Date:18/01/2004 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2004/01/18/stories/2004011802961000.htm

National

A 'satyagraha' in Pakistan

By Aniket Alam

MUMBAI, JAN. 17. A million peasants in Pakistan's Punjab have refused to pay revenue or taxes for four years demanding rights to land in what is perhaps one of the biggest ongoing `satyagrahas' in the subcontinent. In one instance, for four months from May to August last year, 19 villages in Ukara district were besieged by armed units of the Pakistani Rangers pressuring them to "lease" their land to the Army, which claims it needs this irrigated land for defence purposes.

The military, which is the single largest landlord in Pakistan Punjab, already controls 5,000 acres in this district. "They now want to gain possession of 12,000 acres of land being cultivated by the small and medium peasants and distribute this land to Generals," says Luccas, a peasant leader from Ukara attending the World Social Forum 2004 here.

Luccas, whose family has 12 acres, says their forefathers were settled on this land by the British in 1903 to bring it under cultivation. Now the Army wants to dispossess them by taking their lands "on lease" and turn them into agricultural labour on their own lands. "We all voted for Musharraf in the referendum since he promised to give us full rights to our lands. But he betrayed us and today we have decided that we shall not part with our land and neither will we give any tax to the Government," he says.

He goes on: "We have served the Government for a hundred years by paying revenue. Now our slogan is `Those who till the land, will eat its produce'."

Luccas' nephew, Suleman, died of bullet injuries when a Ranger fired on protesting peasants in August 2002. A brother was injured when police fired on peasant demonstrators last May.

"Today, the Army knows that if they want to take this land they will have to kill hundreds in each village. Women come out and dare the armed Rangers with `thapas' (wooden bars used for washing clothes)," says, Farooq Tariq, leader of the Anjuman-e-Mazahreen Punjab (Peasants Collective). Interestingly in this district, the peasantry is about 40 percent Christian and 60 per cent Muslim, but this religious distinction has not divided them.

Luccas recounts how many of his villagers died for lack of medical facilities when their village was besieged by the Army, of how they feared for the worst. But that fear is gone now, he says, adding, "Our biggest victory was overcoming our fear of their stenguns," paraphrasing Mahatma Gandhi without realising it.

Scores of peasants have been kept in jail for over a year at times, they have been teargassed and 302 court cases have been slapped on them, they have been tempted with land in Cholistan, they have been preached to by the Mullahs not to fight generals of the Army, but they have not let these defeat them.

Today we are free, says Luccas and they cannot take away this freedom from us. Mr. Tariq, who is also general secretary of the Pakistan's Labour Party, introduces one to a Pakistan very different from the regular media images of gun-toting fundamentalists and anti-India baiters.

This is a Pakistan where 36,000 peasant holdings have not paid revenue for over four years, where two million workers in about 200 trade unions are in an intense struggle for a minimum wage, where fisherfolk are raising their banner of protest, where women are organising against the draconian "hudood" laws and students are demanding a right to education.