Published December 19, 2025
DAWN
IT is a truism that Pakistan is an extremely class-divided society. From the proverbial village to the metropolitan city, the brutal reality of an anti-poor system stares us in the face, assuming we choose to open our eyes and look.
In late November, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) initiated a mass eviction in a sprawling katchi abadi sandwiched between the Bari Imam shrine and the President’s House. The abadi, known as Muslim Colony, has existed for at least five decades, and by conservative estimates was home to 20,000 working people, making it arguably the largest informal settlement in Islamabad.
Muslim Colony’s first-generation residents literally built Islamabad with their own hands, including the grand buildings on Constitution Avenue that overlooked their shanties. Over the years, a significant number of Muslim Colony residents became the drivers, gardeners, cooks and cleaners that sustain the ruling classes’ offices and homes.
As construction workers and service providers, katchi abadi dwellers are never ‘security risks’ — in fact it is their labour which explains the palatial lifestyles of Islamabad and Rawalpindi elites. But when push came to shove, the CDA and what seemed like most of Islamabad’s police force forcibly dispossessed Muslim Colony residents of their homes. Anyone who dared peacefully resist faced violent arrest and harassment.
And the courts? The evictees were principally protected by at least two stay orders, one issued by the Supreme Court in 2015 after another mass eviction of a katchi abadi in sector I-11 of the capital, and another more recent one issued by the Islamabad High Court after Muslim Colony residents approached it.
The eviction crews, led by highly educated CDA officers, treated the court orders as mere pieces of paper worth less than the cost of their printing. Perhaps we should not be surprised at the contempt of the bureaucratic apparatuses of the state for even the little relief provided by the superior courts to the working poor in this country — after all, ex-military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf once boasted that the Constitution is merely a piece of paper that can be ripped up and tossed into the proverbial dustbin.
Katchi abadi dwellers are never ‘security risks’.
Katchi abadis and their violent dispossession expose one of the most long-standing myths in Pakistan. They say ‘Islamabad the beautiful’ is the most liveable city in Pakistan, a planned metropolis of world-class standard. To begin with, the CDA and successive militarised hybrid regimes that back it have turned Islamabad into a concrete jungle, allowing all sorts of commercial activities in the Margalla hills while fronting relentless construction of big thoroughfares and plazas to serve the suburban rich. All this has made the city even less liveable for the mass of its working people alongside students who in-migrate to acquire an education.
Renting a home, let alone buying one, is virtually impossible for a working-class household in Islamabad. The city’s real estate was already more expensive than Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar or Quetta even before post-2000 heralded a great new land grab by property speculators and real estate developers. Apparently, all of this was and continues to be facilitated by the CDA, which has wilfully made a mockery of the 1960 Master Plan, occasionally making changes in zoning by-laws to provide post-facto cover to all sorts of profit-making abominations.
Meanwhile, katchi abadis have continued to proliferate because the working masses do, after all, need shelter. There are now approximately 50 settlements in Islamabad with a total population of more than 500,000. Another one of the myths that has been peddled by the CDA and others of its ilk — who want the labour of working people but refuse to acknowledge their basic needs — is that katchi abadi dwellers are free riders and land grabbers who are essentially harming the public good. This, quite simply, is a lie.
Katchi abadis come into being through fully-functioning informal housing markets in which cash exchanges hands between the users of land (katchi abadi residents), the administrators of land (government functionaries) and informal middlemen. The government functionaries are at the apex of this arrangement because they pocket a ‘monthly rent’ while always retaining the power to arbitrarily pull the plug and bulldoze the settlement.
This is what happened in Muslim Colony as it has happened in many other katchi abadis. And given the complete impunity of those who perpetrate so-called ‘anti-encroachment operations’, they will not stop. But working people will not be swallowed up by the ground either. It is they who make Islamabad what it is. Without them, it is but an ugly reflection of the larger class war waged by this country’s rapacious and shameless elite.
Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2025
In late November, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) initiated a mass eviction in a sprawling katchi abadi sandwiched between the Bari Imam shrine and the President’s House. The abadi, known as Muslim Colony, has existed for at least five decades, and by conservative estimates was home to 20,000 working people, making it arguably the largest informal settlement in Islamabad.
Muslim Colony’s first-generation residents literally built Islamabad with their own hands, including the grand buildings on Constitution Avenue that overlooked their shanties. Over the years, a significant number of Muslim Colony residents became the drivers, gardeners, cooks and cleaners that sustain the ruling classes’ offices and homes.
As construction workers and service providers, katchi abadi dwellers are never ‘security risks’ — in fact it is their labour which explains the palatial lifestyles of Islamabad and Rawalpindi elites. But when push came to shove, the CDA and what seemed like most of Islamabad’s police force forcibly dispossessed Muslim Colony residents of their homes. Anyone who dared peacefully resist faced violent arrest and harassment.
And the courts? The evictees were principally protected by at least two stay orders, one issued by the Supreme Court in 2015 after another mass eviction of a katchi abadi in sector I-11 of the capital, and another more recent one issued by the Islamabad High Court after Muslim Colony residents approached it.
The eviction crews, led by highly educated CDA officers, treated the court orders as mere pieces of paper worth less than the cost of their printing. Perhaps we should not be surprised at the contempt of the bureaucratic apparatuses of the state for even the little relief provided by the superior courts to the working poor in this country — after all, ex-military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf once boasted that the Constitution is merely a piece of paper that can be ripped up and tossed into the proverbial dustbin.
Katchi abadi dwellers are never ‘security risks’.
Katchi abadis and their violent dispossession expose one of the most long-standing myths in Pakistan. They say ‘Islamabad the beautiful’ is the most liveable city in Pakistan, a planned metropolis of world-class standard. To begin with, the CDA and successive militarised hybrid regimes that back it have turned Islamabad into a concrete jungle, allowing all sorts of commercial activities in the Margalla hills while fronting relentless construction of big thoroughfares and plazas to serve the suburban rich. All this has made the city even less liveable for the mass of its working people alongside students who in-migrate to acquire an education.
Renting a home, let alone buying one, is virtually impossible for a working-class household in Islamabad. The city’s real estate was already more expensive than Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar or Quetta even before post-2000 heralded a great new land grab by property speculators and real estate developers. Apparently, all of this was and continues to be facilitated by the CDA, which has wilfully made a mockery of the 1960 Master Plan, occasionally making changes in zoning by-laws to provide post-facto cover to all sorts of profit-making abominations.
Meanwhile, katchi abadis have continued to proliferate because the working masses do, after all, need shelter. There are now approximately 50 settlements in Islamabad with a total population of more than 500,000. Another one of the myths that has been peddled by the CDA and others of its ilk — who want the labour of working people but refuse to acknowledge their basic needs — is that katchi abadi dwellers are free riders and land grabbers who are essentially harming the public good. This, quite simply, is a lie.
Katchi abadis come into being through fully-functioning informal housing markets in which cash exchanges hands between the users of land (katchi abadi residents), the administrators of land (government functionaries) and informal middlemen. The government functionaries are at the apex of this arrangement because they pocket a ‘monthly rent’ while always retaining the power to arbitrarily pull the plug and bulldoze the settlement.
This is what happened in Muslim Colony as it has happened in many other katchi abadis. And given the complete impunity of those who perpetrate so-called ‘anti-encroachment operations’, they will not stop. But working people will not be swallowed up by the ground either. It is they who make Islamabad what it is. Without them, it is but an ugly reflection of the larger class war waged by this country’s rapacious and shameless elite.
Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2025
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
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