ONCE upon a time, the law of the land was decreed by rulers who owed their positions of power not to popular will but to inherited rank. So it was that kings with claims to divine inspiration enjoyed tyrannical powers, and subjects knew nothing of the civil liberties of which so much is talked about in this day and age.

Humanity has traversed great distances over the past few hundred years, and many would argue that the enshrining of written legal codes and their universal application across the globe is amongst the most spectacular of our collective achievements. As significant a development as this is, it has not necessarily been unambiguously beneficial for the lower orders.

Last week a single-member bench of the Islamabad High Court issued an order for the Capital Development Authority to rid the federal capital of all ‘illegal’ katchi abadis. The CDA was directed to complete the task within one month.

In and of itself the invocation of legality against ‘illegal’ occupants of state land is hardly a novelty. Evictions of katchi abadi residents in Islamabad and almost every other city in the country have been commonplace for decades. Government functionaries — and the urban elite — are fond of vilifying the proverbial katchi abadi resident for any number of social ills. Every once in a while someone remembers that too much time has passed by without any ‘anti-encroachment’ operation and so the needful is initiated and then publicised.

Whether evictions are initiated directly by the government agency that controls the state land upon which the katchi abadi stands or, as in this case, mandated by the superior courts, the fundamental thrust of the law is clear: the public interest is decided, via legal injunctions, by unelected state functionaries that have the power to throw the poor out of their homes.

Smallholders and tenant farmers in rural areas have also been at the receiving end of similar ‘legal’ initiatives. Whether the land that governments seek to reclaim from the rural poor is public property, as with the now legendary struggle of peasants on the Okara military farms, or privately owned, the law in such cases also protects the powerful from the ‘encroachment’ of the weak.

Not only are the toiling classes subject to regular eviction drives, they also have to suffer hardship and indignity if they resist. Residents of katchi abadis are regularly branded ‘criminal elements’, whereas peasant movements of various kinds have faced the wrath of the local thana and katcheri and the innumerable trumped-up legal cases that these local state institutions infamously prosecute.

To adapt a well-known phrase, law is politics by other means. Yes making the law is a complex and nominally more participatory affair in the modern era as compared to when the verbal utterances of kings were all that mattered. But ultimately the law is a reflection of the prevailing structure of power.

The notion that the law — and therefore rule of law — is an objective truth that shouldn’t be questioned is a myth that needs to be debunked. In this country, generals, judges and establishment politicians have liberally used legal manipulations to sustain their power. Can the law be a source of liberation? Yes it can be, but more often than not, as in the cases outlined above, it is an instrument of status quo and is used to disenfranchise.

The question is how those who consider themselves defenders of the public interest should react to the many instances when the law is invoked to throw poor people out of their homes and off their agricultural lands. In the 1960s and 1970s when left radicalism was at its peak, this question was never posed because class organisations demanding structural change were ready to defy the law, and, indeed, force the ruling class to change it. Successive land reform legislations in 1972 and 1977 were, for instance, a direct result of mobilisations by peasant movements.

With the decline in working class politics, and the increasing influence of urban middle classes on political discourse, the law has become the locus around which much political mobilisation takes place. India’s Aam Aadmi phenomenon is the most dramatic example in this regard. In this country too, mainstream parties such as the PML-N and PTI have gained great political mileage by depicting themselves as uncompromising defenders of the ‘rule of law’, all the while glossing over class and other structures.

The million-dollar question is: when the axe-wielding law-enforcement agencies descend upon Islamabad’s katchi abadis in the days to come, who will take the principled political stand and who will hide behind the veneer of (colonial) legality?

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.