The War against Islamabad’s Katchi Abadis
The municipal government’s campaign to demolish working-class neighbourhoods has stunned communities and allies
A woman standing in the rubble of destroyed her house in Islamabad. Image: AFP
In October 2025, a team of surveyors sent by the Capital Development Authority (CDA) began a data collection exercise in Muslim Colony, one of Islamabad’s largest and oldest katchi abadis (informal settlements). Using local leaders as mediators, the CDA team assured the residents that there was no threat to their homes. While the red markings left by surveyors on the walls of their homes created apprehension, nobody in Muslim Colony was prepared for what was to follow.
On 12 November 2025, personnel from the CDA’s Enforcement Wing arrived in the colony and announced that residents had three days to pack up their belongings and leave. People were stunned, paralysed by disbelief. But when the bulldozers accompanied by heavy contingents of police arrived two days later, panic began to spread. According to eyewitness accounts, anyone who resisted, refused, or asked questions was roughed up or arrested.
Some tried to speak to the Director – a “highly educated” young woman from Lahore – who was personally overseeing the operation on site. In response, she told the residents they were “criminals” for “illegally occupying state land,” and that this “sinful” behaviour had rendered even their prayers illegitimate. Policemen who Ms. Director deemed “too soft” on the residents were publicly humiliated. Courageous community leaders who lay down in front of the bulldozers were dragged into police vans and whisked away. Drones were used to surveil residents’ activities. Late at night, police raided the homes of those identified as “shar-pasand” (troublemakers), who were dragged out of their beds to jail with no verbal or written intimation of the charges against them.
Barricaded on all four sides by shipping containers, with no access for ‘unauthorized’ persons (including reporters), Muslim Colony was transformed from a vast, well-developed settlement with paved roads, formal electricity, gas, and telephone connections, dozens of schools (public and private), dispensaries, shops, and numerous community spaces, into a field of rubble, where people’s life earnings, their childhood memories, their loved ones’ graves, their trees, animals, hopes, and dreams, lay broken around them. Children who had gone to school in the morning came back, still in their light blue uniforms with backpacks on their backs, to find their mothers maniacally rummaging through mounds of broken concrete that was once their home.
Since Muslim Colony was razed to the ground, CDA’s demolitions have expanded in scope and intensity. The villages of Saidpur, Noori Bagh, Dhok Dharial, and other settlements in the Nurpur Shahan area, all located at the foot of the Margalla Hills, have been raided, terrorised, and largely demolished. Dozens of homes in the G-6/2 Dhobi Ghat basti have been destroyed, with the remainder pending demolition. Residents’ National Identity Cards have been confiscated and used to coerce them into “voluntarily” demolishing their own homes. As I write, the CDA is bulldozing jhuggi (tent) bastis in the F-12 sector. More than 50,000 people have been dispossessed in the last five months alone. Every day, the demolitions continue, the destruction grows, the misery spreads.
Elsewhere in the city, katchi abadis are being demolished to remove “obstructions” to mega-development projects, such as the 10th Avenue. Rimsha Colony, a Christian-majority settlement that houses 20,000-plus domestic workers, sanitation workers, daily wagers, and service workers is said to be “encroaching on the Right of Way of the 10th Avenue.” When asked at a public hearing on the project’s Environment Impact Assessment Report if the residents of Rimsha Colony also had rights, the CDA representative failed to give a definitive answer.
While the city’s working-class settlements are being razed, their livelihoods are also under attack. Street vendors have been a particularly favourite target of CDA’s anti-encroachment operations (led by the same highly educated young Director who currently holds four other top offices in the city administration). The vendors are told they are “illegal” because they operate without licenses, but when they approach licensing authorities they learn that they cannot be issued licenses due to “orders from above.”
This is not the first, the worst, nor likely the last wave of attacks on Islamabad’s working classes. In 2015, the I-11 katchi abadi, home to over 25,000 casual labourers, street vendors, and mandi workers, was demolished in a grand operation by hundreds of paramilitary and police personnel, armoured vehicles, and tear gas shells. Dozens of named community leaders and political workers, and nearly one thousand “unknown miscreants,” were booked under the Anti-Terrorism Act for resisting.
And yet, the utter misery of recent days surpasses anything I have seen before in this city. The combination of hopelessness, misery, anger, fear, and the resulting desperation amongst the city’s poorest and most vulnerable populations are unmatched, both in scale and intensity. The question has come up again and again: Why haven’t people resisted?
Well, they both have and they have not. Some bastis – particularly Christian settlements which are larger in size and whose residents have successfully mobilized international networks – used collective action to repel demolition attempts. However, in many cases, the fear of losing even more than their homes, such as their family members (in the event of police action), their daily income, and their material belongings – has led to people acceding to the CDA’s dictates, packing up their belongings, and scrambling to find alternative accommodation. As I understand it, these fears have become overriding just because of the risks involved but also the absence of any real possibility of challenging state power in its current form, which is increasingly coercive, authoritarian, impersonal, reckless, and unaccountable.
The devastation of all forms of life in Islamabad – its vegetation, forests, and wildlife; its indigenous villages, culture, and history; its working-class inhabitants who built the city and keep it running; its rehris and khokhas – is painful even to witness, let alone experience first-hand. Adding salt to wounds is the normalization of this devastation, and its rationalization as “necessary” to move the country towards “progress.” The goal of a “modern” and “developed” Pakistan cannot be disputed; only the means may be (selectively) questioned.
This extractive, colonial model of development is not new to Islamabad. Since the city’s inception in the 1950s, “Islamabad, the Beautiful” was imagined as a “clean,” “well-planned,” “modern” city; indeed, the “only truly Pakistani city,” one “without any commitments to the past”. The joke about Islamabad being “five minutes drive from Pakistan” (referring to neighbouring Rawalpindi) reflects the themes of purity and separation that prevail in the imaginations of the city’s middle class.
Since Islamabad was built “from scratch,” workers were brought in to build the city, and to service its elite residents. Even though the founding architect-planner, Doxiadis had suggested “building for the builders”, this never happened. From its initial decades, the city’s low-income housing provision was not merely insufficient, it was swiftly taken over by middle-class government employees and allotted by CDA to various other groups. In the past five decades, there has been only one (deeply flawed) low-income housing project – the Model Urban Shelter Project (MUSP) in Alipur Farash. Without either state or market-provided housing for low-income groups, Islamabad’s working-classes had no option but to build their own informal settlements.
In line with this colonial imaginary, on January 6, 2026, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi unveiled plans for a massive new development project behind the Prime Minister’s office – a “blend of Shanghai and Manhattan,” emphasizing vertical growth, modern architecture and advanced commercial zones. This “new city” is not being built on ‘empty land’. It has been home to the people of Saidpur and Nurpur Shahan for centuries. The proposed area lies in the Margalla Hills National Park, a protected zone where deforestation and construction of any kind are strictly prohibited. But since development must take precedence, the land must be cleared of inconveniences like legality, history, and indeed, all forms of life.
Alia Amirali is a Left political worker and gender studies scholar based in Islamabad, Pakistan. She can be reached at alia.amirali@qau.edu.pk.