2019.23: Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, When a Movement Stops Moving: The Okara Peasant Struggle Twenty Years On

Twenty years ago, a unique peasant movement pitching sharecropping tenants tilling state land against Pakistan’s military, the country’s  most powerful entity and, by all accounts,  biggest landlord, erupted in the  province of Punjab. The tenant farmers organized under the umbrella of the Anjuman Mazarain Punjab – AMP (Tenants Movement of Punjab), with which I was very closely associated since soon after its inception in 2000. At the time I was based in Rawalpindi, some 400 kilometers north of Okara, which was the center of the tenant uprising, and supported the AMP along with other comrades from the platform of the People’s Rights Movement (PRM), a  political organization that had also been formed around the same time.[1] PRM was active with a number of class-based movements in the early 2000s, including the All-Pakistan Alliance for Katchi Abadis, which struggled against evictions of informal squatter settlements in many of Pakistan’s cities, as well as public sector trade unions in the railways and telecommunications sectors fighting against privatization.

That was a time when  private television channels and the Internet as  sites of activism were novel phenomena, and the fact of myself and other PRM members being young and  foreign-educated gave us an edge in the use of these new technological mediums to disseminate a counter-narrative to that propagated by the military and other state institutions against the Okara farmers, and other popular movements which we  supported.

Our particular positionalities became the subject of study for a number of  Pakistani academics.[2]  One scholar  critically interrogated the position of individuals like myself, euphemistically referred to as “urban activists.”  In my own writing about the movement, my primary objective was to highlight the distinct histories of tenant farmers on state-owned land in a region where individual peasant proprietorship was the norm, all while celebrating the movement’s successes, and, in so doing, I hoped, to contribute to its longevity.[3] Fourteen years on, and with the objective situation having changed considerably, I present here a more nuanced and critical view of the movement – as well as my role as an ‘urban activist’ facilitating it – which I hope will both enrich the CAS archive, while contributing more generally to the field of critical rural development studies.

What happened to the Okara farmers?

It is odd how often we – and I mean both academics and activists – overlook the obviousness of the word “movement” in our analyses. Simply put, a movement   destabilizes an entrenched material structure (and/or discourse), thereby literally making it move. So a social movement,  broadly defined, is a constellation of social forces that has organized politically to force change in the status quo. In the case of Okara’s peasant farmers, the AMP and its allies challenged a century-old structure of tenure relations on the twenty-four villages of the 17,000 acre Okara military farms,  overturning what was previously the largely unchallenged authority of the army personnel who administered the farms. More specifically, the movement was triggered by the military farm authorities’ announcement that the established share-tenancy arrangement was to be replaced by a rent-in-cash system that would  be annually reviewed. Mobilizing  under the banner of the AMP, the tenants resisted this change, believing that it was a precursor to eventual eviction.  The struggle  evolved rapidly: “while the movement initially started out as a rejection of the contract proposal, once aware that the army itself was neither the legal owner nor the lessee of the land, it turned into a struggle for the ownership rights of the land itself.”[4]

Today, this  demand for ownership rights is still pending, yet in my analysis of fourteen  years ago, I concluded that, “the movement has been successful in securing its immediate objective: retaining control over the land and maintaining economic security. Tenants have not surrendered harvest shares to the authorities for the six years since the beginning of the conflict, thereby gaining economically as well as ideologically from the process of struggle.”[5]  Indeed, Okara’s peasant farmers still retain possession of their land  as de facto owners by virtue of the fact that a majority of them no longer engage with the state as landlord in any way. Instead, they enjoying complete decision-making authority over crop patterns and inputs, and, most importantly, retain their  harvests.  

Another major success of the movement which I asserted at the time was that it “amounts to the most important process of questioning the role of the postcolonial state in decades….. [and] is perceived as a symbol of the resentment that a majority of Pakistanis feel towards the army and its growing corporate empire.”[6] Indeed, by 2008, the military regime  that had ruled since 1999 was forced from power by mass protests, with the army’s land-grabbing and other economic activities amongst the biggest causes of public disaffection. In 2000, there was virtually no criticism of either the government or the corporate interests of military personnel, so the AMP unquestionably played a pioneering role in this regard.[7]

However, my claim that the movement succeeded because of a shared subjectivity among all Okara villagers proved to be accurate only for that particular conjuncture. I argued that both long-term historical memories and the events leading up to the revolt precipitated the emergence of:

…a common political consciousness uniting better-off and poor tenants as well as wage labourers. Differences of quom, biraderi and religion have not prevented the development of this political consciousness, even if some of the tensions latent on the farms, particularly between the Muslim majority and the Christian community are still apparent in daily life.[8]

In the fourteen years since then any common political consciousness which united the residents of the Okara military farm villages has fragmented and familiar political alignments based on historical cleavages of class, quom, biraderi and religion have resurfaced, even while Okara villagers on the whole continue to enjoy the material fruits of continued land occupation and the various multiplier effects of de facto proprietary rights.

When a movement stops moving

To return to my point about the movement: at the peak of its power, the AMP signified a major break with established social hierarchies. While the majoritarian land-cultivating caste of Arains, around which most political alignments took place prior to the revolt, was not necessarily displaced during the years of  social movement, it clearly acquiesced to a less dominant role in decision-making affairs within the AMP, with the most prominent such realignment being the enhanced position of Christians. The first general secretary of AMP was a Christian, Younis Iqbal, who remained influential long after divisions between himself and his supporters on the one hand and Muslim Arain  supporters on the other developed within the ranks of the movement.

In the course of many daily interactions with ordinary Muslim villagers  during the most intense years of mobilization (2000-2006)  there was constant discussion about undoing entrenched social hierarchies, and how even the language of the movement was breaking with such hierarchies, shown in a  decrease in derogatory commentary toward  kammi (service) castes and Christians of particular note.

Such derogatory commentary, wider practices of discrimination, and political factionalism more generally,  intensified again in the post-2006 years.  By 2007 the AMP had fragmented into two distinct factions. According to Rizvi,  caste, religious, and other fissures did not disappear as much as become dormant during the peak years of the movement, as the threat of eviction brought all residents of the Okara farms together.[9]  I concur that conflicts between external supporters of the movement and AMP leaders – particularly over funding from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – were not  beneficial for the AMP’s unity and the wider cause of the Okara peasants. Yet it is important not to overstate this particular subjective factor. Indeed, my primary instinct as an urban activist was to unite the wider community of the Okara villages, across class, biraderi/quom, and religious lines, at times perhaps naively so.  I was motivated by a desire to show that  tenant farmers – and the large number of non-agriculturalists residing in the Okara villages – had a distinct political consciousness:

The fact that the authority relationship on the farm was far more pronounced between the administration and all classes of peasants/labourers and far less so between the peasants/labourers themselves, in spite of the latter not sharing the same class background in terms of relations of production, goes a long way towards explaining the development of a united front against a common adversary. Broadly speaking, all of the residents on the farms appeared to associate their livelihood and culture – indeed, very existence itself – with continued access to land.[10]

Hindsight confirms that this confluence of material and discursive interests would not necessarily persist, and that, perhaps, represents the risk of  the “strategic ethnographic refusal” by academic-activists “required to sustain the symbolic unity of a political movement in the face of real differences and splits that make up the movement.”[11]

Yet as an insider I can  testify to  how much time and energy was expended by urban activists  as well as many of the Okara villagers  to constantly push back against internal hierarchies; these efforts were relatively more successful during the movement’s peak, and this is precisely what the stuff of doing politics is about – to push the boundaries of any given social situation and make them move.

The movement subsequently slowed and eventually stopped moving with regards to quom, biraderi, and religious hierarchies in spite of the efforts of many protagonists. It would be inappropriate  to think of this slowing down and stopping as a negation of the explicit politics (of the AMP, PRM and others) which sought to create new horizons of possibility for social relations at large, despite the very real likelihood of failing to do so. 

More generally, my experience both during the peak years of the movement and after confirm that political subjectivity – of the peasant farmers and other residents of the Okara villages alike – was, and is, dynamic. Our efforts as urban activists to displace long-entrenched social relations were neither cause nor consequence of a desire for “confirmation of [our] understanding of political agency as a result of growing class consciousness.”[12] They were, instead, instigated by what we found in the Okara villages: a fledgling political consciousness which we tried to deepen, arguably to a fault. Yet I venture that idealistic efforts such as ours are better than not trying at all.

I harbor similar feelings with regards to the gender question, which was also a major site of internal struggle during the years of movement. At its peak, AMP inspired many due to women being relatively well-integrated into its  leadership structure,  an especially impressive feat given the otherwise strict patriarchal confines of rural central Punjab.

This did not happen by chance. I remember having very heated arguments with many (predominantly Muslim, Arain) movement leaders about the imperative of supporting women who wanted to participate in the AMP’s decision-making process, and that a movement  away from the purely instrumental, secondary role that women played in the  community was needed. One  village patriarch retorted,  Kya aap humme beghairat samajhte hain? (Do you think we have no shame?)

Attitudes shifted enough for women to become important players in the movement, but as with what happened with quom/biraderi and religion, gender norms  were more or less restored after the peak years of struggle. Nevertheless, I feel certain that the period of movement will become part of the Okara villagers’ accumulated collective histories, and that the residual effects of AMP’s dynamic years will generate more challenges to structural oppressions and inequities in the future.

Theoretical musings and beyond

Students and practitioners of peasant politics have long grappled with the modernist – including orthodox Marxist – depiction of peasants as an anachronism, a category waiting to be banished to the dustbin of history. In recent times, with the reemergence of theoretical ideas such as “accumulation by dispossession” alongside organized resistance to such dispossession, often by peasants of one hue or another, theses about re-peasantization have also gained credence.[13]

My experience in Okara confirms many things that overlap with these theoretical and empirical themes.  Yet peasant struggles still persist. The Okara case is particularly distinct because the disputed land is owned by the state, and so an atypical authority relation provided the objective basis for many overlapping categories of peasant – including the menial, service castes which include agricultural wage laborers but extend into non-agricultural occupations as well – to unite around the shared imperative of resisting dispossession of their lands and homes.

Second,  we should be more attentive to the dynamism of peasants as political subjects inasmuch as they not only assert themselves politically in extraordinary moments, but also in the mundane everyday world. I wrote in 2006 that “the conditions that gave rise to the revolt on the state farms cannot be replicated in the case of the rural Punjabi social formation at large.”[14] While at the time I was referring to the distinctiveness of  the state as landlord in the Okara villages, the resurfacing of quom/biraderi and religion as important identity markers and bases of political alignment, alongside renewed factionalism between and across various classes of landholding farmers and non-agriculturalists, confirms that the political dynamics on the Okara military farms – and the subjectivities therein – are, for the most part, similar to canal colony villages in central Punjab more generally.[15]

In short, biraderi and quom are extremely important determinants of how peasants see themselves in the world, and thereby choose their social and political alignments. This is the case as much with Christian as with Muslim biraderis. Needless to say, these choices are heavily mediated by class, political party, and ideology. In any case, factionalism is the norm rather than the exception, and it is arguably unsurprising that the Okara villages would once again converge with others in the wider region, once the movement stopped moving. There can be no politics outside of the dialectic of transformation and reaction that we experienced in the struggle on the Okara military farms, as many have done before us, and will in the future too. 

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan and is president of the Awami Worker’s Party’s Punjab Executive Committee. He can be contacted at asajjad@qau.edu.pk.

References

Akhtar, A.S. 2006. “The State-as-Landlord: Peasant Struggles on the Okara Military Farms in Pakistan.” Journal of Peasant Studies 33 (3): 479-501

Bano, Masooda. 2006. "Self-interest, rationality and cooperative behaviour: Aid and problems of cooperation within voluntary groups in Pakistan." PhD diss. University of Oxford

Bernstein, H. 2001. “'The peasantry' in global capitalism: who, where and why?”. Socialist Register, 37(37).

Rizvi, Mubbashir Abbas. 2013. "Masters not friends: land, labor and politics of place in rural Pakistan." PhD diss. University of Texas – Austin

Rizvi, Mubbashir. 2019a. "A divided movement: urban activists, NGOs, and the fault-lines of a peasant struggle." South Asian History and Culture 10, no. 3 (2019): 295-308.

Rizvi, M. A. 2019b. The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan. Stanford University Press.

Notes

[1] PRM subsequently merged with other leftist organisations to form the Awami Workers Party (AWP) in 2012. The AWP has continued to support the AMP since.

[2] Cf. Bano 2006; Rizvi 2013; Rizvi 2019b.

[3] Akhtar 2006.

[4] Akhtar 2006, 490.

[5] Akhtar 2006, 493.

[6] Akhtar 2006, 493.

[7] It is important to note here that peasant leaders continue to suffer the consequences of this challenge to the military. The main leadership of the two currently active AMP factions, Mehr Abdul Sattar and Younis Iqbal, are both currently incarcerated, facing numerous charges under trumped up sedition/terrorism charges.

[8] Akhtar 2006, 495. The term quom is commonly used in the Punjab to refer to occupational caste, although it can have racial and ethnic connotations as well; biraderi is commonly used in the Punjab to refer to patrilineal lineage.

[9] Rizvi 2018.

[10] Akhtar 2006, 482.

[11] Rizvi 2013, 26.

[12] Rizvi 2019 a, 304.

[13] Bernstein 2001.

[14] Akhtar 2006, 496.

[15] I provided details in Akhtar (2006) of the British project of “canal colonization” which gave birth to perennially irrigated villages like those of the Okara military farms.