ISLAMABAD, May 20: Several thousand shelterless men, women and children staged a rally here on Sunday in support of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

Led by former federal minister Julius Salik, the nearly 3,000 slum dwellers of the city walked from his house to the official residence of Justice Chaudhry, carrying his portraits, placards and flowers for the suspended top judge of the country.

They handed the bouquets and flowers to the security personnel posted outside his residence as an expression of solidarity with him.

They demanded the withdrawal of the reference filed by the government against him, waving the placards which prayed to Allah to provide protection to the people against injustices.

After praying for the chief justice the rally participants dispersed peacefully.

J. Salik told Dawn on the occasion that he had filed a petition in the Supreme Court on February 20 seeking allotment of residential plots to the shelterless people.

“But before Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry could take up my petition, he was rendered non-functional,” he said, fondly recalling the judicial activism of the chief justice with regard to public causes.

His trade mark innovative ways of protest were missing at the rally.

But he tried to make up for that with the biting remark that “the poor shelterless people deserved the favour more than the federal secretaries who have been given two plots by the government”.

Separate from the rally, representatives of katchi abadis from across Islamabad held another meeting under the banner of the All-Pakistan Alliance for Katchi Abadis to demand that the Capital Development Authority (CDA) follow through on the numerous commitments made regarding katchi abadis repeatedly during the tenure of the present government.

The meeting was attended by representatives of France Colony F-7/4, Tent Colony G-7/1, 66 Quarters G-7/2, Hansa Colony G-8/1 and J. Salik Colony G-8.

The Alliance chairperson Aasim Sajjad Akhtar presided over the meeting, a press release issued here said.

Local organiser Amir Jan told the meeting that instead of expediting the process of regularising the homes of katchi abadi dwellers the CDA was making things ever more difficult for them.

For instance, he said, the CDA had sent letters to the gas and electricity companies instructing them not to issue gas and electricity meters to homes which had two floors. He said that many katchi abadi dwellers occupied no more than one or two marlas of land and given their large family sizes making a two-storey home was “entirely reasonable”.

He claimed numerous deserving katchi abadi dwellers were being excluded from the regularisation process “because they were not willing to pay bribes to the CDA or were not on good terms with committee members in their abadis, many of whom were not genuine representatives in any case”.

Patras Joseph of France Colony pointed out that since conducting a survey of all katchi abadis in 1995, the CDA on numerous occasions promised ownership rights to katchi abadi dwellers. Even the federal cabinet took decisions to this effect, yet 12 years later the katchi abadi dwellers remain as insecure as ever.

“Each government uses and abuses the katchi abadis for its own purposes but there has never been any serious attempt to permanently address the larger deficiency in the urban planning,” he observed.

Other speakers lamented a host of other problems and what they called “the callousness of the katchi abadi cell in the CDA”.

It was agreed at the meeting that when elections are announced, the katchi abadi dwellers in the federal capital would devise a collective strategy and would boycott the elections in case they saw no serious effort being made to address the katchi abadi problems.