On August 24, 2002, the Word Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) reported a large contingent of paramilitary troops besieging two villages in Okara district. The purpose was to quell the protest meeting of villagers refusing to pay rent to their landowners. Four men and women were killed and 18 others were wounded by bullets whereas as many as 25 farmers were arrested. The administration filed cases against the tenants under the Anti-Terrorism Act. This was not an isolated incident. There have been many such incidents where landless farmers have been intimidated, murdered and harassed by state forces. These brutalities were at their peak between May and June 2003 when the peasants refused to sign new contracts and were being forced to do so. During this period, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) reported about 195 killings of farmers in Okara during “encounters”. Recently, in July 2014, violence visited the Okara military farms again with large contingents of armed troops pointing machine guns at the protesting landless farmers. They were protesting lease rent hikes, which the farmers were unable to pay. Two farmers were killed and many were injured. Since 2002, they have not only been coerced, besieged and threatened but water supplies and other basic amenities have been blocked to their villages.

The unsettled issue of the Okara military farms classically highlights the impunity with which state forces behave, where the tussle between the farmers and the landowners has been going on since 2000. The issue is over 17,000 acres of land, which have been tended to by peasants since 1913, who have lived there for many generations. The Okara military farms effectively comprise 22 farms in 15 villages in Okara and Renala Khurd. The technical ownership of this expansive land still rests with the government of Punjab. In 1913, the government of Punjab leased out the lands to the military farms for a tenure of 20 years, which was then extended to another five years in 1933. The lease contract stands expired as of today but no one has bothered to renew it. The peasants present there have traditionally been working as sharecroppers, where the military provided them with seeds and fertilisers, and the farmers in return would yield a part of their harvest to them.

All this changed in 2002, when the military unilaterally decided to impose money rent contracts on the poor farmers. To the peasants, this was an attempt to have them evicted from the land that they have been working on for generations. To the army, it was their right to levy rent on the land that is dubiously theirs. This caused the friction between the two and an uprising by the agitated peasants who rejected the new rule instantaneously. Their resistance was tackled with a heavy hand with the police forces, Rangers and reportedly army personnel directly taking part in crushing them through killings, torture, arbitrary detentions and coercion.

The then federal interior minister, Faisal Hayat Khan, stopped the Rangers from taking arbitrary action against the villagers and former Chief Minister (CM) Pervaiz Elahi did admit the grave injustices carried out by the security forces against the landless peasants. Many politicians have even attempted to belittle the grievances of the landless farmers by referring to them as “greedy” farmers. In 2004, Human Rights Watch published an eye-opening report titled, ‘Soiled hands: the Pakistan army’s repression of the Punjab farmers’, which recorded eyewitness accounts of security forces’ brutalities against the unarmed villagers. There have been reports of children being subjected to torture, families of the landless farmers being punished and young couples being forced to divorce to shame the families refusing to sign the new contracts.

The Anjuman-e-Mazaereen-e-Punjab (AMP), working for the interests of the farmers has been at the forefront of demanding rights for the landless farmers, stressing on the Punjab government to provide them land ownership rights. The federal government first promised to grant them rights in 1999, in 2010 CM Shahbaz Sharif promised a dialogue and then again in 2013, during the general elections, he promised rights to landless farmers but to tho date these promises have borne no fruit. On the prerogative of the CM, two meetings were held in which the farmers were assured that their demands would be met but instead of allotting lands to them, some lands were allotted to multinational corporations to introduce model farming in the region. This has added more distress to the landless farmers.

This institutionalised tyranny has its roots enshrined in the legacy inherited from the colonial days. The most prevalent one is the relationship of the landowner and his subjects. The feudal mentality has perpetuated almost every institution in Pakistan, where the lord has complete impunity for whatever he does and the rights of his subjects are not even recognised. They are left to be exploited by the precedents set by their masters. The same mindset is harboured and exploited by state institutions whose use of force against unarmed peasants in the context of ‘disciplining’ them has almost gone unaccounted for and without any legal repercussions because, under the Army Act 1952, uniformed men falling under its jurisdiction cannot be tried in ordinary courts and, in practice, no FIR can be lodged against them. This presents a paradox for the state and its army, which, by a national decree, is supposed to safeguard its subjects but has resorted to oppressing them to protect its economic interests.

The writer is a freelance columnist and may be contacted at zeeba.hashmi@gmail.com