In August last year, several people received an unexpected ‘call up notice’ by email or post from the National Accountability Bureau (NAB). It directed them to visit NAB’s complaint verification cell in Karachi on September 13 in person in connection with a complaint they had filed with the bureau. Around 40 people had filed a joint complaint in late 2020.

Over the subsequent months, many others followed suit on an individual basis. The complaints were almost identical: they alleged that Bahria Town Ltd had taken their life savings and not given them the properties they had paid for within the area where the Supreme Court had allowed the firm to develop Bahria Town Karachi (BTK). But Pakistan’s premier accountability body has only now — two to three years later — bestirred itself to take note of their complaint about a land scam almost unprecedented in scope. And yet, NAB is only one player in a sordid tale of corruption and malfeasance that leaves almost no institution, no governing authority, untainted. (DG NAB, Karachi, Javed Akbar Riaz, responded that the new NAB ordinance bars NAB officials from commenting on any ongoing inquiry.)

District Jamshoro, deh Mole. The Bahria Town wall snakes several kilometres across the landscape, in brazen violation of Supreme Court orders. It ends abruptly on a promontory overlooking Mole naddi down below. There is no telling where it will go, or how much land it will ultimately encompass. It could be a metaphor for BTK itself — open-ended and fluid, spreading wherever the patronage of an avaricious ruling elite enables it to. This, despite the Supreme Court judgment of March 2019 that allowed 16,896 acres for the project while making it legally binding upon Bahria to pay Rs460 billion in installments over seven years for the cost of that land.

On Nov 23, 2023, the Supreme Court declared the firm to be in default for having paid only Rs24bn out of Rs166.25bn (excluding applicable markup) that was due by then. The judgment authored by Chief Justice of Pakistan Qazi Faez Isa reads: “The entire balance amount has become due and payable. …Bahria Town’s excuse to stop payment was that it did not get the agreed acreage of land, which was a false pretext.” The court-ordered survey that was submitted that day had clearly exposed Bahria’s lie, having found it to be in possession of 3,035 acres in excess of 16,896 acres, ie nearly 18 per cent.

How did the real estate giant achieve this ‘feat’ while evading accountability for four long years? This report documents the cunning strategy that Bahria — abetted by powerful elements and corrupt authorities — employed to obfuscate the facts and create plausible deniability in its plans for BTK’s expansion. As a lawyer put it in a conversation with Dawn: “Unless this collusion is put an end to, Bahria and other unscrupulous players in the land business will continue to believe themselves above the law.”

A precis of two earlier Supreme Court judgments would be useful here for background. On May 4, 2018, the apex court in a landmark judgment had declared Bahria’s acquisition of thousands of acres of land in Karachi’s Malir district to be illegal and “void ab initio” — that is, void from the outset. [The brazen manner in which the law was trampled on to hand over the land to the private developer was detailed in Dawn’s ‘Bahria Town: greed unlimited’ on April 18, 2016.]

Pursuant to the May 4 judgment, an apex court bench headed by Justice Azmat Saeed was set up to implement it. On the implementation bench’s orders, Suparco, the national space agency, and Survey of Pakistan, the national mapping and land surveying government agency, carried out a survey of the area concerned. Based on their data, BoR Sindh submitted a detailed map, dated December 2018, to the court. This map marked areas in Bahria’s possession/ under its development in 2016 and those that were in its possession at the end of 2018; the total area came to 25,600 acres. Curiously enough, the implementation bench allowed Bahria — excoriated for its land grabbing by the court just the year before — the indulgence of demarcating the area the firm wished to purchase for developing BTK.

On March 2, 2019, the firm submitted two documents to the court in a civil miscellaneous application; it described one of them as the “initial proposed plan of BTK designed on land measuring 23,960 acres” and the other (Annex B) as a “plan containing the boundaries of the land actually in possession of [Bahria] and developed by [Bahria] measuring 16,896 acres … and which now comprises the final boundaries of [BTK] project”. It included an area of 9,385 acres marked in green which Bahria described as “consolidated land” and 7,510 acres marked in purple that it termed “land under process”. (This plan, based on the BoR map submitted in court, is referenced in the Nov 23, 2023 verdict which reads: “Bahria Town’s proposal of March 2, 2019 (CMA No. 1870/2019) was accepted by this court… .”)

The implementation bench gave its verdict on March 21, 2019, and allowed Bahria the 16,896 acres demarcated by the real estate firm itself to develop its housing project, for which it would pay Rs460bn over seven years as cost of the land.

Machiavellian tactics

First, let us consider the survey ordered by the Supreme Court on Nov 8 last year to “specify the land in actual possession of Bahria Town and if any additional land has been encroached by it …” As directed, the Survey of Pakistan submitted its findings to the bench on Nov 23. Of the 3,035 acres that Bahria occupies in excess, 2,222 acres lie in Jamshoro and 813 acres in Malir. Among Bahria’s arguments for not paying its land dues is that instead of 16,896 acres, the area for which it had agreed to pay Rs460bn, it was in possession of only 11,776.47 acres and could not sell/develop portions being used by utility providers and constituting goths (villages). Among these portions, three deserve particular attention — the K-IV project, the high-tension line area, and the land occupied by the goths. For they reveal how Bahria has tried to hoodwink the court.

The map that BoR Sindh submitted to the implementation bench in 2019, on which Bahria based its own site plan, also demarcates the acreage used by the K-4 project, utility infrastructure and goths within that area; it can therefore be used as a reference to gauge Bahria’s recent claims. The land for the K-4 project in the entire 25,600 acres is listed by BoR Sindh as being 335.39 acres. But Bahria has claimed, in the context of only 16,896 acres, that the land for K-4 comes to 345.75 acres. In fact, GPS data shows that the K-4 land on the 16,896 acres comes to 155 acres at most. And, contrary to its claim, Bahria has constructed three major roads on this land as well, including nine plus acres taken up by a section of the main artery, Jinnah Avenue.

There also appears to be a gross discrepancy in the area set aside for high-tension lines. The BoR Sindh map shows these taking up 38.3 acres whereas Bahria claims it is 303.9 acres.

Next, consider the goths, home to indigenous communities that have been engaged in barani (rain-fed) agriculture or livestock rearing for generations in the area where BTK is coming up. The Bahria juggernaut has upended the lives of the local people in ways the urban population of Karachi cannot even imagine. During 2015 and 2016, when ‘encounter specialist’ Rao Anwar was SP Malir, much of the land was taken over through coercive tactics by the police. These included raids, destruction of property, threats of fake terrorism cases against them, etc. As for the current situation, one village that was included in Bahria’s 2019 site map, Haji Ali Mohammed Gabol goth, is spread over 58 acres and has been walled off. Another, Ali Dad goth, did not appear in that site map, but it too has been encircled. The two together add up to 103 acres; Bahria is claiming over 130 acres in excess of that for the area it says it could not develop on account of the goths.

Outrageously enough, Bahria appears to be excluding the 2,236 acres of roads within the area from being counted as land in its possession. The roads, amenities and infrastructure within a scheme are integral to it and are the responsibility of the developer. (In the case of BTK, the Malir Development Authority had done Bahria the unprecedented ‘favour’ of constructing the major roads, culverts and bridges inside the massive project at its own cost, as confirmed to Dawn by senior MDA and local government officials.)

In fact, in the May 4, 2018 judgment, Justice Faisal Arab applied the 60-40 ratio of land allocation for residential and non-residential use stipulated in the Karachi Building & Town Planning Regulations (section 20-4.1.3.) to calculate the worth of 7,068 acres that Bahria had acquired through an illegal process of consolidation and exchange in its initial phase. Accordingly, the honourable judge excluded 40 per cent “on account of its utilisation for amenities such as roads [etc] and other public places etc, [while] the remaining 60 per cent area ie 4,241 acres could safely be presumed as marketable land… .”

Bahria’s sense of entitlement over the land it covets for BTK was manifestly clear when a Dawn team visited the area in November to undertake its own mapping exercise. In deh Mole, Jamshoro district, they came across the Bahria wall mentioned at the beginning of this report. GPS data shows it extends well beyond what the official, court-ordered survey has mapped — 5.3 kilometres further, to be exact. Not far away, atop a hillock also located in deh Mole, is an empty, one-room building with BTK emblazoned on it and which is used by BTK watchmen during warmer months. Close to this location, the team was accosted by Bahria Town Security vehicles, their horns blaring. A guard stepped out of one and asked “on whose authority” the team had come; meanwhile the driver began to record the encounter with his phone. When a team member asked whether the land was part of BTK, he nodded and told them to leave. The vehicles continued to follow the Dawn car as it proceeded towards the exit.

An excerpt from the March 21, 2019 SC judgment bears mention here. “BTLK [Bahria Town Limited, Karachi] has no right, title, interest or possession of any other land owned by the government of Sindh other than 16,896 acres…The government of Sindh and the MDA [Malir Development Authority] shall ensure that any land beyond this stands retrieved and no excess land shall be allowed to be occupied by BTLK. Any violation of this direction shall entail criminal action both against the functionaries of government of Sindh, MDA and the management of BTLK or whosoever is found responsible.”

Not one inch of the 16,896 acres fell within Jamshoro district. Just a few months after this verdict, Dawn in its report, ‘Bahria Town & others: greed unbound’ which appeared on Sept 12, 2019, exposed Bahria’s active ingress into the district through the means of satellite imagery. Astonishingly, a three-member Supreme Court bench on Oct 11, 2019 “expressed satisfaction over the payment being made by the Bahria Town management in connection with [BTK] and implementation of its decisions in letter and spirit.” — report in The News, Oct 12, 2019. The citadel of justice, it seemed, was unmoved by the incontrovertible evidence provided by satellite imagery of Bahria’s ongoing violation of its orders.

Dawn repeatedly contacted the Bahria Town Ltd management with questions about the firm’s claims to the Supreme Court last year as well as its violation of the apex court’s March 2019 order, but got no response.

Veil of secrecy

In the years that followed, the authorities not only turned a blind eye to Bahria’s activities but imposed a veil of secrecy over the well-connected real estate firm’s actions. Attempts to obtain certified copies of Bahria’s site map that was accepted by the implementation bench in March 2019, or maps submitted in court by BoR Sindh or information about whether Bahria was complying with the payment schedule, were met with stonewalling. Despite the fact this was clearly a matter of public importance, neither journalists nor lawyers could procure this information.

On Oct 10, 2022, the legal firm representing clients directly impacted by Bahria’s activities in Malir and Jamshoro filed an application alleging that Bahria was violating the relevant judgments, and asking for “details of all installments paid to date by BTKL”. It was returned by the registrar on the grounds that the matter was “sub judice”.

On March 31, 2023, lawyer Muhammad Haseeb Jamali, representing investors in BTK whose purchased plots fell outside the 16,896 acres and who were not being accommodated within that area as pledged by Bahria in court, filed a complaint with the office of the chief justice of Pakistan, then (now retired justice) Umar Ata Bandial. The complaint alleged that despite repeated applications, the court officers were not providing certified copies of the maps and documents filed during the apex court’s hearings into the case “under its suo moto jurisdiction”. An excerpt from the complaint reads: “…the court officers, in an arbitrary exercise orally refused to grant such copies without providing an official order or reasons for the same… It is a settled matter that the documents filed in Court form part of the public judicial records which are public in nature and the same are open to inspection and perusal by the public. That Order IX of the Supreme Court Rules deals with grant of such certified documents… .”

On April 27, 2023, the office of the Supreme Court registrar responded in writing to say that the application for “issuance of certified copy of maps of site/layout plan cannot be acceded to as the same pertains to maps of site/layout plan which were filed by Bahria Town and Suparco”.

Multiple sources, including at the SC itself, told Dawn that the record had been ordered to be sealed. And yet no written order exists to that effect. Verbal instructions alone appear to have sufficed to block access to the information — such is the chilling effect of anything involving Bahria.

Lawyer Abdul Moiz Jaferii told Dawn: “I fail to understand how there is any valid or legal basis to such an informal gag order. Courts do afford such confidentiality where the matter is of a sensitive nature; but the nature of sensitivity is reasoned out in the order directing it. What comes to mind is perhaps where valuable trade information is in dispute; or where the identity of minors or individuals unrelated to the dispute is at risk of exposure.

“Perhaps there was an above-board reason for such a confidentiality to be afforded to Bahria Town, after it had already been granted the extraordinary privilege of negotiating away its alleged criminality… . But the failure of stating that reason makes an already opaque and extraordinary process even seedier.”

In this information void, Bahria continued to expand unimpeded into Jamshoro. But this time around, instead of following its old modus operandi of consolidation and exchange that it had done in the first phase of BTK and which was found to be illegal by the Supreme Court in 2018, it used a more indirect strategy. With the backing of Sindh’s political bosses, it began harnessing the coercive power of the entrenched tribal culture in Jamshoro district, thereby creating distance between itself and those who owned the parcels of survey land in Jamshoro’s deh Mole, just across the Malir boundary.

This approach is detailed in Dawn’s ‘Bahria Town & others: greed unbound’. As always, a corrupt land bureaucracy was hand-in-glove. A local broker very familiar with the modus operandi told Dawn at the time: “…They’re taking the khataas [a khataa is an assessment of a property, including size and owner’s name, in the land record] and shifting them along with a chunk of surrounding state land. For example, if they take a 10-acre khaata they’ll show it as 100 acres in the record and place it over land near Bahria.” Then he added: “How do you think all the khataas of deh Mole are now in one corner?”

According to locals, Bahria was undertaking land clearance operations outside the 16,896 acres until a couple of weeks before the Supreme Court hearings in November 2023. When Dawn visited the area, several acres of barani land belonging to Adam Gabol goth near the Kalmati Roomi graveyard in Malir district had been recently cleared of vegetation by bulldozers.

Playing by its own rules

No discussion about obfuscation of facts would be complete without a mention of BoR Sindh, which continues to play by its own rules. In suo moto case No.16 of 2011, then Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Chaudhry had ordered the entire revenue record of Sindh to be digitised on account of the “rampant corruption and organised crime of land grabbing, particularly, regarding prime state land, and mismanagement/ forgeries in the revenue record… .” The outcome of that order was BoR Sindh’s much-vaunted Land Administration & Revenue Management Information System (Larmis), which cost billions of rupees to build. Initially, original land records and maps were readily accessible on the website to the public. Since several years, however, access has been severely limited and a number of links, including deh maps and microfilmed records, have been disabled — negating the very concept of transparency and making a mockery of the Supreme Court order.

A senior official who was a member of Sindh’s caretaker cabinet told Dawn that the previous provincial government stopped the digitisation process in 2012, and neglected to have the records authenticated by the district administrations as required in the second stage. “Within three months, we managed to get authenticated 70 per cent of whatever they’d digitised until 2012. The SC had also asked them to make a transparent allotment policy which they did not.”

Asked about the anarchy in land matters, he said: “[During the previous government,] the sub registrars and mukhtiarkars in Karachi would collect 600 to 700 million rupees per month for ‘upward’ distribution. They had a free hand. Even if someone’s land was legal, they would still charge according to the ‘system’ at the rate they had set, eg Korangi, Rs300,000 per acre. By transferring mukhtiarkars, we disrupted that system of collection.”

The order by CJP Qazi Faez Isa on the survey concluded in November 2023 found that the area encroached by Bahria in Jamshoro “includes 532.25 acres approved by Sehwan Development Authority [SDA] in the name of Bahria Greens @ BTK”. Former DG Hyderabad Development Authority (HDA) Mohammed Sohail, who is reportedly being investigated by NAB for fully facilitating Bahria to illegally acquire and consolidate land in Malir from 2013 onwards while he was DG MDA — and is known to have close ties with the PPP’s top leadership and Malik Riaz — allegedly played a major role in the gifting of land in Jamshoro to Bahria. (DG NAB, Karachi did not respond to Dawn’s question about what had become of this inquiry.) Two senior SDA officials, Ghulam Mohammed Kaimkhani and Munir Soomro, both of whom have far from stellar reputations, are said to have carried out Mr Sohail’s orders in Jamshoro for Bahria’s benefit.

Mr Sohail, a close relative of MQM leader Amir Khan, is an old hand at such shenanigans: while DG HDA he reportedly allotted to himself and some other senior government officials 29 high-value plots without any auction. His appointment to senior positions in various government organisations has been the subject of much litigation. Back in August 2016, the Supreme Court had ordered that his transfer to the MDA be suspended and he be transferred back to his parent organisation (KMC), but he was later once again repatriated to the MDA and appointed DG.

As for the two aforementioned SDA officials, Mr Soomro was removed as SDA DG by the SHC Hyderabad circuit bench in December 2009 after being accused of corruption, among other allegations. But he was once again appointed to the same post in 2014. Mr Kaimkhani has also been accused of corruption, including misappropriation of funds in Gulistan-e-Sarmast — Hyderabad’s flagship residential scheme or lower and lower-middle income families — while he was DG, HDA, as a result of which the scheme has yet to get off the ground, 14 years later.

However, SDA, or any other development authority for that matter, does not have the right to hand over state land to any developer. According to Section 10-A (2) (b) of the Sindh Colonisation of Government Lands (Amendment) Ordinance, 2005: “no land for commercial purpose shall be disposed of except by open auction at a price not less than market price.” The government holds state land in trust for the public, not to bestow upon whomever it favours. DG SDA Saeed Saleh Jumani did not respond to questions from Dawn about how the SDA’s actions could be justified.

It is pertinent to mention that the Supreme Court on Nov 28, 2012 had banned the Sindh government from issuing any lease, or effecting any allotment, transfer or mutation etc of government land. That was a significant setback for the planners of BTK. So, they found a way around it. On Sep 19, 2013, the Sindh Assembly passed the Sehwan Development Authority (Revival and Amending) Act, 2013 which gave SDA the power to consolidate land(a form of mutation). Exactly three months later, a similar clause was added to the Malir Development Authority Act, 1993. Both amendments were an attempt to outwit the Supreme Court by giving to the development authorities the power to consolidate land, something that BoR Sindh as a provincial government department could no longer do. But the May 2018 judgment put paid to these crafty manoeuvres. Bahria and its backers,therefore, decided to resort to a different modus operandi, that which has been playing out in Jamshoro district.

The victims of this massive scam likely number in the thousands. They include both local communities who once could not have imagined that their quiet existence would be thrown into turmoil by a real estate developer, as well as the many who have invested in this fraud and seen their life savings disappear in smoke. But it remains unclear whether Bahria’s owner or its top officials will ever be held to account. After all, in a predatory state, having amutually beneficial relationship with those in the very highest echelons of power virtually guarantees impunity.