Shaky ground: the fraud of property in Lahore

Abstract

The city of Lahore, Pakistan inherited a colonial land bureaucracy in which land is owned according ‘rights in land’ rather than ‘rights to land’. Unlike the absolute ownership provided by state-backed titles, rights in land is merely a presumption of ownership until proven otherwise, creating a permanent gap between ownership and property. These gaps are investigated by patwaris, or lower-level bureaucrats who confirm rights in land before property is sold. Against the backdrop of Pakistan’s booming real estate market, however, land has become Lahore’s most profitable financial asset, and the gap between ownership and property is increasingly exploited to wrangle control over land from others. In this context, ‘fraud’ has become a constant point of concern for both patwaris and residents, each of whom use fraud at various times to negotiate Lahore’s colonial-era bureaucracy with the present-day demands of living in the city. In this article, I argue that fraud mediates property relations in Lahore. In the city, all property is potentially fraudulent, and all fraud can potentially become property. Rather than a fixed relationship between ownership and property, Lahore’s land bureaucracy is characterized by continuously unfolding property relations as new loops of fraud are opened and old ones close.

Keywords:

• corruption
• fraud
• bureaucracy
• documents
• land
• financialization
• South Asia
• Pakistan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics declaration statement

This research was approved by the University of California, Irvine Institutional Review Board (HS# 2019-5180).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1917556]; the Social Science Research Council; The Wenner-Gren Foundation; and the American Philosophical Society.

Notes on contributors

Tariq Rahman

Tariq Rahman is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA. Email: [email protected].