Land Reforms Are Dead, Long Live Land Reforms: Thoughts on Land Struggles in Pakistan
By juxtaposing communist-led land-to-the-tiller struggles in 1970s Pakistan with current movements against real-estatization, we see the prospects and limits of redistributive land politics.
Affectees of the Ravi City project stage a protest, holding placards that read: “Rulers listen, we would give our lives for justice.” Image: Effect of RUDA (Facebook)
Over the last few years, struggles over land have attracted the attention of journalists and progressive activists, often because at issue is mass displacement. Important cases, like those of Bahria Town in Karachi or the Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) north of Lahore, kick people off of rural and generally agricultural land for real estate development. The purchase of land sometimes involves force and often involves corruption, with real estate developers colluding with government agencies at the highest levels. Many of those facing displacement resist in different ways. Indeed, small and large struggles over land, property and nature take place just about every day in Pakistan. And they are often violent, as a lot of wealth is at stake.
Struggles over land raise important questions for progressives, if we imagine (for a moment) that we are situated outside of rural areas. Instincts suggest that we should side with those facing the threat of displacement. While I think this is basically correct, progressives should think about what, exactly, it is that they are defending. First, what are the class interests at stake within rural society? Against approaches that stereotype or simplify rural societies, we must insist that these are not communities where interests are more or less the same, and must therefore consider the implications of different interests on movements. Second, how does opposing land dispossession fit into rural and agrarian development more broadly? Simply ensuring lands remain with existing cultivators ensures neither social justice nor an adequate progressive horizon. Taking the two together, another question: how does addressing cultivator’s immediate issues and forging class alliances between them further the longer-term horizons for activists?
Thinking through earlier struggles over land and their consequences, and the parallels they may hold with today’s movements, can help us approach these questions. I draw from my research on the Frontier Peasant Movement of the 1970s, which was led by the communist Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), and whose epicenter was in the Hashtnagar region of what is now District Charsadda in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. I have also visited and had discussions with some of the current actors resisting RUDA-led dispossession north of Lahore.
Residents protest against the RUDA project fearing displacement and unemployment. Image: Mashal Baloch via The Guardian
Although there are similarities, it is also important to note that these are rather different types of struggle. In Charsadda, landowners (often very large ones) were trying to displace their tenants and landless labourers as part of the “Green Revolution”, which entailed the use of tractors, new seeds and chemical fertilizers. The movement of tenant farmers of District Okara in Punjab that sparked off in 2000 may have been the last of such struggles—officially, at least, tenancy has steadily declined through the decades in Punjab and KP. The RUDA case is a movement of landowners facing state-led displacement, with more or less support from tenants and landless labourers. Whereas the tenant movements of the 1960s and 70s provoked redistributive land and tenancy reforms at a national level (mostly unsuccessful, it is true), the current movements against displacement have not fed into a clear national program—but, as I discuss below, land reforms are not a clear program either.
A Hundred Khans Where Once There Was One
Back in the 1960s, the government of Pakistan under military ruler Ayub Khan introduced “Green Revolution” technologies (high yield seeds, chemical fertilizers) that were best used with tractors and greater water input. If one farmer could cultivate 12.5 acres of irrigated land with a pair of bullocks, a tractor could do much, much more. For landowners, it was more cost effective to hire wage labourers than to rent out land to tenants. By all accounts, tens if not hundreds of thousands of tenants were evicted from their lands in Punjab and the then North-West Frontier Province in the late 1960s and through the 1970s.
Artwork from the 1970s party circular of the Mazdoor Kisan Party, stating “Freedom: The one who tills is the one who shall eat.”
The northern Hashtnagar region of Tehsil Charsadda was the epicenter in 1970 of what became a massive movement of tenants and landless labourers against evictions (ejectments in Pakistani legalese). Led by the MKP, the movement often succeeded in preventing ejectments, especially in northern Hashtnagar and adjoining regions of Malakand and Mardan. The Hashtnagar or Frontier Peasant Movement became an inspiration for progressives, peasants and working classes throughout Pakistan.
And for good reason. Tenants not only kept their lands, many also stopped paying rent for three years. They also withheld other arbitrary taxes and refused to do unpaid labour (begar) for landlords any longer. Many tenants thus achieved significant upward mobility, that is, they got richer (or less poor), but here the movement also ran into problems.
First, tenants or peasants or rural cultivators are not a single class. They are a social group within which multiple classes exist. Many tenants in northern Hashtnagar were already very well-to-do “rich peasants”. They owned their own land, in addition to those they rented from landowners, and so could hire-in labour. Some also had considerable local business interests, while others were even functionaries or managers of landlords. Meanwhile, “middle peasants” farmed mostly using family labour, while “poor peasants” did not have enough land or capital, and so had to seek off-farm income in addition to farming.
Photograph from an MKP meeting in the 1970s. Image:Participedia
Then there were the many landless labourers. Many of them used to possess land, but the movement had not succeeded in preventing their ejectments, or had come too late to do so. By the early 1970s, a huge chunk of people in the Hashtnagar area, possibly half, had no possession of agricultural land whatsoever. They lived on homesteads that belonged to the landlords and they worked landlord or tenant fields, often taking care of cattle. Many of them were just recently made landless, so it could be that one brother had land, the other brother didn't, and the third brother was in a city doing something else. In rural societies, land ownership or even possession often determines respect, dignity, status, and, of course, power. Those tenants possessing land often treated the landless poorly, lording over them not unlike landlords did over tenants.
“where once there was one Khan, there are now a hundred Khans.”
The landlord exploitation was so bad that the landless joined the peasant movement in great numbers, but often did not end up with any land. The MKP tried to negotiate for tenants to give a portion of their land to landless labourers, and some of them did get that land, but most did not. Many landless labourers did come out with one good thing: they no longer had to pay rent on homesteads, which enabled them to achieve a kind of freedom from landlords. Nevertheless, the success of the anti-dispossession movement in Hashtnagar did not lead to an equal distribution of the land.
In fact, the movement enabled greater peasant differentiation, where the richer peasants now had this larger pool of rural labour available to them for hire, to aid their farming and therefore their surplus accumulation. This had gendered effects, too, as many “middle peasant” households could achieve their honor by replacing their female labour with hired male labour. As richer peasants continued their discrimination against the landless, Sher Ali Bacha, one of the key MKP leaders, noted that “where once there was one Khan [Pashto term of status for landlords], there are now a hundred Khans.”
A peasant gathering organized by MKP during the 1970s. Image: Revolutionary Papers
In addition to landless labourers, women in tenant families did not get their own rights to the land. In Pakistan generally, women don’t get rights to land. They get “bought out” of these rights in the form of dowry at marriage (which women may not ultimately control as an independent economic resource). Or they may get a payment from harvest outputs from their brothers, who manage the land in lieu of her own independent control. Land and property ownership passes from father to sons, which forms the basis of an often violent patriarchal order, as the MKP also observed in Hashtnagar. Leaders noted just how awful men could be to the women—marriage often a means of acquiring one more bonded “worker.”
These limitations of the movement were, in many ways, also limitations of the MKP. It did not have sufficiently trained cadre to actually lead, guide and shape the outcomes of the movement. The party could not wrest control from rich peasants, or discipline them. Nor could it concertedly confront patriarchal control (though when it came to women’s landownership, the party itself was mostly silent).
Moving to contemporary Lahore, it is clear that in the RUDA areas there is considerable differentiation among farmers. The entire targeted area encompasses over 100,000 acres of land, with many different kinds of social relations. One key anti-dispossession activist owns 350 acres and is the local chaudhury (headman). Many in the area, including those who rent or work on his land, come to him for key political decisions (like who to vote for). Other farmers are much smaller—with 3 or 7 acres for example—and there are many among the landless. Many of these landless are bonded to richer landowners through indebtedness, and also belong to marginalized caste groups and face domination and discrimination along these lines. Whether and how women of landed families make claims on land rights is unclear to me, but most women are landless. We need better qualitative and quantitative understanding of all these differences (through surveys or participatory rural assessments, for example).
A model of the proposed $7 billion Dubai style Ravi Development Project. Image: RUDA
One local left activist, a worker with a few acres of land he has not yet cultivated for lack of investment funds, was explaining to me the seriousness with which he took the struggle against RUDA. I asked him at some point about the attitudes of landless labourers in his area. He noted that they are indifferent, and some would even be happy to have the land sold to RUDA because of how the small landowners treat them—with disdain, not giving them part of the fodder for cattle, etc. If small landowners don’t care for the landless, why should the latter care for the former?
Yet not all the landless are indifferent to or supportive of the RUDA project. After my conversation with the local left activist, I met some landless workers, who were just sitting on the side of the road behind a mosque. They told me they would have nowhere else to go if RUDA built a city here. Their livelihood, community, networks of social support were all here—all what they will lose cannot even be summed up in numbers. This is also the nub of the problem: Many landowners may be protesting RUDA largely so that they can get better terms of compensation from the government or private investors. But what compensation will those who own no land get for everything that they will lose?
Understanding attitudes to RUDA is not as simple as projecting from class position, but also requires understanding competing interests generated from how classes relate to each other in specific areas. Not all will benefit in equal ways if the project is successfully resisted, or if success is defined in terms of better compensation. It is not sufficient to be against displacement (which, let’s be clear, is an immensely difficult task in and of itself). It is also important to envision productive futures based on principles of equality, and to build the kind of organization needed to achieve them.
“Se Ghwaray? Zamaka, Zamaka.”
Land reform is supposed to be dead. In 1989, a majority opinion of the Federal Shariat Court declared, controversially, that uncompensated and mandatory land redistribution was against Islam. The ruling reflected a global tide against socialism and national liberation struggles, and a reassertion of capitalist ideas through neoliberal structural adjustment programs. Yet, the Pakistani state continues to engage in a form of land reforms: pressing farmers, sometimes quite violently, to give up their lands and redistribute them to real estate developers, as in Bahria Town. In 2000, a military government sought a form of redistribution of land rights away from farmers in Okara.
“Development of political consciousness requires multiple, concrete demands integrated into a broader national project.”
Of course, this is an inegalitarian land reform. It suggests that the kind of political coalition doesn't exist for that old school, egalitarian kind of land reform. It could exist, but not yet. But what would we do with land reforms in Pakistan? This should actually lead us to ask about the role of agriculture in Pakistan’s society, economy and ecology.
The military operation against peasants at the Okara military farms that began in 2000 have resulted in 13 deaths and over 2,000 arrests. Image: Peoples Dispatch
When I was doing fieldwork in Hashtnagar, I spoke to activists of different remaining factions of the MKP, who said that in the 1970s the struggle was only over land. The party slogan was a call and response: “Se ghwaray?” (what do you want?), “Zamaka! Zamaka!” (Land! Land!). They complained that leaders did not raise concerns or consciousness beyond land: stuff like gas, electricity, schools, etc. This is not entirely fair: MKP leaders frequently spoke of wide ranging national and international issues. But the kinds of issues activists now raise around service delivery do point to the insufficiency even of land reforms. Development of political consciousness requires multiple, concrete demands integrated into a broader national project.
A struggle for land requires, ultimately, an understanding of what we want to do with that land. It is not sufficient to leave it to current uses, as these are not necessarily rational as far as social and national needs are concerned. A capitalist farmer may produce cash crops or set up a dairy farm that is very profitable, but that may mean diverting fertile land from human food production to cattle feed, for example. As that capitalist farmer expands his business, which requires more land, he may then displace those who lease his land and replace them with poorly paid waged labour—perhaps even bonded labour. The process of displacement is not simply one that real estate developers are engaging in.
We need to locate land in broader questions of food security and sovereignty. For the last couple of years, Pakistan has been facing shortages of wheat, raising its price and requiring hundreds of millions USD worth of imports. If the government imports, it has to spend money it does not have, and so goes further into debt, especially as it spends in foreign exchange that our nation then has to borrow from others. But Pakistan is also consistently among the world’s largest importers of daal and channa (lentils and chickpeas). We import close to two billion USD worth of edible oil year after year. Thomas Sankara once told an audience to look no further than their plates if they wanted to see imperialism. Pakistan’s perpetual dependence on foreign loans and its current harsh negotiations with the IMF have a lot to do with how much food we import. It is food we could, in other circumstances, be growing ourselves. I don’t know what all those circumstances are, but we need to figure them out.
It’s not just about balancing international payments, though. We need to increase access to a diverse set of foods locally and across the country. As of 2018, four in ten children under the age of five in Pakistan suffered from stunting – limiting their physical and mental development because they weren’t getting adequately nutritious diets. You can bet those kids were mostly poor, as the latter don’t have access to all of the micronutrients you get from a diverse set of foods. That makes their bodies less resilient to infection and disease. That ties into access to clean water, which far too many people do not have – waterborne diseases are among the leading causes of death in Pakistan.
Beyond this, agriculture in Pakistan is often not ecologically sustainable, and is being strained further with climate change. In upland (northern) Balochistan, for example, natural springs have dried out or are drying for want of rain. Tube wells that draw water from underground have tapped so much water that, where once they could get water at 100 feet, they now have to go down to 1000 feet. Soon, there will literally be no water left. In much of canal irrigated Punjab, farmers use so much water, without adequate drainage, that it draws salt into the soil. That degrades soil quality, diminishing yields.
For many people, large scale commercial agriculture is a solution because it can be more productive. But, as I’ve noted, leaving things to the individual choices of profit-seeking rational farmers is not always the best idea from a national perspective. Large scale farming typically dispossesses smallholders, most of whom are not re-absorbed as labourers due to mechanization. Displaced people then go to cities where they face overcrowding and difficulties in pulling together livelihoods, and where urban development for the rich has also caused several ecological catastrophes, like the vanishing of rivers and flash flooding in Karachi. Again, many development economists think urbanization is a good thing that will lead to higher incomes, as opposed to seeing it as the consequence of people losing land and collectively sustainable livelihoods.
What plan does Pakistan’s ruling class or liberal intelligentsia have for ensuring that people are well fed and employed, and that our country’s many complex ecologies are nurtured, other than maintaining a broken agricultural system or thinking the free market will solve everything? Left activism around land has to incorporate some kind of plan to raise consciousness and develop concrete programs around issues of food sovereignty and security. Land reform is key – it is necessary, it is the base, nothing happens without that – but it is only one pillar in a broader program of agrarian reform.
How do we ensure that redistribution of land is equitable and truly lifts the currently landless? How do we support agriculture and make rural areas attractive to live and work in? How do we develop ecologically-appropriate technologies to make smallholder farming easier and more remunerative? How do we understand and serve the nutritional needs of our diverse populations? How do we connect agricultural production to sustainable industrialization? These are political, economic, social, cultural and technical problems we could and should be thinking about—and acting upon.
Between Now and After
How do progressives square the immediate issues of displacement and other forms of rural struggle with the question of what comes after —whether in terms of class and social relations, or the program we have for our future?
“They [poorer classes] will have to generate time, money and, most importantly, these things will come from social connections they build with each other—organization, in other words.”
In terms of class and social relations: in the immediate, struggles often require the leadership (meaning time, money, and social connections) of the relatively well-to-do—both from outside and inside rural societies. This is because the poorer you get, the less you have of time, money and social connections—or, rather, social connections to powerful forces. But when richer peasants or farmers lead a movement, they often end up dominating the benefits if it succeeds—or even if it doesn’t, they can get out relatively less scathed through compromises or negotiations.
But if poorer classes do not have time, money and social connections then it is also true that their liberation will not come from any outside agency. They will have to generate time, money and, most importantly, these things will come from social connections they build with each other—organization, in other words. To some extent, that organization needs to be built and populated by cadre—ideologically trained people steeled in struggle, ready for the next one. More important than victory or defeat in any one struggle is whether progressives can pull out more people (particularly from the lower classes) than they brought in, and whether they can honestly and systematically assess the successes and failures of the struggle, so that they can do better next time. This is very hard, to say the least, but it is necessary to counter the influence and power of the richer members of rural (and urban) society, both in the course of struggle and afterward.
As struggles are dominated by the well-to-do with more resources, progressives shouldn’t merely work through them. They also need to identify those proletarian elements, lower and deeper, who are activated, meaning who are influencing and pulling people around them, to work with them to build new capacities and ideas. In order to be able to press, in the long term, the needs of lower classes, progressives need to figure out what it means to help organizational development. The point is not to dip in and out or put up paper organizations for the social media careers of a few, but to build deeply rooted and ideologically inclined organizations.
These cadre, these organizations, may well be the link between the immediacy of displacement and the broader program that it is our duty to struggle for. Amilcar Cabral noted that people struggle around material issues and not around grand theoretical ideas. But in Nepal, Maoists told me that they explained, sometimes hurriedly and sometimes patiently, to people they were struggling with that the ultimate cause of their exploitation was the structure of the state and that the solution was its overthrow. In the Philippines, Maoists never tire of relating immediate concerns with the big questions of “semi-feudalism, the bureaucratic/big bourgeoisie, and imperialism.”
The point, ultimately, is not just to think of struggle, but to think of what comes after it.
Noaman G. Ali is Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. His research and teaching concerns the political economy of underdevelopment, particularly the relationship between rural movements, institutions and agrarian change. Noaman has published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Journal of Agrarian Change and Rethinking Marxism, and he has also written for Tanqeed.