“My husband, Ghulam, used to put a stall with samosas outside Empress Market. Last time when an anti-encroachment drive took place, police seized his cart without any prior notice,” said Sakina Wali, a 43-year-old domestic worker in Karachi.
“My husband was abused and humiliated by the staff concerned, and we had to pay them a hefty amount of Rs20,000 to get our cart back,” she recalled.
Hundreds of kilometres away in Islamabad, Farmanullah, who is the sole breadwinner for a family of seven, was arrested for committing the offence of “encroachment” and imprisoned for three months, along with a fine of Rs500,000. His crime: selling kulfi outside the Faisal Mosque.
According to a report by US-based group Human Rights Watch, titled ‘Abusive Forced Evictions in Pakistan’, forced evictions of urban poor across the country is a “frequent and widespread” problem. The irony is that because the victims of these operations are mostly from the poor and marginalised strata of society, data reflecting the scale of the problem is largely absent.
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