Ahmad Shabbar

This

I rent at One Constitution Avenue. At 1 AM last night, I was rudely awakened by heavy banging on the door. My first panicked thought: thieves. Instead, I faced nearly 50 heavily armored police officers — rude, aggressive, and clearly itching to beat us into compliance if we dared resist. They didn’t deny it was a forced eviction. No court order was shown. No documents. No explanation. Just a blunt command: vacate by 12 noon today. Only later did I learn this midnight raid had the blessing of a court. Why am I not surprised? This is textbook “protocol court” justice in Pakistan.0 The building has been stuck in litigation for 20 years. During that entire time, courts happily let people buy apartments, invest their life savings, and rent them out in good faith. Individual property rights and tenancy rights were cheerfully recognized — until suddenly, overnight, they weren’t. What kind of court authorises 50 armed goons to storm a residential building at 1 AM with zero notice and zero reasons given? As I noted in my recent Substack piece on judicial/bureaucratic over-reach: “If One Constitution Avenue, Royal Palm, and Nasla Tower show how Pakistan destroys value after it is created…” — exactly. Prime assets are strangled by endless litigation, then casually demolished by judicial fiat while the real value to society and residents is ignored.0 I called journalists. Crickets. No TV crews, no radio teams. Apparently this midnight spectacle wasn’t newsworthy. Who needs this judiciary? Our judges seem less like guardians of the Constitution and more like uneducated protocol seekers and bureaucratic enablers — quick to crush private investment and citizen rights while protecting their own colonial-era privileges. Is this judgment even lawful? And even if eviction were somehow justified after 20 years, does it have to be executed with such thuggish, inhumane brutality — trampling basic dignity and due process? This isn’t justice. It’s asset destruction dressed up in legal robes. A terrifying precedent for every tenant and property owner in the country. @nadeemhaque/note/p-187624159?r=6t51ge&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@nadeemhaque/n…

His name is Mohammad Aamir Khan. On the night of February 20, 1998, his mother asked him to buy medicines from a shop in Old Delhi. He was 18 years old. He never made it to the shop. Men in plain clothes stopped him on the street. He did not know they were police officers. They took him to an abandoned building. For seven days, he was held in illegal custody. He was tortured. He was forced to sign blank sheets of paper. Then the Delhi Police Special Cell produced him in court and charged him with 19 counts of bombing across Delhi, Ghaziabad, Rohtak and Sonepat between December 1996 and October 1997. He was presented to the media as a terrorist. His family was never informed. They spent days searching police stations before finding out what had happened. He spent 14 years in prison. Through torture. Through solitary confinement. He watched case after case fall apart in court as evidence was shown to be fabricated. In 2012, he was acquitted in 17 of 19 cases. Two cases remain pending. He had already served more time in jail than the maximum sentence he could have received even if convicted on all charges. He walked out of prison in January 2012. His father had died while he was inside. His mother had suffered a stroke so severe she no longer recognised him when he walked through the door. The National Human Rights Commission directed the Delhi government to pay him compensation. The amount was Rs 5 lakh. No officer from the Delhi Police Special Cell was charged. No one was suspended. No inquiry was ordered. He wrote a book about what was done to him. He called it Framed As A Terrorist. My 14 Year Struggle To Prove My Innocence. He now helps other wrongfully accused prisoners navigate the system that destroyed him. India gave him Rs 5 lakh and called it justice. Follow for real stories India never makes headlines about.

Breaking : Iran hands over latest negotiation plan to Pakistan as mediator in talks with the US. FM spokesman Esmail Baqaie says ending the war and securing lasting peace remains Tehran’s top priority. Reports Iranian News Agency @IrnaEnglish

Constitution One being vacated through police force as the project company defaults on CDA payments but the investors who were highly educated and placed are now hoping for some compensation. It is surprising that big legal minds were so easily duped into investing here. Judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, journalists, businessmen are now feeling the heat of current govt policies against poors of old villages around Islamabad being demolished.

Scenes inside the premises of One Constitution Avenue. Heavy contingent of police to take over the building and vacate it. Question: Who will invest in Pakistan when government’s mind can change any time and it can throw you out no matter you have made the payment.

In other news, an estimated 25000 students of Pakistan paid almost 50k to the British council to appear for A levels math exam and two hours prior to the exam the paper got leaked. Countless hours of prep, hundreds of thousands paid in tuition fees over the year, all gone to waste. Bear in mind this is the same educational board that funnels 50 billion out of Pakistan each year. Yet this is the third consecutive year they've failed to secure the paper. The students can't be compensated in any way.

Police moved in heavily at One Constitution Avenue in Islamabad's Red Zone in the dead of night to enforce a court order tied to the long-running ownership and legality disputes around the luxury high-rise. The law may be against the builders, and so be it. But enforcing it doesn't mean ditching basic decency. Rolling in at 1 a.m. and pushing 200-plus families out, many of them tenants and several foreign nationals, with little or no fair notice, is brute force disguised as procedure. Tenants have rights too. This was enforcement stripped of judgment and humanity. A poor look for a state so fixated on polished optics. Unless the High Court specifically ordered evacuation within 12 hours, why was no reasonable notice given? Where were foreign and local tenants supposed to go at 1 a.m., and what were they meant to do with their belongings? Even local residents would struggle to round up movers or trucks into the Red Zone at that hour. If the legal case was years in the making, the least the authorities could have managed was a competent, humane plan for carrying it out. The execution was a shambles. — Message from a friend about whats going on at One Constitution Avenue right now.

Pakistan installed so much rooftop solar that it broke its own grid. Daytime demand collapses when the sun comes up. Evenings? 4,000–6,000 MW shortfall. Load shedding is back — not because of too little power, but wrong power at the wrong time. Meanwhile in the UK right now: → 67.6% clean electricity → Carbon intensity: 56g CO₂/kWh → Importing 7.85 GW via interconnectors to Norway, Belgium & Ireland That last point is the lesson Pakistan needs. The UK doesn't just generate — it trades. Cables to 4+ countries mean surplus gets sold, shortfalls get filled. The grid becomes a market, not a silo. Pakistan is landlocked from friendly grids. No interconnectors. No storage mandate. No flexibility market. Pakistan installed so much rooftop solar it broke its own grid.

Breaking News: If Pakistan succeeds in mediating and a deal between US and Iran is signed, there is a high chance that Pakistan's military chief Asim Munir along with PM Sharif will be nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for 2026.

Sharif in Riyadh. Munir in Tehran. Same day. Pakistan is doing what the UN, the EU, and the Security Council combined cannot. One country holding the ceasefire together.

Pakistan is “the only mediator in this negotiation. While there have been many countries around the world that want to offer their help, the President feels it’s important to streamline this communication through the Pakistanis.” -White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt

JUST IN: President Trump said he could travel to Islamabad to seal a deal, praising Pakistan’s leadership and signaling he “might go” if an agreement is signed there: “The field marshal has been great. The Prime Minister has been really great in Pakistan so I might go.” @pdoocy

Here is what Pakistan's insiders are saying: Diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint. Though the gap between the US and Iran remains wide, the critical takeaway is that the dialogue broken on Feb 28 has officially resumed in Pakistan. History shows these deals take years, not days.

JD Vance’s signal that there’s “no deal” after the first round of U.S.–Iran talks reflects the structural deadlock: Washington is pushing for verifiable limits on enrichment and regional de-escalation, while Tehran is holding firm on sanctions relief and strategic autonomy. The gap was always going to be wide. The first round was less about agreement and more about testing red lines. But this is diplomacy, not a one-shot negotiation. The alternative to continued talks is far more consequential. A collapse risks escalation in an already volatile region, sustained energy shocks, and a feedback loop into global inflation and financial instability. Markets, supply chains, and vulnerable economies would all take the hit. No serious actor can afford that outcome. Which is why talks will resume. They have to. And in all this, Pakistan has quietly delivered a strategic win. By bringing Washington and Tehran into the same diplomatic space and opening a credible channel, it has shifted from the margins to the table at a critical geopolitical moment. Outcomes remain uncertain, but the fact of engagement itself is a durable achievement. In a fragmented world, creating the conditions for dialogue is no small feat.

Pakistani fighter jets over Bandar Abbas, Iran, escorting the Iranian delegation to Pakistan safely for negotiations with the US. Pakistan has earned it's seat at the table.

Pakistan has led from the front, from beginning to end, on several weeks of frenetic, high-stakes regional facilitation efforts. Why and how was Pakistan, of all countries, able to occupy this prominent role? This week ⁦@ForeignPolicy⁩: foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/08/pak…

Diplomatic efforts for peaceful settlement of the ongoing war in the Middle East are progressing steadily, strongly and powerfully with the potential to lead to substantive results in near future. To allow diplomacy to run its course, I earnestly request President Trump to extend the deadline for two weeks. Pakistan, in all sincerity, requests the Iranian brothers to open Strait of Hormuz for a corresponding period of two weeks as a goodwill gesture. We also urge all warring parties to observe a ceasefire everywhere for two weeks to allow diplomacy to achieve conclusive termination of war, in the interest of long-term peace and stability in the region. @realDonaldTrump @JDVance @SecRubio @SteveWitkoff @SEPeaceMissions @drpezeshkian @mb_ghalibaf @araghchi

جنگ ایران میں ہورہی ہے، مگر عوام پاکستان کی ماری جا رہی ہے۔ احتجاج! احتجاج! احتجاج! The war is occuring in Iran, but it is Pakistanis who are being killed/oppressed. This should be protested! #pakistan #petrol #IranWar‌

Israel's Jerusalem Times: “New bloc formed by Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia represents a population of 500 million people.” “The coming together of Pakistan, a nuclear armed state; Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s largest oil suppliers; Egypt, which controls the Suez Canal; and Turkey, a NATO member with an advanced defense industry, carries the potential to change Middle East, with implications for Israel.”