The state as landlord in Pakistani Punjab: Peasant struggles on the Okara military farms

Entering the field: Examining the relevance of political ecology to the agrarian struggle of Anjuman Muzareen Punjab in Pakistan

“…In the late nineteenth century, British colonists developed an extensive network of irrigation canals for the agricultural development of the region in order to relieve demographic pressures in (now Indian) East Punjab and service growing military needs for food and cavalry (Gilmartin, 2004). Thousands of migrants from East Punjab were brought in to clear and develop the land in these newly instituted ‘canal colonies’ on the promise of proprietary rights (Ali, 1988; see also Akhtar, 2006 for a class and caste breakdown of this population). However, once the area proved arable, the British were quick to realise the economic and political potential of the canal colony lands to further their political entrenchment, revenue extraction and military requirements.…”

Agrarian class struggle and state formation in post‐colonial Pakistan, 1959–1974: Contingencies of Mazdoor Kisan Raj

“…Most studies of power in rural Pakistan examine how landed elites who once legally practiced indirect rule have held on to their privileged engagement with the state despite, or responding to, transformations in the law and agrarian relations of production (Javid, ; Malik & Malik, ). Landed elites pursue their own advantages by imposing, undermining, or ignoring the law: In Okara district, the state (military) itself owns land and ruthlessly enforces the law against a tenant movement (Akhtar, ); landed elites have subverted implementing land reform laws (Herring, ); and as Haroon Akram‐Lodhi () observed during his fieldwork in Charsadda in the 1990s, landed elites often ignore the law by exercising their own extrajudicial coercion against tenants—involving summary evictions, public beatings, and even killings (see also N. Martin, ). Viewed from the perspective of subordinate classes, it becomes especially apparent that the “line between state and society [is] drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained” (Mitchell, , p. 90).…”

“…Bulletin of Narcotics (4), 21-40. Retrieved May 23, 2019, from https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-andanalysis/bulletin/bulletin_1977-01-01_4_page003.html owns land and ruthlessly enforces the law against a tenant movement (Akhtar, 2006); landed elites have subverted implementing land reform laws (Herring, 1979); and as Haroon Akram-Lodhi (2001) observed during his fieldwork in Charsadda in the 1990s, landed elites often ignore the law by exercising their own extrajudicial coercion against tenants-involving summary evictions, public beatings, and even killings (see also N. Martin, 2016). Viewed from the perspective of subordinate classes, it becomes especially apparent that the "line between state and society…”

“…However, more so than a contribution to the classic literature on peasant struggle (e.g., Akhtar, ) or the debates on the agrarian transition to capitalism (Bernstein, ; Byres, ; Lerche, Shah, & Harriss‐White, ; Patnaik, ), this study examines the political dimension of how agrarian class struggle interacts with state power and contributes to state formation, understood as the “reconfiguration of local hierarchies and relations of rule” (Lentz, , p. 561), and to state building, the “process by which the institutions of public administration are strengthened in their scope and penetration of society” (Kurtz, , p. 56). The land and tenancy reforms “from below” engendered by the peasant struggle in Charsadda provide an avenue to examine shifts in the institutionalization of power not only because the direct power of landlords was undermined but also because the reforms took hold, as we will see, due to significant state intervention in favour of the tenants.…”

On Vernacular Rights Cultures and the Political Imaginaries of Haq

“…For not only do these 'land transfers' to the Pakistani military owe their legal and institutional legitimacy to various colonial era laws such as the 'Land Acquisition Act of 1894' and 'The Colonization of Land Act 1912' (later updated by the Government of Pakistan in 1965), but also the management of these lands by the military in postcolonial Pakistan is based on 'Cantonment Land Administration Rules 1937' used by the colonial military(Siddiqa 2007: 177). Yet, it is also the case that it is over the question of land that the 'state-society consensus' in Pakistan suffers its first 'public fracture' (Khan et al 2014) with the struggles of the peasant sharecroppers at Okara and Khanewal mounting a 'resistance to the post-colonial state dominated by the army'(Akhtar 2006).Essentially, the Anjuman Mazarain are demanding ownership over the land they've been tilling ever since the colonial transfers of population to people vast irrigation projects which began in 1885. Under the 1894 'Land Acquisition Act', the colonial state transferred populations to its newly built 'canal colonies' and irrigation projects promising to bequeath ownership rights to resettled populations over these lands.…”