Islamabad, Pakistan: The saga of Monal Restaurant in Margalla Hills National Park is a textbook example of how the Superclass manipulates rules to benefit elites and grab economic and power resources in Pakistan.

Strongly interlaced, intermixed, and intermingled, the Superclass oMargalla Hills National Parkvertly employs rules, and laws and even covertly rewrites rules in its favor without any fear of contest from the administrative system that serves the powerful.

Margallah Hills National Park comprises the Margallah Range (12605 ha) the Rawal Lake, and the Shakarparian Sports and Cultural Complex. The rock formations are 40 million years old, and fossils of marine life abound everywhere bearing eloquent testimony that the Margallah hills were at one time under the sea.

Margallah Hills National Park (MHNP) was established in 1980 through notification No. S.R.O. 443 (1)/80, dated 28th April 1980 under section 21 of Islamabad Wildlife (Protection, Preservation, Conservation & Management) Ordinance, 1979. Margalla Reserve Forest comprises villages that include Mangial, Malach Dakhali, Phulgran, Mandia, Jhang, Malpur, (Bijran), Rumli, Narias, Padoh Dakhali, Noorpur Shahan, Ratta Hottar, Saidpur, DhokJiwan, Gandhian, Kilinjar, and Saniari; the area bounded by Shahrah-i-Kashmir in the north, Shahrah-i-Islamabad in the west and Murree Road in the South and East up to the junction with Shahrah-I-Kashmir and Rawal Lake and areas within the distance of 2km from the highest water mark of the lake. Today, the land comprising Shakparian, Lok Virsa, Sports Complex Islamabad Club, Polo Ground, Islamabad Riding Club, Islamabad Golf Course, Gun Club, Parade Ground, heliport, and China Expo Centre also fall in the MHNP. Motels and marquees along the Murree Road from Faizabad up to the Islamabad Club are located in the MHNP in violation of rules that govern National Parks globally.

Before the establishment of MHNP, the land had been under usage by different departments and entities including the Punjab Forest Department and a military grass farm. The Superclass used this past of MHNP as a ‘loophole’ to ruin Margalla National Park.

According to a brief history of this land, the Punjab Government leased out 11,970 acres out of 12,511 acres of the forestland to the Capital Development Authority (CDA) for 20 years in 1961. The lease expired in 1981 and CDA got an extension of the lease for 10 years. However, after 1991 neither did the CDA ask for another extension nor did the Punjab government take any step to reclaim the ownership of the forestland because it suited both to create ambiguity about the ownership for favoring land encroachers and builders of the hotel industry. In 2012, the Punjab government took up the issue with CDA with a lull of 21 years when CDA started a project of construction of Margalla Avenue passing through the forests near Labana village. The Punjab Government called for the construction of Avenue violation of the lease agreement signed by the West Pakistan [now Punjab] Agriculture secretary and CDA’s Horticulture Directorate in 1966. The situation is similar to the military grass venture. The record shows that only the grass-cutting rights were given to the Military Veterinary and Farms Corps (MV&FC) to provide fodder to the military animals and MVFC regularly paid an annual fee to the Forest Department in the past.

When CDA directed Monal Restaurant to stop encroaching land around the Restaurant, the owner of the Restaurant who is a brother of the Cabinet Secretary Kamran Ali Afzal claimed that CDA was not the owner of the land as the land belonged to the military and he signed a lease deal with military farms authorities though he got the first lease from CDA.

It is pertinent to mention that the notification of 1980, which established the MHNP directed that the CDA maintain the Margalla forest and CDA can’t violate the Islamabad Wildlife (Protection, Preservation, Conservation & Management) Ordinance, 1979 under which MHNP was set up.

Interestingly, Margalla Society (run under a powerful bureaucrat Roedad Khan for decades before his death), Islamabad Wildlife Management Board (IWMB), WWF, IUCN, and other environmental protection authorities and organizations miserably failed to save the third-largest national park in Pakistan when commercial activities like restaurants, amusement parks and even housing societies started operations in Margalla Hills. IWMB is operating under the Ministry of Climate Change having a mandate to protect, manage, and conserve the Margalla Hills National Park. It was set up in 2015 under Section 4 of the Islamabad Wildlife (Protection, Preservation, Conservation and Management) Ordinance 1979.

Nature was at last helped by the Islamabad High Court which came forward to save this National Park from the manipulation of civil administration. In January 2022, the Islamabad High Court declared that the claim of the Remount, Veterinary, and Farms (RV&F) Directorate of Pakistan Army, over 8,068 acres of land in the notified Margalla National Park area violates the Ordinance of 1979 read with the Ordinance of 1960 and the Master Plan.

The court order indicated that the RV&F Directorate bypassed the Government of Pakistan and directly took up the matter with the CDA. It stated that through notification No. 266 dated 23 April 1910 land was being ‘utilized by Military Farm Rawalpindi for production of hay for Army animals and permitting the use of land does not confer its ownership, nor could ownership have been conferred on the Directorate, a non-legal entity.

The case consequently went to the Supreme Court of Pakistan which released its detailed judgment on August 21, 2024. The judgment shows how the Superclass manipulates rules, and laws and even rewrites rules to protect members of this Superclass. The judgment notes that the directorate asserted rights to the land of the National Park on the tenuously improbable premise that in the year 1910, the Veterinary, Remount, and Farms unit of the British Army was allowed to use some land of the National Park for fodder cutting but did not have ownership of the land. Strangely, the Directorate gave a lease to a brother of one of the top bureaucrats of Pakistan for a seventeen-year lease of a land that was not under its ownership. The judgment also indicates that the Federal Government was correct in rejecting the fanciful notion of the Directorate that 110-year-old permission to collect fodder did not nor could bestow ownership rights to such land. The judgement added that the application was filed by the federal government wherein it stated in writing that the RV&FD Lease was void ab initio’, and that no record is available to show ‘that the Federal Government has given any approval to execute the Lease Agreement with owner of Monal Restaurant.

Chief Justice Pakistan noted that a lessee cannot unilaterally discard his lessor, substitute it with another, and then become the lessee of the latter, but this is what Mr Afzal did. He unilaterally cast aside CDA, his Lessor, and the CDA Lease and elected to become the purported lessee of the Directorate under the RV&FD Lease. Mr. Afzal had obtained the possession of the property from CDA pursuant to the CDA Lease and had agreed to pay rent to CDA, but then he stopped paying rent to CDA and had the temerity to seek the refund of the rent already paid to the CDA.

For a better understanding of how the bureaucrats play havoc with state properties, the following parts of the SC judgment are reproduced hereunder:

“Nonetheless, Mr Afzal retained the possession of the property which he had got from CDA under the CDA Lease while he put up his untenable contention. Rarely such audaciousness, and complete disregard of the law has been witnessed. Afzal cultivated and developed relationships with the powerful, and his brother was in the bureaucracy who then rose to the highest position in it. Therefore, he may have deluded himself by assuming that he was above the law. He violated the law for years and went on expanding his restaurant by encroaching into and destroying the National Park. The protected status of the National Park was of no consequence to him and to the government servants who supported him.”

Money, connections, influence, and/or nepotism supplanted the law and the protected status of the National Park, first by getting the CDA to execute the CDA Lease and then the Directorate to execute the FV&FD Lease. Every opportunity was given to Mr Afzal to comply with the law, which he had been continuously flouting for eighteen years. Probably it finally dawned that this Court would ensure the law is abided by and that it would also ensure that the National Park is protected which made him and the other restaurant owners pause and reflect.

During the hearing of these cases and earlier too frequent fires had erupted in the National Park. The Court was informed that the cause of these fires could also be that Monal, La Montana, and Gloria Jeans were popular venues and daily attracted thousands of customers and any of whom could carelessly throw a lit match or a cigarette, without first extinguishing it, which would ignite the dry grass and twigs lying on the forest floor of the National Park. These blazes are difficult to put out and require considerable manpower and resources, including repeated sorties by helicopters carrying water to throw on the fires.

The owner of La Montana and Gloria Jeans, namely, Dr. Muhammad Amjad, was also issued a notice by this Court, but he elected not to disclose how he managed to get possession of the mountain ridge next to Mr. Afzal’s restaurant and who, if anyone, granted him permission to construct and run his establishments. However, it is unimaginable that without having connections with those at the power center of the country he would have been able to raise illegal buildings and to do so by disregarding the laws of Pakistan.

He too had connections with General Pervez Musharraf, who after his retirement had made Dr. Muhammad Amjad his political party’s Chairman. When personal contacts with the paid servants of the State, trump the laws of Pakistan, and bureaucrats come to serve the interest of lawbreakers it is an abomination.

The priciest land in Islamabad is the land facing the Margalla Hills; prices start reducing the further one moves away from this natural wonder. Resultantly, every profiteer has set his eyes on this unbuilt real estate which probably is the most expensive land in Pakistan. The National Park land has over the years been encroached upon, which could only have happened with the involvement of the officers of CDA and other senior bureaucrats.

The National Park land is under grave and imminent danger. The rich, powerful and well-connected want to wrest it away for their personal use and/or gain. This must stop. The people cannot be deprived of the National Park, its flora and fauna, and of the benefits of this amazing national asset. Government servants who collude with land grabbers also need reminding that it is the people who pay their salaries and it is them who they serve, and whose interest they must protect. Those who forget this fundamental truth are a drain on the public exchequer.

Private interests and those marauding public lands must not be allowed to deprive the people of Pakistan and future generations of it. If we lose the National Park the adverse effects of greenhouse gases, deforestation, soil erosion, pollution, and climate change will be exacerbated to the detriment of the people and future generations.

The fundamental right to life, and to live it with dignity (respectively Articles 9 and 14 of the Constitution) is to live in a world that has an abundance of all species. It has by now been scientifically well established that if the earth becomes bereft of birds, animals, insects, trees, plants, clean rivers, unpolluted air, and soil it will be the precursor of our destruction, and scientific research establishes that nothing in nature is without value and purpose”.

This is one case that appeared on the surface but there can be hundreds of such cases where bureaucrats played havoc with state property that actually belongs to the citizens of the country who have no ownership over state land because they are not backed by the powerful Superclass.