THE EtHICS OF STAYING S OUTH ASIA IN MOTION EDITOR Thomas Blom Hansen E DITORIAL BOARD Sanjib Baruah Anne Blackburn Satish Deshpande Faisal Devji Christophe Jaffrelot Naveeda Khan Stacey Leigh Pigg Mrinalini Sinha Ravi Vasudevan MUBBASHIR A. RIZVI THE EtHICS OF STAYING Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA S tanford University Press Stanford, California © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rizvi, Mubbashir A. (Mubbashir Abbas), author. Title: The ethics of staying : social movements and land rights politics in Pakistan / Mubbashir A. Rizvi. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Series: South Asia in motion | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018033656 (print) | LCCN 2018037789 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503608771 (electronic) | ISBN 9781503608092 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503608764 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Peasants—Political activity—Pakistan—Punjab. | Land tenure— Pakistan—Punjab. | Land reform—Pakistan—Punjab. | Social movements— Pakistan—Punjab. | Civil-military relations—Pakistan—Punjab. Classification: LCC HD1537.P18 (ebook) | LCC HD1537.P18 R59 2019 (print) | DDC 333.3/154914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033656 Typeset by Newgen in 11/14 Adobe Caslon Pro Cover design by Angela Moody Cover photo: Checkpoint in tenants’ fields. Author photo. CNONTE TS Preface: From Farmers to Terrorists vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Masters, Not Friends 1 1 Politics as Process in Okara Military Farms 30 2 TheA fterlife of Colonial Infrastructure 57 3 What Remains Buried Under Property? 81 4 Movement and Mobilization 99 5 Solidarities, Fault Lines, and the Scale of Struggle 128 Coda: The Ethics of Staying 156 Notes 169 References 181 Index 191 This page intentionally left blank PREFACE From Farmers to Terrorists “Do you know that you are sitting in a room full of terrorists?” Hanif ’s unexpected remark caught me by surprise as I reached into my backpack to retrieve a pen and a notepad. The room full of men and elderly women burst into laughter as people debated who was the most dangerous terrorist in the room. Was it the elder Munir, or Maryam Bibi, or her daughter-in-law? Hanif was mocking the anti-terror criminal cases (ATC section 7) registered against him and thousands of peasant farmers for resisting the Pakistani military’s policy to monetize land relations on state-owned military farms. I was attending a gathering of a local chapter of the Punjab Tenants Association (Anjuman Mazarin Punjab; AMP) to discuss an upcoming meeting with state officials and military officers. TheA MP has been resisting the Pakistan military’s unilateral plans for farmlands for the past twenty years. Hanif ’s joke lifted the gloomy mood on that emotional afternoon in April 2008. There was nervous energy in the air as tenant leaders discussed the upcoming meeting with the military officers; the AMP was com- ing under pressure after a protracted détente that lasted four years, and military authorities were installing new checkpoints, fences, and gates at the southeastern perimeter of their village. Hanif struck a chord with the gathering by calling out the absurdity of the state’s attempt to brand ten- ant farmers as terrorists, while also acknowledging the troubling feeling that this might be the start of a new campaign of intimidation. Hanif ’s joke was prescient; a series of extrajudicial measures and anti- terror codes, such as the 2014 Pakistan Protection Act and the National Action Plan, have been used to criminalize and arrest the AMP leadership. TheA MP was formed in the summer of 2000 to resist the Pakistan military’s unilateral policy to monetize land relations on the vast state- owned military farms (approximately seventy thousand acres) throughout viii Preface Punjab. The army sought to replace the century-old practice of rent-in- kind sharecropping with a cash-based land lease program. This obscure change in land tenure policy led to the largest rural peasant mobilization in postcolonial Punjab. The announcement came after years of whirling rumors about the military’s legal rights over these farms, and there was great speculation about the future of these farms. The tenants’ doubt was intensified by military investigation into the dramatic decline in farm revenue from 40.79 million rupees in 1995–1996 to 15.87 million ru- pees in 1999–2000 (Akhter and Karriaper 2009). The audit of these ob- scure military farming estates gained a new urgency because its findings were made shortly after the military coup in 1999, when General Pervez Musharraf dismissed Nawaz Sharif ’s elected parliamentary government over charges of corruption. At that time, General Musharraf was able to cast his regime as different from past military regimes by invoking the discourse of open market reforms, transparent governance, and tech- nocratic rule tempered with moderation (Liberalism) to ensure a proper transition to democracy. General Musharraf traded in his military uni- form for business suits as he fashioned himself as the “CEO” of Pakistan, a military leader fit to take Pakistan into the neoliberal age. Farid Daula, the widely respected elder leader of the AMP, recalled the suspense and the rumors surrounding President Musharraf ’s inten- tions when the military was reviewing the military farms operations. “I heard that the jarnails [common Urdu pronunciation of “general”] were about to sell the land to Lever Brothers Company” (interview by the author, June 3, 2004, Okara Military Farms). Other tenants disagreed vehemently, Farid recalled; some tenants even speculated that General Musharraf wanted to establish his reputation and gain popular support in Punjab by redistributing the land to tenant farmers. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, this obscure meeting in the park grounds of Okara in June 2000 would spark the rise of the largest peasant mobilization in Punjab since 1947. General Qamar Zaman Chatha, the military officer in charge of in- vestigating the decline in military farms revenue, surprised the tenants at the large gathering of tenant farmers in Okara City with his findings. He announced that the military farm operations were rife with corruption Preface ix and that the farm management had been stealing harvest revenue from sharecroppers and selling the produce in the market while blaming the tenant farmers for huge losses. According to my interlocutors, this was the first time any official had recognized what the peasant farmers had been complaining about all along, and it reflected the new style of “trans- parent” governance and straight talk championed by General Musharraf. After stating his initial findings, General Chatha announced the im- plementation of a new land tenure system that would replace the existing system of battai (sharecropping, rent in kind) with a new, cash-based sys- tem of land tenure. The new tenure system was designed to “end the cul- ture of corruption” (baimani) and poverty in these farms. He announced that the new land tenure system was the first step in the impending pro- grams of development involving “model villages,” clinics, and schools. This was a unilateral decision made by the military, and the new lease system was scheduled to start at the end of the month. The reform program got a mixed response from the farmers. Better- off farmers likeF arid Daula (a prominent elder and a well-to-do farmer from the village Chak 45/3 R)1 were at first supportive of the plan. As he put it, “We were happy [to hear about the end of sharecropping] because there has been so much oppression [zulm] here, and we were finally going to be free of this servitude [ghulami]” (interview by the author, June 4, 2004).2 The existing battai tenure system was widely disliked. According to this system, the tenant farmers had to surrender half of their harvest to village administrators, who were supposed to provide inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and water. This sharecropping system left the tenant farmers susceptible to rent-seeking by farm managers. According to the AMP, the farm managers (chaks-in-charge) routinely inflated crop estimates, stole from the farmers’ harvests, and intimidated the peasants with fines.H owever, other less-well-to-do farmers like Ghulam Rasool were concerned about the full implications of a cash-based land tenure system. They feared that they would be subject to eviction if they failed to pay cash rents on time. The old battai system, even if it proved to be ex- ploitive, guaranteed usufruct (permanent land use rights) to tenant farm- ers and occupancy rights to their houses in the village, as outlined in the 1887 Punjab Tenancy Act.3 The sudden change in land relations in the x Preface military farms generated great distress among tenant farmers who had tilled this land for a century under sharecropping. As Younus, an AMP activist put it, “The new cash lease system did not guarantee our land rights. We learned that as soon as we accept this con- tract system, they will start to throw us out of these lands. We found this out through our sources. We established contacts in the revenue office to get this information, with a little help from Quaid-eA zam [eu- phemism for money bribe] . and they [the revenue officials] told us not to sign the contract because the army wants to move us out to sell plots” (interview by the author, May 3, 2007).