War on the poor
IF truth is the first casualty in war, then the biggest casualty is almost always the poor. This is as true in the warzone itself — Iran and the Gulf countries — as here in Pakistan. The petrol bomb has already wreaked havoc, but what if a poor family forced to deal with what is effectively a cost of living crisis had to deal with their home being demolished?
The story I narrate here is of the federal capital, and one that I have written about on these pages before. The protagonist is the Capital Development Authority and the hybrid regime that oversees it. On the other side are the poor residents of informal settlements, the biggest of which, Muslim Colony near Bari Imam, was razed to the ground in December. The distractions of the Zionist attack on Iran are now providing cover for the CDA to go after others.
The latest targets of the ruling regime are Islamabad’s Christian katchi abadis. It is cruel irony that many whose homes are under threat actually work for the CDA’s sanitation department. What better evidence of the utterly instrumental and brutalising logics of Pakistani statecraft that the workers who clean the capital’s streets, homes and offices are being evicted from their shanties?
Christian working-class communities contend with a unique combination of communal apartheid, caste untouchability and brazen class exclusion that makes them amongst the most persecuted and depressed segments of society. Think about the rabid lynch mobs who seek their blood, the bulldozers that flatten their homes, the abuse they encounter as domestic servants — these are literally the wretched of the earth.
The war on the poor has grown more intense.
The authority’s main aim is to rip down the huge katchi abadi in sector H9 of the capital which goes by the name Rimsha Colony. It was in 2012 that Rimsha Masih, then 14 years old, was arrested by Islamabad Police on the charge of having committed blasphemy. She was exonerated a year later, and the CDA itself shifted hundreds of Christian families to Sector H9 under the guise of protection. The settlement has since grown and is now home to almost 25,000 residents, most of whom are Christian.
The same CDA now wants to evict them in order to build the 10th Avenue highway. Only in the world of our colonial bureaucracy do roads have more rights than people. For what it’s worth, the largely powerless Environmental Protection Agency conducted a public hearing in 2022 to determine the viability of the 10th Avenue project and concluded that both the environmental and social impacts of Rimsha Colony’s demolition could not be condoned. It is also worth being reminded that a Supreme Court stay order from 2015 remains in effect to this day that prevents any governmental agency from engaging in summary evictions without providing adequate resettlement.
But who cares about such inconvenient truths here, especially when the clamour of wars abroad drowns out all else? Christian katchi abadi residents are as vulnerable as any in a war on the poor that knows no limits.
Take, for example, millions of working people in Balochistan who are currently being suffocated by the shutdown of the Iran border trade. Pakistani officialdom sees this matter only through the lens of ‘national security’, but as Akbar Notezai has masterfully documented, a vast array of goods, most notably oil, travel across the border on a daily basis, providing a daily wage to drivers, small traders and more. There is also the dark business of human smuggling, powered by the demand of a brutalised population without hope. Border closures mean that working people who have not yet succumbed to human smugglers are literally being starved of their meagre livelihoods.
Cross-border trade on the Torkham and Chaman borders also remains largely suspended as the state remains militarily engaged with its former protégés, the Afghan Taliban.
Here too, the drums of war take their toll on civilians killed by bombs and guns and a much wider demographic of ordinary working people — both Pakistani and Afghan — that rely on everyday trade for their survival.
There are many, many more examples of the war on the poor that has now only grown more intense with the wars of destruction taking place on our western borders.
It makes sense that many are currently unable to focus on much more than bloody geopolitics, and the bloodlust of US imperialism and the Zionist fascists that wreak havoc across West Asia in particular. But where we raise our voice to resist the wars abroad, we can and must do so to resist the wars within too.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, March 13th, 2026