Not the Red Indian of Islamabad: What the United Nations Already Told Pakistan About Us

By Advocate Raja Khurrum Ali Abbasi, Phulgran, Islamabad Capital Territory

In September 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Declaration most Pakistanis have never heard of, and the drafters of Islamabad’s new governance model appear not to have consulted it. It says, in plain terms, that no state may redraw the political map over an indigenous people’s land without first securing that people’s free, prior and informed consent. Pakistan voted for it. Nineteen years later, as the federal government finalizes a sweeping new administrative structure for Islamabad Capital Territory, that promise is the measure this reform should be held against — not sentiment, not tradition, but a legal standard my country already signed its name to.

I write this from the village of Phulgran, in the northern hills that fold into Islamabad Capital Territory, as a lawyer and as a member of the Rajgan of Phulgran, part of the Dhund Abbasi tribe whose name recurs through the old settlement records and gazetteers of the Murree hills. When the government announced, in September 2026, a 27-member Islamabad Capital Territory Assembly, a chief executive, twenty-seven departments, and the transfer of the Capital Development Authority’s powers to an elected government — with talk of eventually making Islamabad a full province — I read the drafts the way the UN Declaration asks any state to proceed: carefully, and looking for the consultation clause that was supposed to come first. I did not find one. Once again, a plan to reorganize the land under our feet is being drawn up in committee rooms without asking the people whose ancestors were here before the plan for a capital ever existed. If this bill passes as drafted, my community risks becoming exactly what international law says it must not: dispossessed on paper, remembered in place names, absent from power.

A Standard Pakistan Already Signed Onto-What gives this argument its force is not sentiment. It is law — international law that Pakistan itself helped adopt. In September 2007, the United Nations General Assembly solemnly proclaimed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a document that sets out, article by article, what states owe to the indigenous communities living within their borders. Pakistan was one of the states that voted for it.

The Declaration does not treat consultation as a courtesy. It treats it as a right. Article 18 recognizes that indigenous peoples have the right to participate in decisions that affect them, through representatives of their own choosing. Article 19 goes further: it obliges states to consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned, through their own representative institutions, to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting legislative or administrative measures that may affect them. Not after. Before.

Read that against the ICT Governance Model now sitting on the Prime Minister’s desk — a 138-page framework reportedly modeled closely on the administrative structure of Delhi’s National Capital Territory, drafted behind closed doors, with a 27-member assembly apportioned by National Assembly constituency. Nowhere in it is there a reserved seat, a consultative mechanism, or even an acknowledgment of the indigenous rural tribes — the Dhund Abbasi chief among them — whose villages this new structure will govern. That is not a technical oversight. Measured against Article 19, it is a violation in progress.

Article 26 is equally direct: indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used, and states are obliged to give those holdings legal recognition and protection, with due respect for the customs and land tenure systems of the peoples concerned. Article 27 requires states to establish a fair, independent and transparent process — developed together with the indigenous peoples affected — to adjudicate those land rights, with the peoples themselves entitled to participate in that process. Article 32 adds that no project affecting indigenous lands, territories, or resources may proceed without a state first securing free and informed consent through the peoples’ own representative institutions. A governance overhaul that redraws administrative control over Bhara Kahu, Phulgran, Shahdara, and the other northern union councils is precisely the kind of measure these articles were written for.

We Did Not Resist the Capital. We Are Resisting Its Erasure of Us. None of this is a demand born of grievance against Islamabad itself. When the federal government chose the Potohar plateau for the new capital in 1960, it was Dhund Abbasi land and Dhund Abbasi villages that were absorbed to make room for the sector grid. Families gave up land their ancestors had held for generations. And yet — unlike so many indigenous communities elsewhere who met comparable state projects with organized resistance — the Dhund Abbasi absorbed that disruption without ethnic or sectarian friction, and sent their sons and daughters into the civil service, the armed forces, business, and politics, while a still-substantial rural population remained rooted in these hills.

That restraint deserves to be named for what it is: a rare act of civic generosity, not a surrender of standing. The Declaration’s preamble itself insists that all doctrines treating one people’s claims as inferior to another’s are “racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust.” Welcoming a capital onto ancestral land is not the same as forfeiting recognition as that land’s indigenous population. The Dhund Abbasi opened their hands to Islamabad. Islamabad’s planners should not mistake an open hand for an empty one.

What Other Indigenous Peoples Won — Without Waiting to Be Offered It-Pakistan does not need to invent a framework. Others have already built one, through courage and through law. In November 2024, Māori MPs turned a routine vote in New Zealand’s Parliament into a defining act of indigenous assertion, forcing the country to reckon with indigenous consent before its Treaty Principles Bill was overwhelmingly defeated the following year. Māori make up roughly 17.5 percent of New Zealand’s population — smaller than the 23 to 25 percent share Dhund Abbasi community leaders estimate for themselves within ICT. In Australia, the High Court’s 1992 Mabo ruling dismantled the legal fiction that Aboriginal land belonged to no one before colonization, and by 2019 the same court was awarding compensation not just for lost land but for the deeper harm of severed cultural and spiritual connection to country. Neither victory was handed down out of unprompted generosity. Both were fought for, under the legal architecture, the Declaration now asks every UN member state, including Pakistan, to build in advance.

What We Are Asking the Government of Pakistan to Do-This is not a separatist demand, and it is not an attempt to block reform that Islamabad genuinely needs. It is a demand that reform be finished properly, in keeping with commitments Pakistan has already made. Specifically: commission an independent, geo-fenced demographic survey of Islamabad Capital Territory that identifies indigenous tribal populations, since no official census currently does. Convene a formal consultation, consistent with Articles 18 and 19 of the Declaration, with the recognized elders and representative bodies of the northern hill communities before the ICT Governance Model bill goes to Parliament. Establish a reserved seat or statutory consultative council for the territory’s indigenous rural population. And commit, in the text of the law itself, to protecting customary land and settlement rights in the union councils being folded into the new administrative structure, as Articles 26 and 27 require.

We are a tribe that fought the Sikh Empire in 1837 and joined the wider rebellion against British rule in 1857 in these same hills, and a tribe that nonetheless opened its arms to its own country’s capital in 1960 without asking for anything in return. We are not asking for anything extraordinary now. We are asking the Government of Pakistan to honour a declaration it has already signed — and to count, consult, and represent the people whose ancestors held this land before the word “Islamabad” existed on any map.