps, no city in Pakistan deserves the title Islamabad more than Multan, the city of saints, whose name, according to some scholars, is a shortened version of Mool Asthan – the Temple of the Sun. While the people of Multan, both saints and sinners, have never felt uncomfortable with the name of their beloved city, the ruling elite wanted to assert Islamic identity while suppressing cultural and civilisational heritage. They wanted a tree without roots – an idea more colonial than Islamic. There is a popular picture of Ayub Khan sitting with his comrades on the Shakarparian hill after laying the foundation stone of the capital. Almost everyone in the group had served the colonial services.

Islamabad was imagined as a colony, a civilian cantonment that could provide the ruling elite protection from the dust and noise of a real city and also from noisy, smelly, demanding, protesting citizens forever threatening to upset the applecart. Children (and most adults too) in Islamabad believe that the city was built on an open uninhabited space. In reality, there were villages, mosques, wells, graveyards, fields and communities. However, the new city had no place for its original residents, individually or collectively. Any trace of an earlier human habitation needed to be obliterated for the sake of the new city.

Instead of integrating villages into the city or at least allowing local residents to stay in the same locality by sharing residential plots with them, they were compensated through allotments elsewhere and were required to leave. The price paid to them was often less than one percent and sometime one tenth of one percent of the market price of the real estate developed on their ancestral homes. Of course, land was allotted for farming activities too, for example vegetable farms – but vegetable farms in Islamabad are mutli-million dollar mansions owned by the nation’s who’s who. In a country where it is hard for a famer to make both ends meet, Islamabad has some of the richest and most powerful vegetable farmers in the world.

As rich and powerful often learn to their horror, the poor can be good at the art of survival. Instead of donating land to the Capital Development Authority (CDA) for the great national cause of allotments, they started selling it directly and also decided to defend their land with their lives. In July 2012, three persons died and hundreds were injured when police tried to evict residents of Sri Saral village with guns and bulldozers. This incident made it extremely hard for the CDA to continue with their conquest.

When the poor could not be controlled, the rich decided to beat them at their game and started setting up their own slums – the slums of the rich. Bani Gala is one such slum, where Mohsan-e-Pakistan Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, owns a house and our beloved Quaid-e-Inqilaab, Imran Khan, has a mansion on a hill that occupies 300 kanals of land. We have strange ideas of revolution indeed.

The CDA wants to create ‘Agro Farming and Residential Housing Schemes’ in Zone-4, one of the five zones envisaged in the city’s master plan, in accordance with the sacred Zoning Regulation – which means mansions spread over acres of lands. Just imagine what an allotment bonanza of the century that could create. But as the CDA looks helplessly, Christian sanitary workers, rural migrants, internally displaced persons, cooks and drivers are taking over the land while rich slum dwellers are giving them a healthy competition.

While the slums of the rich cannot be touched, the CDA is always keen to go after the slums of the poor because they look like sores on the beautiful body of the capital. In December last year, the CDA informed the Supreme Court that the influx of Christians to the capital could pose a threat to the numerical superiority of Muslims in the capital of the Islamic Republic.

Though the Christian sanitary workers may not be able to overtake the city, the wrong kind of demographics has already won the battle for the numbers. Unfortunately, the citadel cannot be defended any longer; its walls have been fatally breached. This is the Constantinople moment for city of Islam.

The writer is a social anthropologist and development professional.

Email: zaighamkhan@yahoo.com

Twitter: @zaighamkhan