Precious land: Jehangir Park survives another bid to turn it into parking site

The park, once an important landmark in Karachi, now lies in ruins due to apathetic attitude of officials.

KARACHI:

A large picture of a lush green park covers one wall of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s (KMC) parks and horticulture department. The picture shows beautiful courtyards covered in greenery and laced with trees of different varieties.

You will not believe this is what the department plans for the Jehangir Park if the administration is successful in realising its plan to convert Saddar into a pedestrian zone.

The current sorry state of the park, however, really puts the picture into perspective. The barren mud ground, rusting iron bars marking the boundary and a broken down fountain that sits at the centre impress the sad history of one of the most important landmarks of the city.

Last week, a ceremony was held at the Jehangir Park in which the Governor of Sindh Dr Ishratul Ebad Khan, Karachi Commissioner Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui and Karachi Administrator Rauf Akhtar Farooqui officially handed over the park and its neighbouring parking sites to a liaison committee involved in combatting crime. The move would have done nothing to improve the sorry state of the park.

The decision was derided by several rights organisations and NGOs who had demanded the government to stick to its plans to convert Saddar into a pedestrian zone.

“We were finally able to force the government to revisit its decision to use Jehangir Park only as a parking facility” said Dr Raza Gardezi, a member of NGO Shehri. “I don’t know why the government granted permission to convert the park into a parking facility, even though they have no mandate for it.” He added that a portion of the park will now be used as an office by the committee managing charged parking in Saddar.

For his part, the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) administrator Rauf Akhtar Farooqui also clarified that the corporation had not granted permission to convert the premises into a parking facility. “We never gave them permission to use Jahangir Park as a parking facility,” he stressed.  “According to the MOU, they will only maintain the parking sites at Zaibunnissa Street and Abdullah Haroon Road.” He added that the corporation will ask them to vacate the premises if they use Jahangir Park as a parking site.

About Jehangir Park

The park was gifted to the people of Karachi by a Parsi philanthropist, Khan Bahadur Behramjee Jehangirjee Rajkotwala, in the year 1893. Throughout its over 100-year history, the park served as a source of fresh air in the midst of an increasingly commercial district.

Jehangir Park was so popular among the citizens that it hosted several political rallies within its premises in the first decade after independence.

Over the last few decades, however, the condition of the park steadily grew worse while apathetic officials tried to mint money out of the expanse of land; sometimes trying to convert it into a parking facility while at other times using it as a commercial market for fruit vendors. The government looked the other way when 100-year-old trees were being cut in the park to facilitate these encroachments.

On April 5 2006, the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), deciding a suo moto case, had directed the provincial chief secretary to ‘ensure that no tree of Jehangir Park was cut down nor should the park be used for any other purpose.’ The direction had been passed to stop the City District Government Karachi from constructing a multi-storey parking plaza on the site.

Eight years have passed since that judgment and the park still wears the look of a deserted land, neglected by those meant to look after it and exploited by those who have slowly but steadily begun to encroach it.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 11^th, 2014.