Between militants and “mafia”: Interrupting dispossession in rural Pakistan

Abstract

In 2000, one of Pakistan’s largest social movements began: a tenant struggle for land rights on the country’s military farms. Though the military tried to subdue the movement, it eventually succeeded insofar as many tenants stopped paying rent. As a result, villagers experienced a generalized (albeit uneven) prosperity. Certain movement leaders, in particular, became especially wealthy, relocating from their mud houses to big bungalows, replacing their motorbikes with SUVs, and transitioning from tenant farming to lucrative businesses in nearby cities. They also started moving around with armed security, allying with urban elites, and entering Pakistan’s major political parties. Rumors also began spreading that some leaders were using violence or intimidation to accumulate this political-economic power. In the movement’s afterlife, ordinary villagers began to wonder: were their leaders still committed to militantly pursuing villagers’ collective interests? Or were they now using the movement for their own private, even criminal, ambitions?

Combating Land Grabbing in Pakistan: Legal Challenges and Reforms

“…Land grabbers in Pakistan don't play fair at all; they use all sorts of sneaky and even strong-arm tactics to get what they want: They mess around with land records and property documents to pretend they own land that's not really theirs, which makes it super hard for the real owners to claim their rights (Raza, 2020).…”

Agrarian change, populism, and a new farmers' movement in 21st century Pakistani Punjab

“…These movements were populist because tenants do not usually comprise a single class but are differentiated like other peasants by varying access to land, capital, and so on and moreover because these movements involved substantial participation of landless labourers. Yet, victories around de facto land and tenancy reforms appear to have disproportionately benefited the richer tenants over poorer tenants and landless members of the movements (Ali, 2020; Raza, 2020; Rizvi, 2019). The absence and inadequacy of “corps of cadres” (Borras, 2020, p. 27) in independently organizing landless labourer members of such coalitions may have been a determining factor in explaining why the latter were less able to wrestle benefits and why these movements did not ultimately give rise to newer generations of activists and cadres.…”

“…The PKI is "new" in the Pakistani context because it uses militant tactics to pursue the interests of owner-cultivators and populist because it brings together different rural classes and groups together to do so. Critical studies of agrarian movements in Pakistan have largely focused on left-leaning tenants' struggles for land rights, such as in the AFTAB And ALI 1970s in the North-West Frontier Province and South Punjab (Ali, 2020;Ali & Raza, 2022;Raza, 2022) and in the 2000s on military farms in central Punjab (Akhtar, 2006;Raza, 2020;Rizvi, 2019). But by 2010, tenancy had declined considerably in Punjab and over 90% of farms were operated by owners or owner-cum-tenants (see Table 2).…”