Recently, an extraordinary episode unfolded in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Hundreds of Harry Potter fans protested when the planned route of the $581 million Greenlink energy interconnector between Wales and Ireland threatened the fictional grave of Dobby, an even fictional house-elf. Dobby dies heroically while saving Harry Potter and his friends from Malfoy Manor in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The project’s planners listened. The 200-kilometre power cable, linking Pembrokeshire with Wexford, Ireland, was rerouted to spare a memorial to a fictional character. The episode is revealing. A fictional grave commanding public sentiment altered the course of a major public project.
How starkly different is the lesson at home? Large-scale anti-encroachment drives by the CDA have left thousands of homes in Islamabad’s informal settlements reduced to rubble. Entire low-income communities of long-settled residents and laborers have been uprooted with little warning, displacing thousands whose modest homes represented years of work, savings, and precarious security.
In the latest Bahria Town episode, after years of acquiescence, the CDA has suddenly issued notices to residents in some of its phases over alleged construction on land designated as open space. Whatever the legal merits, the human consequence is painfully familiar. The developer remains beyond reach, while the residents who bought homes, invested their savings, and built their lives there are left to bear the uncertainty. When institutions awaken belatedly to their own failures, it is ordinary people who are left to absorb the devastating fallout.
The pattern shadows Karachi’s Nasla Tower. Years of regulatory and institutional failure culminated in the demolition of a building whose residents had invested their life savings in their homes. The Monal saga offers another unsettling variation. A SC order that led to its closure and demolition was set aside by the Federal Constitutional Court, which described the earlier decisions as a grave miscarriage of justice. The argument is not that law should be defied; it is that when institutions act belatedly, inconsistently, or without accounting for the human cost, justice can become indistinguishable from punishment for those least responsible.
Most horrifyingly, this institutional rot transforms protectors into predators, as exposed by the custodial rape of an intellectually disabled girl at a Lahore Police Station. Then there is the deepest cut of all. Nothing captures our institutional dysfunction more bleakly than the fact that even death does not bring closure. For families whose loved ones are murdered, grief is compounded by botched investigations, institutional indifference, and the agonizing suspicion that incompetence, or something more deliberate, has buried the truth alongside the departed. Exhumations and repeated autopsies driven by institutional failure, desecration that they are, prolong the agony, anguish, and trauma of those left behind. What, then, have we made of a country where the powerful can reverse and reassert decisions while ordinary people are left to absorb the consequences? It is invariably the citizens who lose their homes, livelihood, dignity, and sometimes even the peace owed to the dead.
As Pakistan approaches its 79th Independence Day, perhaps the most patriotic act is not another national song, flag-waving ceremony, or message extolling the virtues of Azaadi but a moment of unforgiving introspection. This 14 August, we need less orchestration of Azaadi and more self-examination about the ever-widening chasm between what it represents and what we, the mere mortals, actually live.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Mir Adnan Aziz is a columnist whose writing explores the forces that shape power, belief, and society.
