Land and violence

There is much outrage over the Supreme Court’s decision of June 14 in which the bench declared the leases of more than 10,000 houses fake with a stroke of a pen. Many lawyers have provided legal commentary on the decision, and experts have stressed upon the various kinds of paperwork and regularization mechanisms – but this issue can never be resolved in the courts or the chambers.

Karachi came to prominence during the British era, when our former masters realized the importance of its port. Since then, people started pouring into the city, initially from other areas of Sindh which was easily managed by the Karachi Metropolitan Authority. After 1947, the inflow increased exponentially, and the young state of Pakistan was unable to facilitate the new inhabitants.

Under those circumstances, people were forced to find shelter in various kinds of informal settlements. While a few of them found shelter in government quarters and barracks, most were forced to live in tents wherever they could find vacant land. Desperate times required desperate measures, and the authorities had no option but to start regularizing these informal settlements. As this whole process was being carried out without any planning, corruption became an inherent part of the regularization process and mafias started to emerge in the city. These groups were not limited to providing land but also basic amenities to these settlements.

With rapid industrialization of Karachi, laborers from all over the country also started entering the city but neither did the government pay any attention to the housing needs of these workers nor were the industries asked to provide them with any shelter. There was enough vacant land in the city which started to be informally sold or rented out to the poor working-class migrants. When the land started to become scarce and the real-estate business started to emerge, politics, ethnicity and other social factors started an interplay in this lucrative business. The first ethnic riots that broke out in the city after the defeat of Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah in Ayub Khan’s controversial elections were also related to the tension that different ethnic groups were feeling due to competition with regard to basic resources, especially land.

The rulers deliberately started ignoring the problems of Karachi, once the capital was shifted to Islamabad. On the one hand, this affected the people living in the city badly but on the other hand it further helped certain groups expand their business. Since then, Karachi has constantly witnessed violence; these tensions were directly related to the mass inflow in the city on the one hand and the lack of resources and planning on the other.

During the 70s and the 80s, the city experienced mass migration from Bangladesh and Afghanistan simultaneously. Vested power interests and corrupt officials used this opportunity to make money out of their miseries and both migrants were informally settled in District West of Karachi, which turned into one of the biggest slums of the world. Karachi experienced extreme ethnic and sectarian violence and riots in the 80s – and all of this was directly related to land. With formal authorities unable to provide people with resources, these riots were the direct result of the competition between different ethnic and sectarian groups and the mafias associated with those groups.

In the 90s, when the MQM emerged as a strong power in Karachi, it tried to take over the informal control of the resources from all the mafias and other state institutions which were now deeply involved with land and other resources of Karachi. Similarly, the PPP, ANP and the other parties tried to take over control in those areas where they had the power. The violence this city experienced in the 90s was a result of fierce competition mainly between the MQM, PPP and federal state authorities over the resources of Karachi. It is precisely this reason that a whole variety of land distribution and regulation agencies emerged in this city.

When we entered the new millennium, the land cliques had already started transforming themselves into builder and construction companies and they started using various parties and state officials for acquiring and selling land, plots and projects. It was during Naimat Ullah and Mustafa Kamal’s era that the development thesis gripped Karachi and, enjoying full support from the center, they focused all their energies into construction and real estate. The vision of turning Karachi into Dubai helped builders and construction companies make exponential profits.

The new game had begun, and every power wanted to invest in Karachi’s land and real-estate sector. After Musharraf’s regime, the MQM lost its hegemony over Karachi but the game of land investment could not be stopped. All the conflict and violence that had gripped the city since 2007 was directly related to land acquisition and real estate projects. A perfect example of this is Katti Pahari, where a double road was constructed by cutting a hill into two halves. This scheme raised the real-estate value of the area, and we all witnessed the subsequent clashes after that. State authorities, political parties, gangs, etc all were fighting over every piece of land in Karachi. China cutting became a new buzzword along with target killing in this city – but despite all the violence, plazas and projects continued to come up in the city.

When considerable land was acquired, the state was pressured to initiate an operation in those areas that were bought or regularized. One needs to see this process not with the lens of a conspiracy but in light of the economic benefits these companies pursued at different times. When they needed land, they needed gangs and parties, and the competition between the parties and the gangs led to the violence. However, the same parties and gangs became a hurdle in attracting investment in the next phase. No one would have invested in Naya Nazimabad if Katti Pahari had still been a battlefield.

After the elimination of these gangs and parties, new projects have constantly been emerging in Karachi, attracting huge investments, from all over the country, especially from overseas Pakistanis. Karachi’s real estate is acting like a stock market, where you can find 100s of buildings and projects, in which houses and flats are lying vacant, despite huge investments. The game has reached a level where even a salariat class professional cannot afford to buy a two-room apartment in any established locality of the city.

All of this is being built on an urban mentality of development, where every middle-class Karachiite has a fetish to see Karachi turned into Dubai or Bangkok. Old areas inhabited by the working class – like Liaquatabad, Orangi and Lyari – are a big hurdle in the completion of this vision as these areas lie in the heart of the city. In my humble opinion, it is this development fetish which played the role in not only cancelling the leases of the residents living near the Gujjar and Orangi Nullahs and completely neglecting the fact that these houses are not being demolished to clean the nullahs but also in constructing a 30 feet wide road approved by the Sindh government and KMC, which has never been part of any master plan of Karachi.

And the Sindh government also should not hide behind the Supreme Court order, as the KMC under the Ministry of Local Bodies incorporated the plan of a 30 feet road on both sides of the nullah cleaning project and again it was the KMC’s officials who made these leases look unauthentic in the eyes of the court. We see Bilawal Bhutto Zardari showing sympathy for the affectees in public on the one end, while the Sindh government and KMC work towards demolishing these working-class neighborhoods to construct 30 feet wide roads.

The problem is not the Gujjar and Orangi Nullah but the fact that this new trend will not stop here. Powered by the development fetish of the middle class, the comprador parties, corrupt state officials and greedy construction giants this trend will continue to demolish every working class and lower middle-class colony in this city, in one way or another.

Karachi may have been changed for a certain class, but the oppressed classes are only witnessing state violence instead of other forms of violence, as the land business has become sophisticated.

Email: k.a.nayyer@gmail.com