Oct 28, 04: Landless farmers of Pakistan
Iinterviews Mubbashir Rizvi and Aasim Akhtar about the landless farmers in Okara, Pakistan.
MUBBASHIR RIZVI is a graduate student in Social Anthropology
Program at University of Texas at Austin. During the summer of
2004, he spend several weeks interviewing the residents of Okara
Military Farms to document the rise of farmers movement that has
emerged as the biggest social movement in Pakistan. The residents
of this area have also faced brutal repression by paramilitary
forces who are trying to crush this peasant's movement. In the
last four years, The Anjuman Muzareen Punjab (AMP, literally
Tenants Association of Punjab) has emerged as a peasant farmer
movement that is resisting the changes in landholding laws which
can potentially displace over a million peasants from the
farmland that they have been tilling as sharecroppers for over a
hundred years. AMP has emerged as a Punjab wide Peasants movement
that is rejecting the new landholding laws and demanding
ownership or land rights over the lands that have been illegally
occupied by military establishment since the British colonial
rule. The scale of this mobilization has no parallels in
Pakistani history and it indicates the possibilities for new
social movements in Pakistan.
