Taking on encroachment

Around 20,000 residents of Chishti Nagar in Karachi have been protesting and clashing with the authorities over what they call an attempt to raze their legal houses under the guise of an illegal anti-encroachment drive. So far, the residents have protested outside the mansion of the provincial local government minister — on whose directions a momentary reprieve was provided before officials of the KDA returned with heavy machinery in their neighbourhood prompting locals to clash with them and their police escorts. The protests grew violent and a police van was torched while the cops resorted to crowd control measures to maintain order. The KDA says it is acting on the Supreme Court order to raze encroachments — whether extended shades of stores or entire housing colonies. The residents of the colony say that the KDA is taking liberty with the top court order, using it as a carte blanche to carry out operations in areas where they were never asked to intervene.

The issue of encroachments is a serious one. People in the country take the law for granted and feel that it is their right to occupy land which does not belong to them just so they can plant flowers outside their windows and then cry foul when they are found out. One direct consequence of such encroachment, it can be argued, is the liberty people have taken in the irregular development of many areas of the country, particularly Karachi. On the other hand, how prudent is it to render 20,000 people homeless on the pretext of anti-encroachment operations? Those who built a housing society by encroachment were in the wrong. But so are the authorities who never intervened when the society was being built. Such retrospective action will not right the wrongs of the past. The easiest escape is to regularise these societies now but the courts and these authorities must fix the system to prevent such situations from arising in their entirety. 

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2019.

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