A divided movement: urban activists, NGOs, and the fault-lines of a peasant struggle

ABSTRACT

Contemporary rural social movements in South Asia are increasingly dependent on NGOs and urban civil society networks to expand their local struggle to the national and even international levels. This development has shifted the political dynamics of rural social movements in unexpected ways as NGOs and urban activists affiliated with civil society organizations have supplanted older Left oriented political parties and local elites as the primary media for funding, communication and outreach for livelihood struggles. This article analyzes the dramatic rise of the Punjab Tenants Association (hereafter AMP), the land rights movement that is resisting the Pakistan military’s policy to monetize state-owned military farmland in Punjab. The aim is to underscore the new possibilities of such a movement and highlight the contradictions that were experienced by AMP as a result of its close association with NGOs, urban activists and civil society networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Peasant movements
• neoliberalism
• NGOs
• Pakistan
• state effects

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Desmarais, Peasants speak-The Vía Campesina; also, Borras et al. “Towards a better Understanding of Global Land Grabbing.”

2. See Patel, “Food Sovereignty,” 663–706; Escobar, Territories of difference; and De la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes”, for their respective models to theorize contemporary rural peasant politics in the aftermath/or absence of international rural socialist politics and models to scale up their struggle from local struggle to national and even international theatre.

3. See Wolford, This Land is Our Land; Fabricant, Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced; and Copeland, “Linking Defence of Territory to Food Sovereignty.”

4. See Chaudhary and Kapoor, NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects.

5. See Wolford, This Land is Our Land, 12 for elaboration of external and internal hegemonies within social movement for land rights.

6. See Edelman, Social Movements: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics, for a discussion on different paradigms of land rights that veer from peasant politics of land redistribution to indigenous politics of recognition.

7. See Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 63. Tsing builds on Marx’s notion of ‘primitive accumulation’ and forwards the idea of salvage accumulation to argue that non-economic externalities (everything from photosynthesis, to child rearing) are central to the making of commodity chains.

8. See Ghosh, “Economies of Anticipation”, for a discussion of Nano car and the land dispossession associated with its manufacturing; Lerche and Shah, “Conjugated Oppression within Contemporary Capitalism; and Gidwani, “The Cultural Logic of Work,” 57.

9. See Yong, The Garrison State, 70–98.

10. See Akhtar and Karriaper, “Local Devolution and Okara Farmers Movement.” The military decided to terminate sharecropping on its farming estates in June 2000, when an audit of the military farm operations found a dramatic decline in revenue from Rs. 40.79 million ($67,983) in 1995–1996 to Rs.15.87 million ($26,450) in 1999–2000.

11. Cheema cited by Akhtar and Karriaper, “Local Devolution and Okara Farmers Movement.”

12. Fieldwork notes, 6/10/07. During the course of the correspondence, the tenants learned that the farmland did not belong to the Pakistan military but rather to the state of Punjab. The military had leased the land from the provincial government and its lease had expired in 1938 (it made the last payment in 1942). Moreover, there were no records available for billions of tons of wheat, sugarcane, corn and cotton that had been produced since the inception of the military farms in 1913.

13. Younus Iqbal, personal interview, 5/3/07.

14. Sajjad Haider, quoted by IRIN website: http://www.irinnews.org/report/18567/pakistan-focus-peasant-protest.

15. See Subramanian, Shorelines, 18.

16. See the following for a diverging debate on moral economy of Indian Peasant: Thompson, “The Moral Economy Reviewed,” 261; Scott, The moral economy of peasant, and Greenough, Indulgence and abundance as Asian peasant values, 832.

17. See Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 12: for a discussion by Prison Notebooks.

18. Dorosh, “Pakistan Promoting Rural Growth and Poverty Reduction (World Bank Report),” 50.

19. Farooq Tariq, personal interview, 7/6/07.

20. See Harvey, “Militant Particularism and Global Ambition,” 70.

21. Zafar Ali, personal interview, 3/15/07.

22. Bashir, personal interview, 3/15/07.

23. See Levien, “The Land Question,” 356; for a discussion on how social movements are tackling the politics of dispossession in India.

24. Baseera Bibi, personal interview, 10/13/07.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Latif, Abrar, and Hanif, focus group discussion, 10/5/07.

28. Ibid.

29. Bano lists a sum of $33,400 offered by Action Aid to AMP, which was first accepted by the AMP leadership and subsequently rejected and returned but there is no source or evidence cited to prove the amount received or rejected. See Bano, Breakdown in Pakistan, 149 .

30. Younus Iqbal, personal interview, 5/3/07. I didn’t find any archival evidence of aerial bombing in Sindh during the 1980’s MRD movement but the Pakistani state did use its air force and Iran’s support to suppress the Baloch insurgency in the 1970’s.

31. Younus Iqbal, personal interview, 5/3/07. Iqbal also told me about how when AMP representatives went to meet an American diplomat in Islamabad the representative knew all about the farm issue. She knew the rangers’ positions, the land topography, etc. According to Iqbal the embassy officer she told the AMP representatives that she knew that the main priest in the church in 10/L was cooperating with the army and that was unfortunate and that Americans also had agents in the rangers.

32. Taimur Rehman, personal interview, 8/10/07. Rehman the energetic leader of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party, confirmed that he helped fill out the application for the Action Aid grant for the Lahore office, but he also clarified that he advised against it and he worked on the grant as a favour in his personal capacity not through the party.

33. Other parties like Labour Party Pakistan, the Awami Party, Pakistan, the Workers Party. Several of these parties including PRM merged in 2012 to form Awami Workers Party.

34. Irfan, personal interview, 9/20/07 .

35. ibid.

36. Saqib, personal interview 9/23/07.

37. Akhtar, personal interview 10/3/07.

38. Sattar came in third during this election, the Okara provincial seat was won by candidate affiliated with Nawaz Sharif’s PML party. Sattar ran in subsequent elections for the Parliament position but he came in third in 2013 and 2015 losing both times to independent candidates. Sattar was arrested in 2016 for defying the newly imposed emergency rules that banned large gatherings and protests as a security measure. He was subsequently charged on 36 cases filed against him since 2003.

39. Akhtar, “The State as Landlord in Pakistani Punjab,” 495.

40. The literary critic Rob Nixon has coined the term ‘unimagined communities’ to refer to the erasure of the dispossessed communities who are simply written out of history after they are evicted from their land; See Nixon, Slow Violence, 150; Zaman and Ali, Bahria Town Karachi: Greed Unlimited, Dawn.com, 18 April 2016.