Graveyard encroachment: Building homes on bones

Save Graveyards Movement raises voice against land grabbers.

PESHAWAR:

The living are not the only ones troubled in the city of Peshawar. The dead have their own reasons to be insecure.

Some of the disgruntled citizens have launched a movement against land grabbers who are encroaching on graveyards for construction purposes.

The movement is going to begin with a protest in the front of the Peshawar Press Club (PPC) on Monday. The organisers say that the movement was launched following an increase in land grabbing incidents in cemeteries around the provincial capital. “A cemetery is like a genealogical tree, where one can trace history of his family,” said Azhar Ali Shah, convener of Save Graveyards Movement. A year ago, he had filed a civil case against encroachers who had demolished some graves in his ancestral Zargarabad Cemetery in the local court.  “Earlier, I had not taken any action against these people, although when they ventured into the local graveyard, I took some photos and approached the court demanding that this construction be declared illegal,” he said. He added that people associated with seven other cemeteries have also joined him to launch the Save Graveyards Movement.

Azhar said that Rehman Baba Cemetery, the largest graveyard in the city, was originally spread over an area of 198 acres, but now has been reduced to only 74 acres. Encroachers have grabbed more than half of the cemetery’s land and the situation is the same across the city.  He said that the value of the grabbed land in this graveyard is around Rs10 billion, with the price per marla (21 square metres) being around Rs 1 million.

Azhar explained that as most of the graves are not visited regularly, land grabbers make enclosures around them, claiming to protect these graves, but once the walls are completed, they convert the enclosures into houses. “They dump construction material over the graves to conceal them.”

He said that through their movement, they were making three demands to the authorities. Firstly, they should construct boundary walls around existing graveyards to limit encroachments. “Also, the authorities should imposed section 144 on digging and all kinds of construction in cemeteries except for graves, and the government should allocate land for new graveyards in line with the increasing population,” he said.

Abdul Samad, general secretary of the movement, said that this was a serious problem for most of the citizens, “Currently, a majority of the poor do not even own a two marla house and live on rent, so how can they purchase land to bury their dead?”

He alleged that the district government itself was responsible for constructing a road inside the Zargarabad cemetery a few years ago. “Construction of a road on cemetery land, which falls under Waqf property, is in violation of the law”.



Published in The Express Tribune, June 19th, 2011.