EDITORIAL: Barring a few exceptions most of the houses and shops now facing demolition were there for years as these were built in connivance with concerned officials and serviced with public utilities such as gas, water and electricity. Take the case of some 12,000 units built along Karachi’s Gujjar Nullah and Orangi Nullah. Many of the evicted house owners have established tenure through land leases. They built their houses in daylight, in full view of the concerned authorities. No wonder then their plight has drawn attention of relevant United Nations experts, who have urged Pakistan to stop evicting close to 100,000 people living along these two storm water drains. “These actions are taken by city authorities without adequate consultation with the affected residents, no relocation plan, and disparate and insufficient compensation for the displaced,” said UN rights experts in a statement issued in Geneva. They have questioned the legal basis for this “mass displacement” and asked what are the compensatory measures. To them what is clear is the “horrid effect on the displaced population, putting many poor families out on the street in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic”. Pakistan is a member of the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, but these experts find it incapacitated to ensure full compliance with international human rights standards governing relocations, evictions and internal displacements.

The residents living along these two storm water drains are not the only target of anti-encroachment drive; this is going on throughout the country. Of course there are cases of rich and mighty having usurped the government land, but that was invariably in connivance with the officials who were supposed to protect the government property. The question whether these officials have faced any action has no clear answer. If the so-called usurpers of government land can be thrown out of their homes, why no action is being taken against those who made money by looking the other way when the encroachments were taking place. One doesn’t see any serious move in that direction. Also, why the option to regularize the illegally occupied land – as was done in case of Bani Gala in the outskirts of Islamabad – is not being offered to the common defaulters? Accepted, that is not possible in cases like houses along the storm water drains in Karachi. But in quite a few other cases, the misuse of usurped land can be regularized – essentially because the net sufferers are not the persons and outfits that misused the land, it is the third party bona fide people who bought plots, houses and shops built on these tracts. And in cases where evictions are inevitable, the victims should be properly and timely compensated. There exist no statistics of the displaced owners of houses along the Gujjar and Oranghi nullahs who have been resettled by the government. But we do know that at some places the affected had strongly protested against demolition of their houses and shops, and were dealt with, with sheer force by the police. No wonder the UN experts have taken note of these arrests and branded it “intimidation and unlawful detention.”

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021