The Delhi Gymkhana Club was born in 1913, raised for British officers and the colonial set, and was later inherited by bureaucrats, politicians, and the comfortably connected. None of that pedigree could save it, however, from the law. Last week India told it to vacate the land by June 5. The government read a single clause from the club’s own lease, named a public purpose, and issued the notice. The land returns to the state as do the buildings on it. The club says it will fight the decision in court, and it may. But the order is out and the clock has started.

In Pakistan, the Lahore Gymkhana was born in the same year, is grander than Delhi’s and also sits on land worth a king’s ransom. But no notice to vacate has been issued.

These are the facts from the government documents that explain why.

38 paisas a kanal

The Lahore Gymkhana sits on state land ringed by The Mall, Jail Road, and Zafar Ali Road. There is no pricier address in the province. Its 1913 lease stretches back to the Raj, and has been repeatedly extended in 1921, 1960, and, in haste in 1996, five years before its expiry. This time it was extended for 50 years to cover the years 2000 to 2050.

The gymkhana estate sprawls over 112 acres and the club holds three kanal and 16 marlas more than the record of rights allows — a tiny trespass that nobody thought to note until now.

But that is not all. Inside Lawrence Gardens (Bagh-e-Jinnah), the Gymkhana keeps an exclusive cricket ground on three-and-a-half acres of the Agriculture Department. This was never part of the lease, there is no grant for it and no rent is paid. No paper explains how a public garden was fenced off for a private game.

For the main estate, the club pays Rs5000 a year in rent. Not per kanal. In total. That comes to Rs417 a month, or under fifty paisas per kanal, for some of the most valuable earth in Pakistan. How little is Rs5000? Consider it against the government’s upper commercial rate.

The land is worth Rs218 billion so fair rent would be about Rs4.36 billion a year. Under the government’s 2023 policy, clubs can pay a tenth of market rent, but this would still come to Rs400 million a year. The club pays Rs5000.

For years, the land’s real value sat behind a nominal colonial rent. It became visible when market figures were placed on the record.

The admissions of guilt

The club filed its defence with the Assembly admitting the buildings came after the lease, which said the government had to approve construction. Over the decades the club built its clubhouse, golf clubhouse, pool, two guest blocks, health club, administration block, mosque and a café in 2012. The Board of Revenue searched for permissions but none were on record. The club has not even paid its token Rs5,000 rent. The Additional Deputy Commissioner’s office sent a notice, dated 26 August 2020, saying that rent had not bee paid since 2011.

Then the money. The club swears no public funds reach it but then lists them in the next breath: Rs2 million from President Zia in 1985, Rs2 million from PM Nawaz Sharif the same year, Rs50 million from CM Pervaiz Elahi in 2006, Rs10 million from CM Shehbaz Sharif in 2014. Four heads of government, four gifts from the public purse, to a private club.

And who is the club for? Its rulebook answers. Every civil servant of Grade 18 and above may join for a token fee, and so may every commissioned officer of the armed forces. The other way to become a member is to inherit membership. The capture is not an accident of history. It is written into the founding charter. The roll of ordinary members, meanwhile, the club guards as confidential as if it were a list belonging to a Freemason Lodge.

The instinct to maintain secrecy runs deep. When citizens used the Right to Information law to ask for the lease and the donor records, the club refused, and carried its refusal to the Lahore High Court, pleading, without blushing, that as a public limited company it was no “public body” and owed the public nothing. In January 2023, the court dismissed the plea. The land belongs to the state, the judge held. Handing over land worth billions of rupees almost free was an enormous benefit and rent of Rs5,000 a year “cannot be even termed as any rate whatsoever.” The same shrug was then offered to the Assembly when it asked who the club’s members were.

Institutionalising the giveaway

The Gymkhana is no aberration. It is the template: in May 2023 the state made the template law.

That month, a caretaker government in Punjab, an unelected stopgap whose only charge was to hold an election, approved a sweeping new policy. It had no mandate to make long-term land decisions but it made one anyway. On May 10 2023, the Colonies Department opened the door to hand prime state land to gymkhana clubs across the province, and fixed their rent at a tenth of market value. The discount was sewn into the rules.

The Board of Revenue reports the harvest. The figure that matters is what the clubs actually pay, after the 90 per cent is shaved away: Rs20,000 an acre a year at Dera Ghazi Khan, Mandi Bahauddin, and Chiniot; Rs50,000 at Vehari, Sahiwal, and Dera Ghazi Khan; Rs60,000 at Kamalpur Syedaan in Attock; Rs100,000 at Saddar Gymkhana, Gujranwala; Rs120,000 at Jhang; Rs140,000 at Jhelum and Gujranwala City. An acre of prime city land, for the price of a secondhand motorcycle, every year. And the final irony: this generous policy, the Board says, does not reach the Lahore Gymkhana, because its lease is older.

Elite enclaves on public land

The Gymkhana is not the only refuge for the officer class in Lahore. Inside the GOR, that broad expanse of prime central land set aside for officialdom, stands the Punjab Civil Officers Mess on Tollington Road. At GOR’s gate stands the colonial Punjab Club. A short walk off, the Lahore Polo Club keeps its grounds and stables inside the Race Course, public parkland surrendered to horses and a handful of players. An exclusive school for the male heirs of the elite, Aitchison College (Chief’s College), spreads over 200 acres. None of these entities bought their land. It is public land, held in trust, enjoyed by the few.

Islamabad tells the same story more starkly. The Islamabad Club, sprawled across 352 acres of CDA land, pays about three rupees an acre a month as its gates remain closed to ordinary citizens. The Gun and Country Club rose up on land meant for the Pakistan Sports Board; the Supreme Court declared it illegal in 2018 and ordered the land to be taken back, yet years later auditors could not trace some 38 acres, and the club sat on roughly 37 with no deed, no lease, no licence at all. The court said it aloud: there was no land in Islamabad for a public hospital [for the poor], but there was land aplenty for clubs for the rich.
And the hunger has not eased. In Multan, the district administration moves to slice 15 acres off the Central Cotton Research Institute, founded in 1970, the cradle of more than forty cotton varieties, including the region’s first virus-free strain, to feed another gymkhana, while the country’s cotton reserves sit at a record low and we spend hard currency importing the very crop the institute exists to improve. The Pakistan Business Forum has written to the chief minister to stop it. The clubs took the parks. Now they reach into the seed bank.

There has been an attempt to quantify this. In 2021, the UNDP put a number on the privileges captured by Pakistan’s elite. Cheap land and capital, tax breaks and soft inputs came to about $17.4 billion a year, which is nearly 6pc of the whole economy. The Gymkhana is merely a place where one may stand and watch the transfer happen: a 112 acres, for Rs5000.

When the same hands value, grant, and enjoy the land

This mechanism endures not through sloth but through strategy, as the actors make clear. The land belongs to the state. The men who grant it are senior civil servants in the Colonies Department, the Board of Revenue, the office of the Deputy Commissioner.

The men who set the value of the land, and thus decide the rent, are with the same revenue service. And the men who enjoy the clubs are, by rule, civil servants of Grade 18 and above and senior officers of the armed forces. The same hands own the land, price the land, rent it, and carry the membership cards.

When one cadre handles every aspect of a deal, its low price is no blunder. It is the purpose. No one at that table has any interest in making public land fetch a public price, for all of them gain from the opposite. The officer who would raise the rent, enforce the breach, or cancel the lease must act against his service, his colleagues, and likely his own leisure. That is what makes Sohaib Butt’s report so rare, and so telling. It took a man willing to go against the grain of his service to do the simplest thing: write down what the land is worth.

This is the truth worth stating plainly. In Pakistan, real power does not change hands at the ballot box. Governments arrive and depart; the bureaucracy and elites abide. And on the matter of state land for clubs, those who never leave office and those who enjoy the clubs are one and the same. That is why such a file scarcely moves. And it is why it matters so greatly who, in the end, forced it into the open.

Two-tiered justice

The state can, of course, move on land with great speed if it wants. Take Islamabad, the capital that prides itself on order. For three months its bulldozers have flattened katchi abadis or the informal colonies where the city’s gardeners and nannies, washerwomen and labourers have lived for a generation.

Around 25,000 people were driven out of Mulism Colony in Bari Imam alone. Settlements a quarter-century old, Rimsha Colony in H-9 and the largely Christian Allama Iqbal Colony in G-7, were marked for the same fate, along with the ancient villages of Saidpur and Nurpur Shahan.The state’s housing policy counts 60 such settlements in the city, home to between 300,000 and half a million souls; the CDA recognises barely 10 as lawful and brands the rest squatters.

And here is the part that should silence the room: a Supreme Court order from 2015 was passed after the merciless clearance of the I-11 settlement left 25,000 people homeless. It stayed the summary evictions altogether. The bulldozers came regardless. The same legal system that cannot dislodge an unpaid colonial lease in 18 months had no trouble dislodging the poor in open defiance of its highest court.

Punjab is no kinder about informality. It is just quieter about it. For three decades, it has promised to regularise its katchi abadis, and for three decades that promise has mostly stayed on paper. There is a law to sanction the work done and an agency to get it done but the number of settlements grows faster than the lists of “regularised” ones. Surveys are started and abandoned. Notifications are issued and forgotten. The poor who put up their housing on the edges of Lahore and Faisalabad and Rawalpindi live out their years in limbo, always one bureaucrat’s signature away from eviction. Three decades is a lifetime. A child born in one of these colonies has grown, married, and had children, and the family still cannot say for certain that the ground beneath their feet is legally theirs.

Meanwhile, the new law enforcer is punishing and swift. The Punjab government created the Punjab Enforcement and Regulatory Authority (PERA), to clear what it deemed to be encroachments. It is aided by deputy and assistant commissioners and a uniformed force with black Vigos.

Through 2025 PERA hired thousands of staff and opened stations across Lahore and beyond, as its drives targeted the small folk. Traders protested its methods: a shop photographed in the evening, sealed the next morning, fined Rs10,000 to Rs25,000, kept shut until the owner paid. Thella wallahs, vendors, kiosks punished for setting up on a footpath.

But 112 acres of the city’s finest land, held on a dead lease, built over without leave, exempted by a rule the board invented, is “legitimate possession,” defended for generations. The bulldozer works swiftly for the weak but stalls for the strong.

What Rs218 billion could buy instead of membership

It is worth listing what Rs218 billion would buy in a place that cannot pay for medicine.

In 2025-26, Punjab set aside Rs630.5 billion for its health sector, and proudly announced that for the first time this included Rs79.5 billion for free medicine. And yet Dawn reported that Rawalpindi’s three public hospitals (Holy Family, Benazir Bhutto, and the Teaching Hospital) were given a fraction of Rs4.5 billion they asked for. Their vendors are refusing to deliver stocks until the bills are cleared.

The Lahore Gymkhana land, on the other hand, is worth Rs218 billion, or three times the free medicine funding. A single elite golf-and-dining estate, that pays Rs5000 in rent, is worth more than the tab for medicines in a province of 120 million people.

The Assembly did its job

It took an elected Assembly more than one attempt to set this right. The matter was brought up at the last session but did not move ahead for “mysterious” reasons. The House pressed further. A member moved an adjournment motion and the Speaker called it out: this was elite capture of state land.

The Speaker formed a committee and for the first time in history, opened its hearings to the public and TV cameras. The House’s members killed it at the first sitting by placing on the record, all of them, that they sought no membership of the club, only the public interest. In a few weeks they ferreted out from their government two documents that settled everything.

The first was the valuation, ADC(R) report (shown above), which turned Rs5,000 into a scandal by comparison. The second document ended the argument. The Law and Parliamentary Affairs Department gave a clean opinion on what the state may do: Clause 6 of the 1996 lease lets the government end the lease at any time, on six months’ notice. Clause 8 says that when it ends, the club is owed nothing for any building it raised. The Board of Revenue added that the state is bound to resume the land when public purpose requires it, or when the lease is broken.

India reclaimed its gymkhana land by reading one clause of a lease. Punjab’s lawyers have now confirmed the province holds the same power to take back the Rs218 billion estate, with every building on it, on six months’ notice, and pay nothing.

Credit for this denouement goes to the House of elected representatives. What they cannot do alone is sign the order. That pen rests with the executive, which is the same bureaucracy that would rather keep the file shut.

Options

The remedy is not exotic. The simplest one is to cancel the lease. The second option is to take back the land for public use, which is what Delhi did. We don’t need to look far to find precedent. When the Royal Palm Club in Lahore defaulted on its lease of Railways land, the state took the land back and pulled down structures. Indeed, members on both benches have said if it can be done to a club on railway land in Lahore, it can be done to a club on nazul (state) land in Lahore.

The most durable option is a legal statute to dedicate the gymkhana estate to a fixed public use. And one use should unite the benches. The estate is a manicured, thirsty green in one of the most poisoned cities on earth. Take it back. Grow a native forest on it the fast and thick Miyawaki way and plan a park. Such greenery traps the dust, cools the air, and pushes back against the smog that sends people to our hospitals each winter. A golf course serves a hundred men. A forest would serve millions.

We say the law protects everyone alike but we must admit it does not. The thella wallah is presumed to be illegal and is not given time to prove otherwise. The Lahore Gymkhana Club is presumed to be lawful no matter what the file says.

Delhi has shown us the way. There was never a question of what the law allowed if elite land had to be taken back. The Assembly has proven this twice and put proof on record. What remains is the will to choose a public forest or park over a private fairway, the many over the few, the medicine over the membership. The House has spoken. The executive has not. For now, the silence belongs to the people holding the pen, and everyone can see why they would rather not sign.