Karachi Dry Fruit Store still stands in the left wing of the bulldozer-ravaged Empress Market.

Misty-eyed Shaheen Abbasi, the third-generation owner of the modest establishment, tells me from behind the counter that his family owned two other stalls in the same market until a month ago.

“They razed my two shops to the ground in just four hours,” he says while showing a bunch of receipts to emphasise that his de­molished booths were tax-paying lawful entities.

A victim of the Supreme Court-ordered anti-encroachment drive in and around Empress Market, Mr Abbasi is one of the 17,500 people directly affected by the move that most urban planners have termed disastrous for the city.

One month on, the foyer of the main structure is still strewn with debris of all kinds. The KMC has left concrete, wood, plastic and rotten merchandise from the knocked-down stalls all over the quad. It seems that Bahria Town didn’t fully clean up after the KMC.

“I know the chief justice told them to remove encroachments. But my shops were perfectly legal. They had no right to demolish a legitimate business,” says Mr Abbasi.

From the city mayor to the commissioner and the provincial minister concerned, each government representative denies any wrongdoing in the execution of the apex court judgment.

The court order directed the mayor to simply remove ‘encroachments’ without delving into further details. For example, it did not specify whether rent-paying hawkers operating in semi-permanent stalls counted towards encroachments. The order also lacked any direction for the authorities whether they were bound to relocate the displaced hawkers in adjacent markets.

Even if the KMC was within its rights to unilaterally end the tenancy agreements with the hawkers, urban planners wonder if the state should suddenly take away the source of livelihood from thousands of law-abiding citizens.

“What’s the compelling use for the area that they are supposedly cleaning? Their attempt to restore a 19th-century, pristine version of British Karachi is futile,” says Dr Noman Ahmed of NED University of Engineering and Technology.

“There is no specific definition of a hawker,” he adds. No mapping infor­­mation for the city is available, he says, making it impossible for researchers like him to know exactly what the city managers are up to.

According to Karachi Commissioner Iftikhar Ali Shallwani, extortionists mobilised a monthly bhatta of Rs35 million every month from Empress Market, although the revenue collection from the razed shops was minimal. The fact that the authorities let the extortionists run wild in one of the biggest city markets while collecting a negligible amount in taxes for a long time speaks volumes about the state of governance in Karachi.

The quickness shown by the KMC in removing its tenants is in stark contrast to the little interest it exhibited over the years in raising the rent, which was evidently lower than the going rate in adjacent areas.

Mayor Waseem Akhtar accepts that the KMC facilitated so-called encroachments in the past. “But it has to stop now,” he says. There’s no specific plan to rehabilitate mostly unskilled workers that have become unemployed in the aftermath of the anti-encroachment drive, he adds.

“The root of the problem is that this city has become de-politicised,” says Dr Ahmed of NED University of Engineering and Technology. “There’s no one to speak up for the rights of the people.”

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, December 10th, 2018