RAWALPINDI: Modern times are stamping their own mark on the historic Liaquat Bagh, by encroaching upon its grounds.

That is how many citizens view the construction of a bus station there for the Punjab government’s Metro Bus Project worth Rs 38 billion. In reality, the project would only be expanding the “official encroachment” of Liaquat Bagh’s land, that began some 16 years ago.

In 1998, Wasa, the water and sanitation agency, occupied more than five kanals of the parkland to park its water tankers and two years later the Rawalpindi police raised its Rescue 15 facility over two kanals.

Metro Bus Project director and Rawalpindi Commissioner, Zahid Saeed, said the bus station would be adjacent to Rescue 15 office, and the memorial Independence Wall.

“We will ingress not more than three or four feet of the park on the Liaquat Road side. The Independence Wall, raised in 2006, is not even a part of the park, which is in no danger,” he told Dawn.

“There was a proposal to put the construction material inside the park, like it was done in some parks in Lahore, but we rejected it,” he said reassuringly.

In any case, land of other parks will be used to store the construction material, but the provincial government would “refurbish them within 10 months” of the completion of the Metro Bus Project, he said.

Developed over 30 acres during the British Raj as Company Bagh, the park gained its post-independence historic significance, and its current name, after Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, fell to an assassin’s bullets while addressing a public meeting there on 17 October 1951.

Shortly after the tragedy, a hall was built in the park ground in his memory.

The Pakistan National Council of the Arts managed the cultural monument until 2006, when it passed into the hands of the National College of Arts and the Rawalpindi Development Authority.

A year later, the Muslim world’s first woman prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in a mysterious gun-and-bomb attack as she left Liaquat Bagh after addressing an election rally.

Her father, hanged former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is accused of perpetrating massacre on a rally of opposition National Awami Party at the same place in 1973.

In 2010, their Pakistan People’s Party sought to raise a memorial at the site for Benazir Bhutto but the then PML-N government in the Punjab said not more than a 30x30 feet plot could be spared for the purpose.

Irate PPP workers, however, allege that to accommodate the commercial plaza of a local PML-N legislator, the Rawalpindi Development Authority had reduced much of the size of a bus stand on the Sixth Road.