They live by a shrine to a saint. Why are their homes being demolished?

Islamabad’s Sacred Neighborhood Faces Erasure: 50,000 Displaced as Demolition Sweeps the Bari Imam Area

Ecorescuezone.com – For over three centuries, a community has grown organically around the marble shrine of Bari Imam, a revered Sufi saint whose tomb sits at the base of the Himalayan foothills. Pilgrims have flocked to the site daily since the Mughal era, and the people who settled nearby — cooks, vendors, lamp-lighters, caretakers — built an entire economy and social fabric around serving those visitors. That fabric is now unraveling at a pace that residents and housing-rights advocates describe as without precedent in the capital’s history.

Between December 2025 and April, municipal authorities tore down hundreds of dwellings and commercial stalls in a roughly one-mile radius surrounding the shrine. The rubble field where tightly packed homes once stood now stretches across what was once a dense, working-class neighborhood. Activists and local organizers estimate that approximately 50,000 people — roughly one-tenth of Islamabad’s estimated 500,000 informal-settlement residents — have lost their homes in the operation.

A Family’s Aftermath: Salvaging Bricks to Feed Eight Children

Wirasat Aly, 30, spent a recent day pulling usable bricks from the wreckage of his own home, stacking them for sale to construction firms. A single truckload fetches the equivalent of about $5.40. That meager income is what he is using to scrape together the $70 monthly rent needed to keep a roof over his family — which includes eight children under his care, among them the nieces and nephews of a disabled brother.

“We have to do something for the children,” Aly said. “I’m going crazy. Our stomachs are empty.”

Aly explained that he was forced to withdraw the children from school because he could no longer cover the monthly bus fare, lunch expenses, or textbook costs. The neighborhood’s former character — roadside stalls selling meditation beads and prayer carpets, tiny tent-like kitchens where cooks prepared cauldrons of rice for the shrine’s free cafeteria — has been replaced by open debris fields. That cafeteria, once crowded with pilgrims and families of day-laborers, drew its food from worshippers who paid for the rice as a devotional offering to the saint.

Political Ambitions Behind the Bulldozers

Residents and observers point to a single political figure as the catalyst: Interior Minister Mohsen Naqvi, widely regarded as close to Pakistan’s army chief — the country’s most powerful institutional actor. In April, Naqvi publicly articulated a plan to transform the stretch of land behind the prime minister’s official residence into what he called a “futuristic hybrid of Shanghai and Manhattan.” That stretch of land is, in fact, the Bari Imam shrine and its surrounding residential quarters.

“See how you can come and invest,” Naqvi told a gathering of businessmen, in remarks carried by the local outlet City21.

Naqvi’s office did not respond to a request for comment regarding his role in prompting the clearances.

Official Justifications and the Question of Compensation

An official at the Capital Development Authority, the body that administers Islamabad’s urban planning, told reporters on condition of anonymity that the majority of demolished structures fell within an informal settlement called Muslim Colony. She stated that affected households had exhausted every available legal challenge before the razing proceeded. Under the authority’s framework, residents who had occupied their plots before 2005 received compensation. Those who arrived later, or who had rented out structures built without permits, were expected to accept lesser sums to relocate.

“A perverse initiative was at play,” the official said, describing the compensation calculus.

Many of the post-2005 arrivals, residents and advocates noted, had themselves been displaced by earlier shocks: armed conflict along the Afghan border, a major earthquake in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and successive cycles of flooding and drought. Most entered Islamabad’s labor market as security guards, domestic cleaners, tailors, and butchers serving the city’s wealthier districts. The CDA official, however, offered a blunt assessment: those unable to meet the capital’s high cost of living should simply not be there.

“It’s better to not move in a city if you cannot afford the price of living,” she said.

Nurpur Shahan and a 1957 Land Seizure

Local media reported that an additional roughly 200 homes were demolished in a neighborhood called Nurpur Shahan, which had once been a standalone village. The CDA official confirmed that authorities had compensated residents for their land in 1957, when the plot was expropriated to lay out the planned capital city of Islamabad. She stated that no further compensation would be paid to current occupants.

Some adjacent neighborhoods remain standing for now, though a large billboard erected near their entrances declares: “All structure and activities on this land are unauthorized and illegal.” Tanvir Hussain, a local resident and lawyer representing affected families, told reporters that the decades-old 1957 compensation was never properly disbursed to all entitled households. He further noted that other residents were still in the process of seeking legal recourse when the bulldozers arrived.

What Comes Next

The Bari Imam shrine itself remains intact, its marble minarets still visible above the rubble. But the human ecosystem that sustained it for three centuries — the lamp-lighters, the rice cooks, the bead sellers, the families who passed down devotional duties across generations — has been scattered across Islamabad’s periphery and beyond. Housing-rights scholar Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, who has tracked informal-settlement demolitions across Pakistan for years, characterized the operation’s scale and speed as unprecedented.

“I have never seen the intensity that I’ve seen,” Akhtar said. “Something that is far more brazen than I’ve seen before.”

Whether Naqvi’s Shanghai-Manhattan vision materializes, or whether the cleared land reverts to informal habitation within a few years, remains an open question. What is not open is the immediate reality facing tens of thousands of displaced families: empty stomachs, children out of school, and a city that, by its own officials’ account, was never meant to house them in the first place.