March 24, 2026
By Sher Ali Khan
In Islamabad, the threatened eviction of Rimsha Colony, Akram Gill Colony, Shapar Colony, Allama Iqbal Colony, and other katchi abadis is not exhausted by the language of encroachment, planning, or irregular settlement.
The present operation names a condition in which families who have been relocated, counted, documented, and drawn into the material reproduction of the city remain unable to convert any of that into a claim that binds land. Homes built over more than a decade through savings and labour, addresses registered through NADRA and the Election Commission, utility lines extended into streets and lanes, and the dense forms of life attached to churches, schools, kin, and work all remain fully visible to the state. They can still be placed under the sign of removal the moment the Capital Development Authority invokes the master plan, flood risk, green belts, road expansion, or urban regeneration.
The families now threatened with demolition in Rimsha Colony did not simply “encroach” upon state land, but arrived there through an earlier displacement.
Christian residents fled the fallout of the Rimsha Masih blasphemy accusation and were permitted to establish tents in H-9. Those tents became houses, and those houses became a neighbourhood tied to the city through low wage labour, utility connections, voter registration, and long residence. The same authority that allowed this settlement to take shape within the daily life of Islamabad now returns to treat it as illegal, turning years of residence into grounds for eviction. The ordering of law and urban space here is racial, such that these communities do not appear before the state as fully human, but as populations upon whom force can be exercised without ethical restraint.
Racial and cultural difference determine the political ordering through which modes of being human are named, ranked, and placed. Through that ordering, the distinction is continually reproduced between those before whom the state appears as guarantor and those before whom it appears as self-preserving force. The Christian colony in Islamabad has to be read in this sense, not merely as a poor settlement inhabited by a religious minority, but as a space in which communal marking, caste-marked labour, and urban informality meet.
The concentration of many Christian residents in sanitation work, domestic labour, and other stigmatized forms of service belongs to this structure because the city’s dependence on these workers is one of the conditions through which their vulnerability is organized. The figure of the sanitary worker carries forward the historical weight of untouchability into the present urban order, while those who clean, carry waste, and maintain the material life of Islamabad return each night to homes the city still holds as removable.
Their insistence that they cannot leave because they must remain near work states plainly that labour, dwelling, schools, churches, and neighbourhood life are bound together in ways removal would break.
The city depends on their labour and service while keeping their homes permanently removable.
Muslim Colony near Bari Imam has already been bulldozed, while earlier Pashtun and Afghan settlements in sectors such as I-11 and I-12 were cleared under the sign of security, illegality, and deportability. Christian colonies are now being addressed through the sign of encroachment, environmental management, and planning. The vocabulary shifts with the population, but each remains exposed to removal through a different state rationale.
The 2001 National Housing Policy bars eviction without relocation and resettlement, and in Islamabad that protection was reinforced by the Supreme Court’s 2015 stay order. Rimsha and Akram Gill now face notices and the threat of demolition even though these settlements took shape through an earlier state relocation of Christian families after the Rimsha case. Those protections remain on paper, but the settlements are still being approached as land that can be taken back and reassigned. Necessity appears here in the language of planning, regulation, and clearance through which removal is carried out.
The threatened eviction of Islamabad’s Christian katchi abadis therefore names more than a housing crisis or an administrative abuse. It names a city organized through an ordering in which poverty, informality, communal difference, and caste-marked labour mark certain populations as available for rearrangement. That ordering allows force to move under the cover of planning, law, and development, while families can live there for years, can be counted there, can labour there, and can still remain before the state as those for whom justice does not hold. They are sustained at the level of work and circulation while denied the capacity to anchor themselves in land, and that is why the line between documentation and demolition, between administrative visibility and removal, remains so terrifyingly thin.
The author is a political geographer, writer, and journalist based in Lahore.