For Land And Freedom: Witnessing Mehr Sattar's Long Struggle

I distinctly remember staring at the wooden door frame through which we had entered the compound. It was the year 2009 and I was with a motley collection of journalists, academics, activists and writers drawn by curiosity. Tension gripped the farmlands as an altercation between the mazareyeen (tenant farmers) and local authorities had resulted in three deaths among the locals defending their right to the land they cultivated.

We sat listening to Mehr Sattar - a leader of the Anjuman e Mazareyeen e Punjab (AMP) - and his associates from the Okara military farms, as they told us about a great mobilisation of tenant farmers. It was scheduled to take place the next day. The numbers he spoke of were staggering. He mentioned thousands upon thousands of people converging on our location. I put this talk down to our Punjabi penchant for casual exaggeration.

At that moment, a giant of a man walked into the walled area where we sat. He carelessly trampled the wooden door-frame as he entered. As his foot pulverised the rotting wood that he trod upon, for a moment my mind conjured up images of mythical Dullah Bhatti and his stout Punjabi peasant rebels, taking on the might of the Mughal padishah and his revenue collectors. The comparison may not be that far off, I thought, as I recalled my readings about the ongoing dispute between mazareyeen (tenants) and the administration in modern-day Okara.

I thought the newcomer was here to inform Sattar that it was all over for now, and that men of the Law were here for him - just outside. After all, we had been told just earlier that morning that Sattar might be taken away by the authorities.

But the burly man merely bustled around, bringing us refreshments on behalf of our host.

Like everyone else, I gratefully accepted Mehr Sattar’s offering of hospitality, and for some reason decided it was an opportune moment to bring up my concerns about his immediate future.

“Sattar sahib, is it true that you could be arrested at any time - even now?” I enquired.

“Let’s have tea!” he brushed aside my question with a cavalier smile.

I began to wonder where our group of visitors from Lahore and Islamabad would fit into the scheme of things, if indeed Sattar were to be taken away. Would I then be writing an account of how a rally planned by the tenant farmers was cut short by the arrest of one of the main leaders of the mazareyeen, Sattar himself?

Our spirits quickened by the tea, we stepped out behind Sattar. As he emerged from the walled courtyard, he was greeted - not by the police (as we had been told to anticipate) but by a growing crowd of mazareyeen. Even as we watched, the crowd grew as men drove in on motorcycles from all directions in the surrounding fields.

As for the police, they had chosen to go back rather than confront this crowd. Sattar smiled.

Both the PPP and the PML-N have on various occasions promised to ‘solve their problem' - but as they awaited a solution, the mazareyeen have often been at the receiving end of police crackdowns and worse

Next day, we stood on a track as streams (or rather torrents) of farmers poured in - from Okara, Renala Khurd, Sahiwal and elsewhere. They came on carts, motorcycles, motor-vans and auto-rickshaws. Smiling women in their scores, marshalling their children running free. Good-natured men greeting us, their urban visitors, as they passed us on their way to the rally. Old men carrying the colours of the Anjuman e Mazareyeen e Punjab (AMP) - a red flag bearing, aptly, a white plough - passing around cigarettes and keeping up effortlessly with the younger people.

And they were in their thousands. Estimates of the people gathered ranged from fifteen to twenty thousand. All I knew was that I had never seen so many people with red flags before. Sattar had been as good as his word.

That was 2009.

Today, in 2016, much has changed.

Sattar is in the custody of the authorities. He recently tried to organise a convention of mazareyeen. He is not the only one. He now stands accused of banditry, extortion, incitement to disorder and so on. Other leaders of the AMP are also in the custody of the authorities, while cases have been registered against thousands of farmers. Literally entire villages stand accused of sedition.

Mainstream Pakistani discussion has decided who its heroes are, who it looks up to and who it is grateful to. There is little room to question the hysterical consensus. There is a National Action Plan in place. The government and law enforcement agencies claim to have the details of it all worked out - of how Pakistan will be rid of terrorism, political violence and a host of other, very real problems.

Terrorism has been conflated with dissent. Dissent has been equated with terrorism.

The thaapa, a wooden instrument used to beat clothes while washing them, at this moment was transformed from its rural domestic use. It turned into a symbol of defiance by the women

We must ask ourselves some questions before the mazareyeen are dismissed as seditious rabble-rousers, as the administration in Okara would perhaps like. Should a dispute over land ownership and tenure be treated as a question of sedition and public safety? Should peaceful men and women, staking out a claim to the land that they have farmed for generations now, deserve to be seen as security threats or as plaintiffs in the court of public opinion?

This space will not allow for a detailed discussion of the dispute around the Okara military farms. For that one must refer the reader to work such as Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s "The state as landlord in Pakistani Punjab" in The Journal of Peasant Studies, written in 2006.

Nor can we go into a proper discussion of what is dissent and what is terrorism. Those are matters which the conscience of a society must decide upon - not soldiers, bureaucrats or callous politicians.

Today, the Anjuman e Mazareyeen e Punjab (AMP) stands beleaguered and besieged. Once it could confidently count upon the support of thousands of farmers - 100,000 by some estimates, even higher by others. Today its leadership and support-base faces what poor people go through in the custody of law enforcement in Pakistan - arbitrary violence and legal proceedings to fetter them.

Should a dispute over land ownership and tenure be treated as a question of sedition and public safety?

Public opinion has hardened in general. There is something much more at play here than the grim, pragmatic realisation that harsh measures have to be taken to root out the menace of religious extremism and terrorism. There is now open cruelty in public discourse. Commentators want to see public hangings. People want to see the authorities countrywide taking ‘action’ - against someone or the other. It matters little whether those being targeted by the authorities are actual fanatic enemies of public safety or un-armed people who happen to find themselves on the wrong side of the administration in some dispute or the other.

There is a particularly vicious insistence on labeling marginalised groups as ‘criminals’, ‘encroachers’ and so on. Such was the case when Islamabad’s Capital Development Authority (CDA) evicted thousands of katchi abaadi (slum) dwellers by labeling them ‘foreigners’, ‘Afghans’ and ‘people engaged in illicit activities’. No questions were asked when the CDA themselves later admitted that only a tiny minority of the evicted people were foreign (leaving aside the question of whether foreigners ought to be evicted in such a manner).  But while the brutal process of eviction was being carried out, there were shrill voices on social media accusing anyone who sided with the slum-dwellers of being bleeding-heart supporters of ‘mafias’ and ‘drug-dealers’.

As the administration in Okara tightens its iron fist around the tenant farmers of the AMP, one fears that the same atmosphere of cruel determination might prevail once again.

Among the ranks of the mazareyeen are thousands of Christians too

The tenants of the Okara military farms have long soldiered on (excuse the pun) regardless of the political conditions in the country. Be it General Musharraf’s military regime or the constitutional democratic dispensations that followed, the mazareyeen have found themselves at the receiving end of promises by the political parties. Both the PPP and the PML-N have on various occasions promised to ‘solve their problem’, but as they awaited a solution the mazareyeen have often been at the receiving end of police crackdowns and worse. Among the ranks of the mazareyeen are thousands of Christians too.

The current struggle of the Okara mazareyeen for ownership rights over the lands they cultivate for the Military Farms broke out in October 2000, when police attempted to (apparently) seize some stocks of wood which the peasants had failed to give up to the administration of the farms. As the raid began, women stood and defied what they saw as a usurpation of their families’ right to land, with wooden thaapas in their hands. They succeeded in dissuading the authorities from their purpose - a scene which has repeated itself many times. The thaapa, a wooden instrument used to beat clothes while washing them, at this moment was transformed from its rural domestic use. It turned into a symbol of defiance by the women - and I have personally seen them beating thaapas together as they arrive at rallies and protests.

It is this tradition of civic resistance by the mazareyeen women that Badr-un-Nisa comes from. She is one of the AMP’s leaders from Kulyana Estate in Okara.

I first saw her years ago as she entered a room where we sat listening to tenant farmers in Kulyana Estate. The atmosphere in the room changed immediately as she arrived. Farmer men became silent and began to await her words, listening carefully and saying little in her presence. She was clearly someone in charge of the movement.

I saw her in Lahore recently, at a protest camp set up by the Anjuman e Mazareyeen e Punjab (AMP) in Lahore. She was calling for the release of Mehr Sattar and others who have been arrested. I asked her how she planned to handle the immense odds she and her movement faces, what with the ongoing crackdown.

It is rare to find people so undaunted in today’s “post-ideological” era. Badr-un-Nisa is clearly one of those people. She stood there with her young daughter, who wishes to be a lawyer when she grows up - so she can fight the legal battles of the movement her family is involved in.

“You will see, with the help of young people, we are sure to prevail!”, Badr-un-Nisa told me. Whatever the fate of the AMP and the tenant farmers of Okara, I must confess that her confidence is both infectious and inspiring.

 

 

Ziyad Faisal lives in Lahore

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Zahid Ali reports from Okara on the current situation and the circumstances of Mehr Sattar's arrest:

Ordinarily, if you were to turn left from the Okara by-pass and drive on for about twenty to thirty minutes, you would expect to see a series of small but promising villages on both sides of the road - a picture that would please the heart and comfort the mind. The hitherto quaint countryside houses, now adorned with red flags, present a scene perhaps more at home in some Maoist village in India, but they are not. These houses are located in the Dipalpur Military Farms and their red flags are a symbol of their unacknowledged dispute with the state machinery that for the last fifteen years has been trying to move them to a contract system from the current sharecropping arrangement. Today, at every few hundred yards one can see the presence of police check-posts and patrolling armed vehicles that give the impression that you have entered a war zone.

In Okara, the NAP has become the state’s justification for arresting the General Secretary of the Anjuman e Mazareyeen e Punjab Dipalpur wing, Shabir Ahmed Sajid, without providing any evidence against him or (apparently) offering him the right to a fair trial. This has happened, it seems, on the orders of the DPO.

Sitting in a dilapidated four-walled structure, the remainder of the police’s heavy handed action, Mushtaq Shabir, son of the arrested AMP leader, said, “My father was headed for Pakpattan from Bail Ganj, when his car was stopped by a troop of elite commandoes and the police. He was blindfolded and driven around for several hours. And ultimately taken to a deserted ruin where his blindfold was removed and he was asked to face a wall, as if he were to be assassinated in a fake ‘encounter’. They asked him if he had any final requests; when he answered in the negative, he was again loaded up in one of their vehicles and taken to Hujra Shah Muqim.”

Mushtaq further said, “My uncle and I have been warned against pursuing any legal course of action; meanwhile, my father is being kept prisoner without being provided with food or water.”

The SHO of Chak Bedian Chaudhry Ashraf was contacted with great difficulty for comment. When asked if he had arrested Shabbir Sajid under ‘7 ATA’, the SHO declined knowledge of any such individual. When pressed on this point with the testimony of the villagers to the contrary, Chaudhry Ashraf finally admitted that he had indeed arrested Shabbir Sajid but that the DPO had barred him from commenting any further on this matter.

These tactics of secrecy and subterfuge employed by the authorities seem extremely out of place when dealing with the citizens of the state. One has to question the need for registering manifestly false cases against civilians who represent the will of the local people and who are supported by them.

Two weeks before his arrest, at his place of residence in Chak 4/4L, Okara, the General Secretary of AMP Mehr Sattar, while addressing a gathering of about two hundred peasants with red flags, said, “Our only wrong-doing is that we and our forefathers before us have been tilling these lands since before the Partition, that we feed our women and children from the fruits of our labour, and that the police and the state have set their sights upon this land so that they may deprive us of our basic needs to fill their coffers.”

He also said, “Even if every single leader of this resistance is arrested, our struggle will not cease. We will fight to the end to defend our rights, our freedom and our dignity.” Two weeks after this address, a number of elite police commandos were dispatched to arrest Mehr Abdul Sattar from his residence, causing also extensive damage to his property.

While speaking to BBC News, in response to a question on why he had arrested these people under allegations of terrorism, the DPO Rana Faisal said, “These people are terrorists. They block roads. We know how to teach a lesson to anyone who thinks he can take the law in his hands.” When pressed with regards to any evidence he possessed against the accused, the DPO said, “All will be revealed in time.”