Daily Times

Katchi Abadi residents of I-11 were evicted from their mud houses in 2015 by the Capital Development Authority (CDA) with the help of law enforcement agencies. Some 25,000 residents became homeless and quite expectedly, had put up a strong resistance. Scholars-activists, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar and Ammar Rashid, were also a part of this movement. They even wrote a journal article on it, which has been recently published by the Third World Quarterly. The authors analysed dispossession and “financialisation” from their Islamabad experience. I am going to refer to this journal publication in today’s article and discuss a personal example of the bad property experience in the West.

Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. It had a population of 800,000 in 1998, which expanded to two million by 2017. Many new residents have come from the war-affected areas from the north of the country. Informal squatter settlements or Katchi Abadis have expanded in this “agrarian-urban frontier.” However, the 2015 eviction showed that the dispossession of the urban and rural poor was greatly increasing due to a state-backed spread of the gated housing schemes for the rich. Global capitalism is moving towards “financialisation,” where unproductive sectors, such as real estate and stock market equities, are dominating over the productive sectors of industry and agriculture. Development and dispossession are dialectical processes.

The publication used David Harvey’s concept of “accumulation by dispossession” and referred to the work of Anwar on Karachi to state that dispossession was an exercise in “value-grabbing” and appropriation of surplus by private profiteers and state functionaries.

Katchi Abadis are home to nearly half of the urban population of Pakistan; consisting of the urban poor. However, since powerful development agencies, like the CDA, generate most of their revenue through auctioning new lands to the housing schemes, eviction of the poor becomes an attractive option. In 2017-18, the CDA generated PKR 23 billion out of its total revenue of PKR 38 billion through the auction of land to developers, including the former site of I-11 Katchi Abadi. The poor are also evicted from the peri-rural areas due to the spread of gated communities there as we have seen in the case of Karachi.

Private and state developers use all the might of the state and its coercive powers to expand their housing societies

Real estate has become the most profitable sector in Pakistan with an estimated value between $700 to $1211 billion. There was an approximate growth of 118 per cent in this sector between 2013 and 2018. In the rest of the world, real estate growth has been between five to eight per cent but in Pakistan, it is more than 10 per cent. The average estimated return on real estate is 11.3 per cent annually in Pakistan. So, private and state developers use all the might of the state and its coercive powers to expand their housing societies. Much of the land is acquired through the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act of 1894.

There is a major dearth of housing for the poor. As far back as 2015, there was a housing backlog of nine million houses for the poor. Almost 63 million urban poor have no feasible housing option available, so they live in Katchi Abadis and are then evicted from there. This has been seen in the case of Orangi and Gujjar Nullah residents as well as Bahria Town’s march on the lands of people in the outskirts of Karachi in Sindh.

The authors pointed out affordability as the main issue as “56 per cent of existing formal housing units are a financially viable option for a mere 12 per cent of Pakistan’s population, comprising individuals with a monthly income of Rs 100,000 and above.” They cited the leading urban planner for the poor, Tasneem Siddique, to state that the “poorest 68 per cent of Pakistan’s population can only afford one per cent of the total supply of formal housing in the country. It is nothing short of a scandal…” This dire situation pushes the urban poor to live in Katchi Abadis where they live in uncertainty and are often evicted from.

The practice of dispossession is not exclusive to developing countries like Pakistan. It also takes place in the West. I am sharing a recent personal example. I own a small one-bed flat in London for the past 11 years. It is increasingly becoming an albatross around my neck due to the exceptionally bad handling by estate agents. I had many traumatic experiences in London while I was studying there. The kind of tormenting experiences I had while doing PhD in London are not usually shared by other Pakistani students. The way my British bank dealt with me (badly), was not experienced by other clients. How my estate agents continuously undermined my interests while managing my flat, other overseas landlords don’t face those issues. All the systems in the UK are decked against me.

I recently decided to sell my flat in London as I didn’t want to deal with its headaches any longer. My current estate agent would have earned a hefty commission should the flat be sold but the estate agent was strangely resisting selling my flat. I had to threaten my estate agent with legal ramifications and only then, did they introduce my flat to their sales team. It is not yet marketed. I do not know why my estate agent was interested in retaining my ownership of my London flat. Now, I have decided to donate it to some charity (preferably some Pakistani-based charity with a presence in London), so that I don’t have to deal with it anymore. In case, the charity option does not work out, I would simply transfer the ownership to my husband. What a roller-coaster of an experience!

I just want to highlight how the politics of dispossession takes place everywhere, whether in Pakistan or the West. The progressive forces need to unite against this injustice. The powerful forces pushing dispossession should be finally acted against.

The writer is an Islamabad-based social scientist. Email: fskcolumns@gmail.com