Two parcels of state land sit on the same colonial avenue, and the government treats them as opposites. The Lahore Gymkhana holds about 112 acres for Rs 5,000 a year, Rs 417 a month (a little more than a US dollar) and the Punjab Assembly cannot force even a review of the lease. Ewing Hall, a 1916 heritage building of under two acres, was taken from Forman Christian College over a rent demand that is at once exorbitant and largely the state’s own doing, much of it billed for the very years the government had nationalised the college and was running it itself.
The question of the Gymkhana’s rent has been raised on the floor of the Punjab Assembly, denounced across party lines and referred to a committee to review within two months — which, 21 months on, has yet to submit even a report to the Assembly. Ewing Hall, on the other hand, was taken from its Christian college on 24 hours’ notice.
The building that was taken
On Thursday, June 11, the Punjab Board of Revenue took possession of Ewing Hall. A day earlier, the university administration had been told by telephone that the lease was cancelled and that officials would arrive the next day. Once the building changed hands, the administration was given 24 hours to remove generators, furniture and historical artefacts or have them, too, treated as government property.
Rector Dr Jonathan Addleton, who heads Forman Christian College University (FCCU), called it a “forcible takeover” in a video filmed outside the locked gates and posted on June 12; it drew more than 233,000 views within days. “Given its historical connections to Forman,” he said, “the past two days have involved considerable grief and more than a few tears.”
The timing sharpened the alarm. Thursday was ending; Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were not ordinary court days; and there was no guarantee of an immediate stay on Monday. Over the decades, the government has taken away much of Forman’s original property, so staff feared the hall could be demolished and folded into the ongoing beautification of the congested Neela Gumbad quarter before a court could intervene.
The stakes are high. For more than a century and a half, Forman has produced presidents and prime ministers, chief justices, scientists and diplomats — among them former military ruler General Pervez Musharraf, former prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, India’s former prime minister I. K. Gujral, former chief justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani and the late seasoned diplomat Jamsheed Marker. The college’s reach is one reason the takeover landed as a national story rather than a minority grievance; without it, the case might have drawn little attention beyond the community most directly affected.
The college also rejects the heart of the money claim. It says it was unfairly asked to pay rent for the years from 1975 to 2003, when Forman had been nationalised and was under government control, a period for which it argues, the state, not the mission, was responsible
Conservationists joined the protest. The Lahore Conservation Society Collective urged the government to drop any plan to acquire, demolish or irreversibly alter the building, noting that it is a protected heritage structure listed under the Punjab Special Premises (Preservation) Ordinance, 1985, and that revitalisation should mean restoration and adaptive reuse, not demolition. Architect Raza Ali Dada told Voicepk that the government’s own beautification of Neela Gumbad would be enriched, not undermined, by conserving and integrating Ewing Hall.
What the government says
The government tells a different story. Punjab Information Minister Azma Bokhari told Dawn on June 14 that the lease had expired and gone unrenewed for years, that no rent had been paid since 1975, and that the property had been reclaimed under the Lahore Heritage Area Revival Project to restore the city’s historic buildings.
The land, officials say, was leased strictly for education but had not served that purpose since 2015. According to a Board of Revenue document issued on April 27 and handed to the college only on June 10, the outstanding lease liability totals about Rs 107.79 million (roughly $387,000) — some Rs 29.19 million said to have accrued between 1975 and 2018, and a further Rs 78.59 million calculated for 2018 to 2026. So, the reasoning for cancelling the deed was handed down after taking possession of the building.
The Lahore Heritage Areas Revival Board has since denied that Ewing Hall will be demolished, saying the structure will be preserved and restored. “We deeply respect Forman Christian College and its long history of service to Pakistan,” one government statement said, adding respect for “the minority communities who hold this institution close to their hearts.”
The case the college makes
Forman’s account undercuts almost every premise of that case.
Far from abandoning the building, the university says it was in the middle of saving it. Worried about the structure’s age, the college spent more than Rs 4.6 million engaging consultants Ali Consultants and Building Standards Limited for a full structural assessment involving non-destructive and partially destructive testing and geotechnical investigation.
The report, completed in March 2026 and shared with the government’s heritage team, did not recommend demolition; it found the building could be repaired and reused, and the college had begun planning the work in phases, starting with the staff quarters. As early as April 1, 2025, a signboard had gone up at the gate reading “Ewing Hall (Boys Hostel), Forman Christian College — Renovation Work in Progress”, noting the college’s commitment to student housing “since 1916”, a document issued by the university notes. A building whose owner has publicly flagged it for renovation is a hard thing to call abandoned.
Nor was the takeover sudden, in the college’s telling — only its final act was. The pressure had built for fifteen months. In March 2025, revenue officials arrived believing the hall was empty and tried to enter; staff turned them away. The next day, a revenue delegation came to the registrar’s office with papers describing Ewing Hall as government property; the college produced its own Board of Revenue lease and handed over copies.
Through late 2025 and early 2026, teams from the Walled City of Lahore Authority sought permission to work on the external façade, and the college repeatedly asked for drawings, a scope of work and a bill of quantities before granting access to a protected building. A lease-hearing notice landed in April 2026. Then, on June 10, came the phone call, as per the document provided by the university.
The college also rejects the heart of the money claim. It says it was unfairly asked to pay rent for the years from 1975 to 2003, when Forman had been nationalised and was under government control, a period for which it argues, the state, not the mission, was responsible. And if the site is reserved for education, the university asks, why is it being charged what looks like commercial rent?
As for the charge that the hall sat unused since 2015, the college says it served as a student hostel well past that date, until structural safety concerns, the very concerns the government had raised, led to its vacation around 2018, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, after which the pandemic and a change of leadership slowed renovation planning.
The Forman educational heritage
To see what Ewing Hall means, we have to start with Forman.
Dr Charles William Forman, an American Presbyterian missionary, reached Lahore in 1849, soon after Punjab came under British rule. He gathered a handful of boys in the Rang Mahal quarter of the walled city and taught them under a banyan tree. Within a year, eighty pupils were enrolled — 55 Hindus, 22 Muslims and three Sikhs — at a school open to the children of Punjab, whatever their faith. It grew into the Rang Mahal Mission School; in 1864, a college was added, Christian Mission College, and, since Punjab University did not yet exist, it was affiliated to the distant University of Calcutta. It became one of the earliest centres of modern higher education, not just in Punjab but in North India.
In 1888, Dr James Caruthers Rhea Ewing became principal, and the following year the college moved to the Neela Gumbad area on Mall Road, the grand avenue the British were lining with Lahore’s most imposing buildings; the Viceroy of India himself came to inaugurate the new premises.
When Forman died in 1894, his body was brought to the school for the funeral service; the city gates were thrown open, and at least three thousand mourners of every faith joined his funeral procession, and the college was renamed in his honour: Forman Christian College. Ewing, who also served as vice-chancellor of Punjab University from 1910 to 1917, and after whom the hall is named, kept the college at the centre of Lahore’s intellectual life.
Forman was not refusing to preserve Ewing Hall — it was paying to do so, and had asked to do it alongside the government
The main campus moved again, to its present grounds on Ferozepur Road in 1940, but Ewing Hall remained on the original Mall Road land, serving generation after generation of students as a hostel. That is part of why the dispute stings: for Forman, Ewing Hall is not thirteen kanals and an old roof, but a piece of Punjab’s educational history and Lahore’s civic memory.
A tangled lease
The legal thread begins in 1915, when the land beneath Ewing Hall was leased for thirty years at Rs 1,200 a year, then renewed for another thirty, running to 1975. In 1972, the Pakistan Peoples Party government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto nationalised Christian educational institutions across the country — Rang Mahal School, Forman Christian College and Forman Girls’ High School among them — and the lease on Ewing Hall went unrenewed while the state ran these institutions. When it expired in 1975, the institution was in government hands.
That is the knot at the centre of the money dispute. If Forman had been nationalised, whose responsibility was it to renew the lease and pay the rent between 1975 and 2003 — the mission that had been stripped of the college, or the government that was running it? When General Pervez Musharraf’s administration denationalised Forman in 2003, the college received a university charter from the Punjab Assembly the following year — not everything came back.
By the college’s account, the historic Rang Mahal School and the nearby Forman Girls’ High School were never returned, and part of the Ferozepur Road campus was sold to a government laboratory; these, and many other Christian institutions, remain under state control to this day.
The lease, meanwhile, curdled into a billing dispute. In 2009, the then rector, Dr James Tebbe, asked the government to review it; the state did, but treated the unpaid rent since 1975 as an irregularity to be cleared, offering only a short renewal in the meantime. By 2015, the government was seeking some Rs 35 million in back rent up to 2018, even as it extended the lease into the 2040s. The college sought to settle on the basis that it should not be charged at commercial rates, nor for the decades when the state itself controlled the institution. This year, the demand climbed to roughly Rs 108 million, and then the building was simply taken.
The club that pays Rs 417 a month
Now set that against the Gymkhana.
Founded in 1887, the Lahore Gymkhana Club occupies roughly 112 acres over 1,100 kanals of prime state land bounded by The Mall, Jail Road and Zafar Ali Road, plus some three acres in Bagh-e-Jinnah that the lease does not even mention. Its colonial-era lease was extended in 1921, 1960 and again in 1996, five years before it was due to expire, to run from 2000 to 2050. The rent for all of it is Rs 5,000 a year — Rs 417 a month, a little over one US dollar.
On May 15, 2024, PML-N MPA Amjad Ali Javed moved an adjournment motion in the Punjab Assembly over the arrangement. Speaker Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan said he was astonished, refused to take Gymkhana membership himself, and warned that the club owed the government enormous sums.
Lawmakers from both benches put the land’s market value in the hundreds of billions of rupees. One recent estimate is about Rs 218 billion, against that token rent. In September 2024, the Speaker formed a special committee to reassess the lease and report within two months. Twenty-one months on, the committee has met exactly once and produced nothing.
There is a final, awkward symmetry. That committee was placed under PML-N MPA Samiullah Khan, the husband of Azma Bokhari, the same information minister who has defended the Ewing Hall takeover on grounds of unpaid rent and heritage. One spouse explains why a Christian college must surrender a heritage building over a rent bill; the other chairs the committee that cannot make the elite’s club pay Rs 417 plus a single rupee more.
One rule, and another
The contrast is not really about two leases. It is about whom the state treats gently and whom it treats as a problem to be cleared.
Punjab has a genuinely good record on parts of its heritage. The provincial government and its partners have restored Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim sites, gurdwaras and temples, Sufi shrines, Mughal gateways and forts, and rightly present this as a success. Lahore’s heritage belongs to no single faith or era. But the same principle has to extend to Christian heritage. If a gurdwara, a temple, a stupa and a shrine can be protected through partnership, a missionary college’s hall deserves the same respect and the same seat at the table.
That is what makes the manner of the takeover, not just the fact of it, so troubling. Restoration, if that is truly the aim, should build trust, not fear; it should open a conversation, not seize a building; it should keep a community attached to its heritage, not evict it. Forman was not refusing to preserve Ewing Hall — it was paying to do so, and had asked to do it alongside the government. For Punjab’s Christians, already keenly aware that the province’s largest religious minority holds not a single seat in its cabinet, an afternoon eviction reads less like conservation than like one more thing taken.