South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. xvii, 200 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0876-4.
The Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP) led a valiant, and to some extent successful mobilization against the Pakistani military’s attempts to extend control of their land and its collusion with multinational corporations. Consequently, the movement centred around Okara in central Punjab attracted the interest of activists and intellectuals from urban Pakistan and elsewhere. Mubbashir Rizvi has written the best account of this movement that I have seen. Eschewing glib formulations and easy binaries, Rivzi gives us insight into the complexities of the movement. Importantly, an acknowledgement of competing visions, varying levels of enthusiasm for particular courses of action, marginalization of certain voices within the movement, as well as the shifts in elite alliances does not detract from recognizing the bravery of many ordinary people who were part of this movement. Writing about an active movement that one sympathizes with is hard. But perhaps harder still is to record the internal fissures as the movement starts coming apart. A major strength of this book lies in Rizvi’s ability to write about this in a sensitive manner. He notes the rise of some leaders as local strongmen, and the concerns expressed by women who had played an important role in standing up to military incursions in their villages but were sidelined in later decisions.
In chapters 2 and 3 Rizvi builds a historical understanding of the institutional setting for this movement. He shows how the colonial state used the canal colony projects that were immensely ambitious feats of social and physical engineering to privilege certain social groups as well as norms of settled agriculture over nomadic pastoralism. Settling the newly irrigated lands involved massive, but under recognized, social engineering with the large-scale migration of peasants and workers from around Punjab. While the state took credit for these engineering marvels, in fact, it was the peasants who, attracted by the lure of land ownership, undertook the hard work of clearing the land and making it fit for agriculture. The state also used this newly available land to establish religious communities, primarily Christian ones, albeit with grants for Hindu groups such as the Arya Samaj and Muslim groups such as the Ahmadis.
The appropriation of these farms by the Pakistani military—through long-term leases that transferred from the colonial to the postcolonial state—the lack of clarity about actual ownership in some cases, and the unrealized promises of land ownership for many of the peasants is sensitively traced here. The colonial state’s support for missionary groups, while mostly Protestant, had the paradoxical effect of first establishing some farms as separate institutional entities that the Pakistani military took over from the mid-1960s onwards, and later of providing initial links with international players such as the Catholic charity Caritas when the peasants began mobilizing in early 2000s. In fact, the peasants had mobilized at various points throughout the last century. One area that Rizvi does not explore in significant detail is that the Okara region and the canal colonies were sites of communist and leftist mobilization from the late 1920s onwards. The late 1960s were another important era of mobilizations here, and as Rizvi notes in passing, many landless peasants were galvanized by Maulana Bhashani’s tour as well as Bhutto’s rhetoric of land redistribution.
Rizvi is concerned explicitly in moving beyond simplistic ideas about the mobilization propounded by both its critics and some high-profile supporters. Critics of the movement have tended to present it as comprised of simple-minded peasants led by international NGOs, which were in turn bent upon destroying the social fabric of Pakistan. Some high-profile supporters too misread the movement as a struggle by peasants for their human rights. Rizvi adds to the literature that complicates liberal and urban visions of rights. He shows in chapters 4 and 5 how the members of the movement did not always think of land as an object over which they ought to establish individualized property rights. Their relationship with land—and consequently the rights and duties tied to it—have an element of the sacred and are not conceived of in purely individual terms and, in legal terms, often focus on usage rights rather ownership.
The theoretical concerns of this manuscript are somewhat diffuse. The title raises expectations; it appears initially that the focus is in engaging deeply with the ethics of a particular kind of claim making. Early on we are told that the “tenants demand land rights in relational and ethical terms by invoking customs and obligations based on the hardship of sharecropping and memory of suffering on the land. The AMP differs from many contemporary land rights movements in that its claim is not based on notions of origin or indigeneity” (4). The specifics of this ethic of staying are not collected together at any point for the reader to reflect upon. What precisely does the ethic of staying entail? What role does staying play in this ethic? Why is it an ethic of staying and not of subsistence? The rich detail that Rizvi brings to the fore in this book could have been complemented with a more ambitious concluding chapter to tie some of these loose ends. That said, the detailed and nuanced engagement with an immensely important movement is the real strength here, and readers are left with a convincing picture of claims that exceed legal property rights.
Humeira Iqtidar
King’s College London, London