In 2021, the Government of Sindh displaced about 66,500 people in forced evictions operations in two districts of Karachi. In August 2020, Supreme Court Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed ordered the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) to remove encroachments around 540 small and 38 big storm water drains (nullahs) and to clean them. The decision fostered public consent for demolitions, erroneously claiming that these structures were “encroachments” that had exacerbated the effects of urban floods during the monsoons of August 2020. The state partially or fully demolished over 7,000 low income homes and small businesses along Karachi’s eleven-kilometer-long Orangi Nullah and thirteen-kilometer-long Gujjar Nullah. In parallel, over the last decade, mega real estate developers began a process of dispossession and elite capture of agricultural land in Gadap—Karachi’s outskirts—for construction purposes. Occupation, speculation, and financialization of land have become the biggest business in Karachi and have come at the expense of people’s housing and land security. The judicial system and the administration have enabled this process through various means in the backdrop of a political economy of extensive borrowing from international banks that provide short term financial assistance, but compromise peoples rights in the long run with the state being forced to cut social spending in order to pay interest and debt servicing costs.
The city government, aided by the police and the Sindh Rangers, relied on Justice Gulzar’s vague August 2020 order and started a demolition operation at the two nullahs in early 2021. Ideally, an order with such far-reaching human rights consequences should have elicited the formation of a judicial commission to review the legal basis of each structure. Gulzar's order also included a direction for rehabilitation, and a commission, had it been formed, could have consulted with evictees and planned rehabilitation in a manner consonant with human rights principles of transparency and inclusion. Instead, the state proceeded in an arbitrary and ad hoc manner to swiftly implement the order. Structures marked for “cutting” were identified by a drone survey by a local engineering school. There were no door-to-door surveys that could have documented families and helped humanize them. An elusive high-level committee comprising military personnel and the Chief Minister of Sindh met in 2021 and decided that commercial and religious properties and those that suffered less than thirty percent structural loss would not be compensated. Ignoring land acquisition laws that require market rate compensation for titled properties, they treated all homes as encroachments - an act that indelibly weakened doctrines of housing tenure.
Hundreds of residents with leases rushed to the Sindh Anti-Encroachment Tribunal and filed applications for stays. Where the tribunal found leases to be valid (and impliedly not encroachments), it issued stays that halted the demolition apparatus on individual properties and empowered residents. In May 2021, lawyers for residents also secured an injunction from the Sindh High Court stopping the demolition of leased properties. The morale amongst evictees was high and there was a degree of faith in the judicial process. Tribunals had contradicted the Supreme Court’s dicta and declared that leased properties were not encroachments. Residents, through pro bono assistance, then planned to get stays on non-leased properties (physically indistinguishable from leased ones) based on arguments of equity - lengthy possession, payment of bills, and settled expectations of tenure. However, things took a disappointing turn. In June 2021, the Supreme Court vacated all the lower court stay orders and the demolition rampage re-commenced shortly thereafter. The Supreme Court did not delve into the validity of leases presented to them. Arguments grounded in equity now seemed futile. There was little political legal space to make nuanced legal arguments about one’s home and its implicit grounding in the right to property read in conjunction with the Article 38 which is a principle of policy and encourages the state to provide housing. Despite the dismal Supreme Court order of June, other small legal victories kept the legal case for rehabilitation alive. In June 2021 and December 2022, multiple UN rapporteurs including the housing specialist, sent communications to the Government of Sindh regarding the Nullahs and how forced evictions violated human rights treaties Pakistan has ratified. Lawyers for residents also pursued a grievance complaint before the World Bank alleging that one of their projects for the city’s solid waste management received indirect benefit from the demolitions. A finding of admissibility by the Bank’s Grievance Redress Mechanism threatened the GoS with a loss of funding, and indirectly compelled the GoS to draft resettlement and rehabilitation regulations.
In 2021, as demolitions were mobilized at breakneck speed, city officials in 2021, enticed nullah residents with monthly rent checks for two years perhaps to gain their acquiescence. At the peak of demolitions between February and April 2021, residents were engaged in tense negotiations with city officials to “cut” less and spare some of their homes or shops in exchange for cash or other favors. A resident of Bhatta Town at Gujjar Nullah who had once been a member of the local government said during a meeting his house was slated for a seven percent cut (which meant no compensation),and while he could have gone to the District Central to negotiate, his pride prevented him. Presence of police and paramilitary on some occasions made the whole atmosphere a menacing space for residents. Three years have passed since the demolitions, and the provincial government has yet to devise a concrete resettlement and rehabilitation plan.
Initially when the tribunal was issuing injunctions, residents refused to accept rent cheques of PKR 15,000 a month in lieu of letting their house be partially or fully demolished. They knew their homes were worth much more and that cases were proceeding before the high court and the tribunals. After the SC vacated these injunctions, residents started accepting checks. These transactions were far from procedurally simple and filled with hurdles. The state never issued an official circular on the process and deliberately kept it obscure. There were no online transactions and residents had to make multiple trips. Multiple entitled families were left out and came to be known as the case of “missing IDS,” (identifications) a phrase to identify numerous exclusions from rent including unaccounted structures and families and cases where homes were marked for less than thirty percent destruction, but in reality, lost much more.
Nullah residents were persistent in their struggle–both in terms of street protest and legal cases. Activists of all backgrounds mobilized the struggle in a post covid era. A serendipitous mix of leftists from Awami Workers Party, Women Democratic Front, campaigns for women’s rights came together in various online and physical spaces with residents to create a robust campaign. It worked primarily because of its spirited nature with public meetings held with regularity in 2021. This was in the backdrop of an institutional malaise evident in the fact that no elected representatives took a stance against the demolitions. This political legal activism was perhaps why the residents got rental checks and a promise of resettlement. The government, compelled by the court, disbursed more than one billion rupees to mutasirin in August 2023. Those evicted in 2019 from the area around the Karachi Circular Railway (KCR) track were similarly situated but did not get rent checks. There has also been less pressure on the provincial government to resettle them despite a similar judicial order for it.
The state had never officially disclosed its plans and started to build roads on both sides of the nullahs. The NDMA then held a sham environmental impact hearing on restoration of these nullahs in late 2021, but did not engage in meaningful discussion with the residents on plans for the area and how these would enhance the greater public interest. They also did not solicit free, prior, and informed consent for it or incorporate the immense knowledge of the community for future nullah construction. In 2022, the city government reneged on its promise of rental support checks. They also did not share information with the residents who continually approached relevant departments about alternative land or compensation. In a contempt case filed by residents in August 2023, the Supreme Court summoned the Chief Minister on the last day of his tenure and ordered that rental support be paid. Exasperated that no acceptable resettlement plan had been filed by the state, the judges offered two options to affectees: a lump-sum market rate payment for 80 square yards (about twice the area of a parking space) or land and funds to build a home. The judges reiterated their 2021 comments that the provincial government could not use funds in another case involving mega builder Bahria Town Karachi to resettle nullah evictees as those funds were the property of the federal government (Contempt Application, 2023). Perversely, these funds were fines imposed on a property tycoon for illegally acquiring farm and forest land in the city’s northern fringe –fines for the elite capture and financialization of rural land to compensate the victims.
Along the rural edges of the city and the M-9 Highway, elite gated communities have popped up in the last decade. There are almost 150 such gated communities that have replaced farms and pastures, and are gradually intruding into protected Kirthar National Forest. One of the most notorious ones is Bahria Town, which is more than three times the size of Manhattan; DHA City is 47 square kilometers (about twice the area of JFK Airport), ARY Laguna DHA City is spread over 60 acres, and Airports Security Forces (ASF) City 3,000 acres. Geographer David Harvey calls this the rubric of accumulation by dispossession that is, commodifying and privatizing land, forcefully expelling peasants, suppressing rights to the commons, and converting collective, traditional, customary land rights to private property rights (Harvey 34-35, 2007).
In May 2018, the Supreme Court found that government departments that oversee housing and land had flouted land acquisition law to acquire agricultural land for a powerful real estate corporation, Bahria Town. However, a year later, a new bench of the Supreme Court, exceeding its limited mandate to implement the 2018 order, regularized these illegal transactions by ordering Bahria Town to pay PKR 460 billion over seven years in exchange for the acquisition of 16,896 acres of village land. Locals claim Bahria Town has since occupied 50 thousand acres, and is now intruding into Kirthar Forest, which UNESCO recognized as a protected area in 1975. These concrete jungles have devastated the ecosystem of the area, its rivers, tributaries, mountains, and grossly damaged sustainable forms of rain fed and tube well agricultural systems that local Baloch and Sindhi who identify as indigenous peoples relied on for over a hundred years.
Harvey refers to colonial and neocolonial processes of “appropriation of assets,” as “the monetization of exchange and taxation” and the “accumulation of national debt” as part of this dispossession (Harvey 34-35, 2007). Unsurprisingly, Pakistan is borrowing heavily from international financial institutions (IFIs). The Asian Development Bank (ADB) agreed to fund a thirty-nine-kilometer road (the Malir Expressway) connecting Karachi to these gated societies on the M-9, ostensibly to boost their real estate value. In October 2022, two farmers petitioned the Bank and argued the road did not improve connectivity, was being built on a riverbank, would damage the ecosystem, and would displace indigenous farmers and pastoralists. Since neo-liberal institutions like the ADB do not want to be associated with bad projects, the ADB retracted its funding. Over the last three decades, IFIs have responded with a whitewashed form of laissez-faire to criticism of the economic devastation states in the Global South suffer to comply with the terms of IFI loans. While co-opting the language of human rights—civil society and capacity building, governance and transparency, institution building, and safety nets—IFIs are committed only to the bottom line monetization of all trade and land, reduction in social welfare, and increased taxation of the people.
To protect their image and investments, the World Bank revised its social and environmental standards in 2018. With their Pakistan portfolio at $14.8 billion, the state is compelled to take the World Bank’s recommendations seriously. In 2022 GoS (with an $838 million investment just in Karachi) drafted a rehabilitation and resettlement policy inspired by the Bank's Environmental and Social Standard 5 titled, “Land Acquisition, Restrictions on Land Use and Involuntary Resettlement.” The consultation process on this policy was rushed and done more to appease foreign lenders than to demonstrate an actual commitment to resettlement. This was evident as the policy was not law, meaning it would be selectively applied and not retrospective and hence inapplicable to the evictions in Gujjar and Orangi Nullah. This lip service to social rights of evictees is being done as IFIs fund projects that destabilize rural economies and increase climate vulnerability and migrations. The Malir Expressway (MEX)—a project that could be an unmitigated climate disaster—is just one example. Another example is the World Bank funded Left Bank Outfall Drain in the upper part of the Indus Deltawhich since its poorly planned construction in 1999 failed at its original purpose of drainage and has exacerbated the effects of flooding most recently in the 2022 monsoon rains. The World Bank is now lending to rehabilitate damaged infrastructure in areas affected by these 2022 floods. Other famous business interests were The National Logistics Cell and the Frontier Works Authority, both parts of the military-business (milbus) complex. They were in line for mega contracts for new roads and nullah work after they had been cleared of the so-called encroachments. According to Dr. Ayesha Siddiqi, these milbus entities operate outside of the defense budget and state accountability mechanisms and are a source of private financial prowess for the institutions and their high level personnel.
Implicit in neoliberal economic practices is the use of law as an expression of class power. The Supreme Court in the nullahs case obfuscated the degrees of legal tenure people possessed and lumped all low income properties as encroachments enabling their violent eviction. The court did not interrogate the real cause of city flooding in 2020 and falsely blamed residents. In Gadap, a judicial bench with the limited mandate to simply implement a 2018 decision of the apex court finding the land transactions irregular ended up facilitating and regularizing these same irregular land deals in 2019. The police filed false terrorism complaints against people defending their land in Gadap. Orangi and Gujjar Nullah residents who participated in the first protest against demolitions still face criminal charges for exercising their right to peaceful protest, with many protestors detained at a June 2021 protest. In addition to this repressive state apparatus—policing and false criminalization—the state rolled back ameliorative laws protecting people’s rights over land. The state is ignoring and failing to implement the Sindh Katchi Abadi Act 1987 and the Sindh Gothabad (Housing Scheme) Act 1987 that give retroactive legal tenure and regularize katchi abadis (informal settlements) in villages. Villages recognized under colonial era surveys are being displaced. Agricultural leases that were by law and practice renewed as long as farmers were greening the land are being canceled (Notification, 1975). Game watchers who prevented trespassing and hunting in Kirthar forest now condone builders entering forest land for construction as well as sand and gravel mining in riverbeds. The state also became complicit in various forms of economic and social violence—blocking small dams to harm farming, enclosing commons, using cameras to surveil and curtail movement in general (but especially harmful to women pastoralists), and bribing big landlords to sell communal land at the expense of landless harvesters and non-propertied women herders.
In the rest of the rural areas of Sindh province, economic dispossessions have exacerbated the effects of climate change and led to waves of migrants. With the evictions of 2021, and the erasure of regularization laws, migrants cannot hope to find affordable housing in the city. Climate justice and housing justice are entwined issues, and so the state is deepening marginalization by hacking away at housing rights and allowing anti-environmental projects without the free and informed consent of the people. This is happening in the backdrop of IFI lending, casting a dent on the public exchequer, without a holistic evaluation of their portfolios which have a history of violating people's rights.
It takes an enormous amount of political mobilization and legal work to keep up with the assaults on the most vulnerable, harm to nature, and erasure of culture. There are problems with resources. There are few legal aid societies that could challenge mega displacements in courts and other fora. It takes resources to bring people to protests so they can visibilize their struggles. Unless strong community and women led sustained movements are raising awareness about the issues in the media and protesting, it is unlikely the courts will be responsive. Moreover, resistance in a state veering madly into neo liberal economies meshed with existing military monopolies and hegemonic systems of economic management, will have to be creative and forge more authentic unities. It requires a lot of vigilance to keep track of new infrastructure projects and their environmental reports (or lack thereof as in the case of Jauhar Chowrangi flyover), let alone take action against them if these appear harmful. With funding coming from banks, it’s not just local courts that are capable of dispensing justice but international mechanisms as well and it would take a lot of labor to cover all bases for proper defense of environmental and economic rights. One modest win before the Asian Development Bank did not mean the Malir expressway project was halted. Since the high court has not issued an order, its status remains up in the air and activists are now working on trying to stop the demolition of a heritage Baloch library that is in its way. Although evictees of the nullahs had victories, tangibles as well as promissory, lawyers and activists are far from done and there are numerous constitutional and procedural issues to sort out before a rehabilitation order is justly implemented and can even be claimed as justice done for people. Education City, a new project of elite capture of farms and pastures, is looming like the sword of Damocles making preservation of green spaces and indigenous rights extremely challenging.