KARACHI: There was panic and chaos at the Gulberg Town point of the Gujjar Nullah on Wednesday morning. The area residents who had come out on to the streets the night before to protest after having heard announcements telling them to vacate their homes ahead of the anti-encroachment drive the next morning had realised that it was of no use.

Accepting their fate they were gathering their belongings from what had been home for them for over 40 years as fast as the monstrous yellow bulldozers arrived.

Nazia was making breakfast for her husband, four little children and old mother-in-law in their 2x4-foot kitchen. She had just placed the saucepan with water for tea on the stove when she heard the engines. Simultaneously the walls of their little home shook. Her husband ran out screaming from their bathroom almost as big as the kitchen. Seconds later the bathroom walls and roof were flattened and turned into rubble. The 18 residents of the 70-yard home ran outside begging the bulldozer operator to stop. They were joined by the rest of the neighbourhood people. The bulldozer did stop then but it didn’t back off.

Breakfast was forgotten. Everyone went back to gathering their belongings as they begged the bulldozers to at least have the heart to let them pack up. The police was ready too. They stepped in between the people and the demolishers.

“I have lived here for 16 years. I came here as a new bride, I had my children here,” Nazia told Dawn. She said she shared the home with her husband’s two brothers’ families. Soon Nazia’s mother arrived to ease her burden somewhat. She gathered her daughter’s four children to take to her place along with whatever of their things she could carry.

Residents claim they have lived there for over 40 years

The mother, Siddiqa, couldn’t hold back her tears when she saw the state of her daughter’s home. “She works as a maid and her husband, Asif, drives a rickshaw. They barely earn enough to not go to bed on an empty stomach. Where will they find another place to live?” she said.

Homelessness

“My own place is in the colony up ahead. We have also been told that we are encroaching. When they raze my home too, all of us will only have the road to live on. We will be absolutely homeless,” she cried.

Rashid Ali, a driver, living there watched Siddiqa take away her daughter’s children with her. His eyes pooled up. “My neighbours are lucky. They have someone to share their pain with them. This is a time when even your relatives turn their backs on you. I have simply no place to go after they bulldoze my home,” he said quietly.

Fazal Abbas, another rickshaw driver living there, asked how come their dwellings were illegal when they have regular gas and electricity connections with meters installed, too. “My parents paid Rs800 for this plot 40 years ago. Bit by bit they built this little home for us. They are gone now but this is the place with many memories for me. I grew up here,” he shared.

Mohammad Ahsan, a garment factory worker, was worried that he had missed work. “I don’t want to leave my family alone but I also don’t want to lose my job,” he said. “Already we are facing the coronavirus pandemic. Then there were the rains and flooding, and now this!”

“It was not that long ago that we pulled out two dead bodies, one of them a child, when this nullah overflowed,” said 18-year-old Shahbaz Malik.

Naveed, a police constable doing duty there to protect the officials supervising the anti-encroachment drive, also had tears in his eyes. Hoping no one would notice, he looked away and used his sleeve to wipe away the tears. “I am also human. I understand the plight of these poor people. I too have children and grandchildren at home. I hate seeing the worried and tear-stained faces of these people’s children. But we also have our orders. We have to do our duty,” he said.

Syed Rahimuddin Pasha had come to watch what was happening. He said that he had been a resident of Block 12 since he was a child. “We moved here near the brook in 1969. Yes, this was not a nullah at the time and there were only 16 houses here. This was a creek, a 100-foot-wide channel and the water which flowed in the form of a stream through here was clear. My friends and I used to come here to catch fish. Not for eating. They were the colourful ornamental kind,” he said.

“Then they built the Hub Dam and the water that flowed through here was blocked from up ahead. The clear stream became a nullah. Soon as people started coming here to build their houses, the channel became narrower. It is 30-foot wide this side and further up ahead it has shrunk to one foot,” he said.

Glancing across the road he pointed towards some two-storey high houses without exterior plaster or paint. “They are newly-built,” he said. “After another similar anti-encroachment drive which levelled the old illegal constructions there, we see these new constructions coming up. You know, if we build our house on legal land and want an electricity connection, we are asked all kinds of questions and we have to supply so much paperwork for it. But here the owners of these little homes built illegally on nullah land are only asked for a copy of their CNIC and Rs5,000 for the same. How is this even possible without backing or support?” he said.

Meanwhile, a couple of men from the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, who were supervising the drive from under a shade surrounded by police personnel, told Dawn that they were expecting all the “illegal residents” to vacate their homes and clear the area by the end of the day and that they’ll start to raze the constructions from Thursday.

“We brought in the machines and bulldozers to make our intent clear to them. We will start the real work tomorrow,” said one of them.

Published in Dawn, September 3rd, 2020