INTO the third decade of the 21st century in Pakistan, control over agricultural land remains a big determinant of power relations. But the latter do not enjoy the same unchallenged power of a generation or two ago. Pakistan’s contemporary landed elite includes many segments, of which rural landlords is only one.

Redistribution of land in rural Pakistan remains the most potent single measure to improve the well-being of millions of small and landless farmers as well as non-agricultural segments in the agrarian sector. Yet a meaningful land reform agenda for our time will remain incomplete if it is not extended beyond agriculture to the economy at large, and urban areas in particular. If the proverbial peasanty was dominated by rural landlords in yesterday’s Pakistan, most of the working masses in today’s Pakistan are subject to a new class of landlords that we ignore at our peril.

Millions displaced from agriculture have migrated to metropolitan Pakistan over the past few decades. Most are served by an underground housing market that functions in liminal spaces. The political and intellectual mainstream reduces squatter settlements and slums to the moniker of ‘illegal’, thus facilitating regular forced evictions of working families. Take, for example, demolitions of katchi abadis in Orangi/Gujjar Nullah and sector G-11 in Karachi and Islamabad respectively which have found some space in mainstream news.

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The overwhelming emphasis on legality masks the fact that even evicted workers do eventually find alternative places to live. Their desperation to find affordable land on which to squat even temporarily is the raison d’être of the slumlord. Mass settlements like Sohrab Goth and Maira Abadi on the outskirts of Karachi and Islamabad respectively are run by these slumlords. For the most part, the latter do not formally own lands to which they issue title; the stamp papers on which agreements are made are effectively underwritten by police, utility companies and municipal authorities who take a cut of the monthly payments offered by workers for land and amenities. It is a myth that squatters or slum dwellers build and occupy their homes for free. They pay for everything, slumlords acting as mediators between the informal state and the squatters.

It is a myth that squatters build their homes for free.

About half of urban Pakistan is at the whim of the slumlords and state personnel that patronise this parallel housing market of some 50 million people. Pro-people planners and architects have called for regularisation of katchi abadis for decades. This is not rocket science and would form the central plank of a land reform agenda for urban Pakistan.

The imperative of such an agenda becomes even more obvious in the context of the gated housing schemes that now litter our physical landscape. As cities expand into the country, millions of acres of agricultural and grazing land are transformed into real estate. Small and landless farmers and pastoralists are dispossessed while bigger agricultural landowners willingly choose to sell their land to developers and/or themselves diversify and invest in housing development.

Real estate magnates are formally private operators, but a large number of them rely on and share benefits with state personnel. While allotting land to judges, generals and civil servants is a state policy that can be traced to the colonial period, the systematic creation of real estate corporations either run by or heavily mediated by uniformed state personnel has reached new heights over the past two to three decades.

Real estate magnates maintain relations with moneyed classes of Pakistanis both at home and abroad. It is these classes who invest billions in the real estate sector. An increasing number of these real estate magnates now participate in formal political contests or fund them, meaning that this new class of urban landlords now accompanies rural landowners in elected assemblies.

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New landlords are also grabbing virgin lands, coastal areas and mountainous zones across rural Pakistan with rich endowments of resources. There is no fundamental difference between the illegalities of landlords who cater to the rich as opposed to those who cater to the working poor. Slumlords do not go out of business when katchi abadis are razed to the ground — they are in fact empowered further. Meanwhile, real estate magnates continue to make merry as those of us who crave and purchase plots in gated housing schemes celebrate our social status as clients of the new landlords.

A land reform agenda to serve both the proverbial peasant and the burgeoning working masses in urban Pakistan will serve progressive political and economic ends. It would be far more meaningful than most of the policy initiatives that both domestic and foreign elites have been thrusting down our throats for decades. The question, as ever, is how to generate the will to make such a land reform agenda into reality.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, November 12th, 2021