Class conflict, state terrorism and the Pakistani military: the Okara Military Farms dispute

Abstract

In their dispute with their tenants, in what is known as the Okara Military Farms dispute, army landlords in the Punjab province of Pakistan resorted to state terrorism conducted by paramilitary troops, in alliance with other state agencies, in an unsuccessful attempt to break farmer resistance to attempts to remove their security of tenure. Analysis of the dispute provides strong support for the argument that state violence can, in some instances, be categorised as a specific form of terrorism. The article, therefore, aims to contribute to the growing literature on state terrorism which has been neglected as a legitimate and important topic for scholarly inquiry.

Keywords:

• state terrorism
• Pakistan
• military
• farmers
• class conflict

Notes

1. 1. The best study of the economic development of Punjab during British rule and its political consequences is Ali (1988).

2. 2. The very large proportion of Christians living in Okara, which is highly unusual in Pakistan, is a consequence of the British administrators, possibly influenced by Christian missionaries, strongly encouraging poor Christians to migrate to the district to take advantage of the economic opportunities with the opening up of the wastelands in the region.

3. 3. Although the Pakistan People’s party originally claimed to be a socialist oriented party which supported labour and farmer organisations, it had became under Benazir Bhutto’s leadership virtually the property of the Bhutto family and was dominated by the same powerful landlord class, allied to the military and senior bureaucracy, which controls other political parties in Pakistan (see Murphy in press).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eamon Murphy

Eamon Murphy is Adjunct Professor, History and International Relations, School of Social Sciences and Asian Languages, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. His main research interest is the relationship between religion and terrorism in South Asia. His latest major publications are The Making of Terrorism in Pakistan: Historical and Social Roots of Extremism (Abingdon: Routledge, in press); and Jackson, R., Murphy, E. and Poynting, S., eds., Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).