Faisalabad and its adjoining district Jhang are the hub of hardline Islamist movements Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Sipah-e-Sahaba (SS) which repeatedly target and direct popular agitations towards members of the Shia sect. The Faisalabad Loom workers’ strike, however, questions the potency and legitimacy of these sectarian divisions in everyday life. During this time, ordinary workers began to question such divisions among the poor and were united in their fight against the combined might of the local landlords, factory owners and the coercive arm of the state.

Background

Faisalabad is Pakistan's third largest city and is often called 'the Manchester of Pakistan' due to its being the center of the country's textile industry. Out of the estimated total of 300,000 power looms in Pakistan, almost 200,000 are based in Faisalabad mostly in the form of small units in houses (Williams, 2012). In 2003, the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM, National Labour Movement) was formed by power loom workers in response to police repression at the behest of influential locals and factory owners. Starting out from just sixty workers, by early 2012 the LQM had spread to at least ten other districts apart from Faisalabad and was beginning to organise workers in a country where only four percent out of a total labour force of 45 million Pakistanis had access to social security constitutionally guaranteed by the state.

In early 2010, the Minimum Wage Board had recommended that workers be given a pay raise of 17 percent. This was in the backdrop of almost a 50 percent wage increase for public sector workers and the government's rapid withdrawal of state subsidies on gas, electricity and petroleum. Tied into the privatisation agenda of international financial institutions, this had resulted in prices for some household items skyrocketing to upto ten times their initial value. While the wage increase was recommended by the Board, factory owners were also required by law to pay at least seven percent of the wages into the social security system. This, however, was conveniently avoided due to workers not being issued social security cards which would then give them access to, among other things, state-run pension schemes, hospitals and medicine. The working classes being obviously the most affected by such policy measures and repressive mechanisms began to organise in and around Faisalabad under the banner of the LQM for implementation of the recommended 17% wage increase.

On 6th July 2010, ten strongmen hired by factory owners stormed into the office of an LQM activist Mustansar Randhawa and killed him and his younger brother Naseer. Workers in the adjoining district of Jhang went on strike and at a public rally in Jhang in mid-July, the LQM issued the call for a general strike in Faisalabad. On 12th July, over 250,000 workers in Faisalabad went on strike demanding the recommended wage increase. This resulted in complete shutdown of 100,000 power looms in the city and the provincial government called in police reinforcements from six different districts to break the strike. On the eighth day of the strike, police and factory owners' hired thugs hemmed in a peaceful march of 20,000 workers and pelted them with stones, rubber bullets and shelling. The ensuing battle between police and workers continued for almost 10 hours resulting in several injured and subsequent arrests of 14 workers including 6 chapter presidents of the LQM. The strike, however, continued and on its tenth day a 25,000 strong march picketed the District Commissioning Officer's (DCO) house. After several failed attempts by police and local authorities to raze the camps set up by the strikers, the DCO gave in and ordered the factory owners to increase wages by the stipulated amount, register workers with the Social Security Board and issue them social security cards.

As a result of the strike, some of the earlier arrested workers were released but the six local chapter presidents of the LQM were tried by an anti-Terrorism Court. The trial was carried out under special laws promulgated by the Pakistani state to expedite cases of terrorism in the wake of Washington's WoT and on October 31st the six labour activists were handed down a combined sentence of 594 years in prison. Since, then there has been a renewed agitation by workers to secure the release of their fellow activists who have been sentenced by the courts for allegedly setting a factory on fire and injuring strike-breakers despite several inconsistencies in the witness accounts and various contradictory pieces of evidence.

In this regard, the case of Bawa Latif Ansari, a local organiser and eminent orator of the LQM, is particularly instructive. As a young man, Bawa was part of the LeT which played upon the fact that many of the local landlords in the Jhang area were Shia to stoke feelings against the Shia minority. However as he got involved in the LQM the realisation dawned on him that the material conditions of all labourers of the area were the same regardless of them being Sunni, Shia or Christian. It is there that Bawa's transformation and the transformation of his understanding of Islam started. Religion for Bawa turned into a radical philosophy of liberation and he started using his powerful oratory to instil solidarity among workers' against general exploitation by the landed and industrial classes. During the strike, Bawa's exhortations to workers often emphasised his understanding of religion as an source of strength and social justice:

"God is sovereign and God asks us to fight for justice. The bosses are nothing; we will not bow to them, these pharaohs."

Bawa's experience, the cross-religious alliances observed during the Faisalabad strike and the peoples' reinterpretation of Islam in the light of their own material conditions shows us the importance of Gramsci's 'popular creative spirit' whereby subaltern classes fashion ideas to transcend and legitimise their move beyond structures of power and domination.

The Faisalabad strike is important in another, often over-looked aspect .i.e. the nexus between the coercive and monitoring apparatuses of the state and capital. Authors such as Ayesha Siddiqa have already talked about the link between crony capitalism and various institutions of the Pakistani state (primary among them being the military). In the case of Faisalabad, labour activists have also commented on the close relationship between the Labour Department, responsible for ensuring workers' safety and that all workers are registered for Social Security, and factory bosses. Moreover, a recent article by Declan Walsh and Steve Geenhouse in the New York Times also highlights the links between global capital and the factory inspections' industry (2012). In the aftermath of a recent garment factory fire in Karachi which consumed the lives of almost 300 workers, Walsh documents the commodification of 'safety' certificates and the various certification agencies present in the Global North which outsource their inspection to companies in the South. The commodification of industrial safety certificates and inspections can also be seen as part of neoliberalism's creation of 'new spaces' as has been demonstrated before in the case of the corporate social responsibility industry (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009). These companies are in turn under pressure for quick turnover and certification of applications by factory owners. Considering that the aforementioned garment factory in Karachi was producing jeans mainly for a German retailer, the links between prevailing regimes of globalisation and outsourcing of manufacturing to countries of the global South are obvious.

Concluding Thoughts

Where the Okara struggle is a cross-class alliance between the rural landless and middle peasant classes, Faisalabad gives us an example of organisation among the urban industrial working class. In their own ways, they break away from earlier described dominant discourses about Pakistan and the Pakistani people. Moreover, resistance against encroaching neoliberalism under the auspices of the post-colonial state (and its imperial guarantors) is also a common thread running through the mobilisations. Where the Okara incident was directly tied into the military's attempts for further corporatisation of agriculture through concentration of land, Faisalabad provided an example where the industrial working classes are being squeezed by an alliance of capital and state. But they represent, in their unique ways, (arguably) effective resistance against the marching and interlinked forces of neoliberal capital and a repressive state apparatus violently disinclined towards any challenge to its political, cultural and intellectual hegemony.

Thus, it is through the highlighting of such movements and careful study with an eye on their proper historical contexts that we can start to move away from lenses distorted by global regimes of power. In doing so, we realise that understanding a country and its population through the binaries cultivated by War on Terror discourse and rooted in old-fashioned Orientalism leads us down the dark alley of one-dimensional modes of thinking and prevents us from understanding actual processes of change, contestation and resistance ongoing in societies such as Pakistan. Problems of historiography and representation with regards to countries and communities of the global South are not new and it is only through a conscious move towards a discourse centered on the people and their everyday struggles that such tropes of knowledge can be challenged. The challenge, as ever, remains to see history not as the deterministic flow of superior ideas and top-down processes of change but as actively shaped by masses of nameless, faceless people in the struggle over their own bodies, environments and material conditions.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51勛圖’s editorial policy.

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An examination of the Okara movement, which served as a serious challenge to the oppressive power of the state, contributes to a more nuanced understanding of ordinary Pakistanis in their struggle for self-determination, emancipation and economic well-being. In so doing, it moves beyond clichéd understandings of one of the most populous countries in the world and challenges hegemonic representations of the Pakistani polity.

The Okara Movement

The Okara Military Farms are part of the canal colonies in Punjab province of today's Pakistan developed by the British Raj in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Agricultural and non-agricultural castes from eastern Punjab were encouraged to settle in these colonies and elites which had helped the British during and after the Indian Uprising of 1857 were rewarded with large tracts of land in these areas (Ali, 1988). Vast areas of land owned by the provincial Punjab government were also leased out in Okara and adjoining districts for use of the British military which included stud farming and horse breeding. These lands were used by the colonial state in its extensive patronage network to ensure the loyalty of the landed and military elites as an insurance against the Bolshevik threat from the north-west. At the time of Partition in 1947, these lands were automatically transferred to the Pakistani military. Although the British had lured the agricultural peasants to the canal colonies with the promise of allotting them land in return for tilling the soil, these promises never materialised and several generations of peasants and farmers worked on these lands under a sharecropping system (called hissa battai) whereby the farmer and his family kept half the produce, while the military took the other half (Akhtar, 2006).

In 2000, just as the military government of General Pervez Musharraf was consolidating its power and planning to pass a law for further corporatisation of agriculture, the military authorities in Okara decided to introduce a new contract system which stipulated that rent was to be paid in cash rather than direct division of farm produce. Moreover, the new contract contained provisions which severely limited use of natural resources by the farmers who depended upon local firewood and mud for building homes. It also contained provisions which would have made it extremely easy for military authorities to evict farmers and peasants on short notice.

Sensing an attempt by the authorities to legally evict them from them from the land they had lived on and tilled for generations, farmers formed the Anjuman-e-Mazareen-e-Punjab (AMP, Punjab Tenants Organisation) through which they hoped to persuade the military to give up its intentions of a new cropping agreement. The authorities, however, taken aback by the temerity of the farmers who dared to stand up to its might in the heartland of its traditional stronghold of Punjab, used paramilitary forces and the police to besiege eighteen villages in Okara district. The increasing incidences of torture, intimidation and harassment resulted in a spread of the movement to adjoining districts of Punjab and the AMP soon morphed into a kind of 'rural intifada' with a more militant organisation representing farmers, peasants and small landholders (Ali, 2003). As the military's excesses increased, the movement grew bigger and went up to over a million strong with cross-gender and cross-religious alliances challenging the hegemonic power of the Pakistan military in its own backyard. During the struggle it was discovered that the military were not the legal owners of the land and were only lessees of the land themselves on which they had not paid rent to the Punjab government since 1943! This knowledge, combined with the oppressive response of the military, led the AMP to adopt the powerful cry of 'Malukyat yaa maut!' ('Ownership or Death'). Through a tactic of civil disobedience and sheer people power, the AMP managed to fight the military off the land. Today a stalemate exists, with farmers and peasants refusing to pay any rent and the military continuing a low-level program of harassment even though formal democracy returned to Pakistan in 2008 (Toor, 2011). In an interview in 2009, the premier spokesperson of the military even conceded that it is willing to go back to the original sharecropping agreement.

The movement defied popular representations of Pakistan and was symbolic in several ways. Firstly, the movement saw peasants and farmers from across the religious divide come together. 40% of the AMP membership consisted of Christian peasants and farmers who have generally occupied the very lowest rung in the Punjab's caste hierarchy. Second, when the military's suppression increased and the farmers and peasants started getting illegally detained and tortured, it is the women who rose up in resistance and led march and protests with their thappas (sticks used to beat dirty clothes while washing) in the air. These women came to be known as the Thappa Force and resulted in a mass empowerment of women which led them to challenge not just the repressive apparatus of the state but also entrenched structures of patriarchy and religious-based discrimination. When Munawwar Bibi, the Punjab President of the AMP, was threatened by local landlords that they would not give her a Muslim burial because as a woman she was fighting alongside Christians, she sent them a reply saying:

'After my soul departs, the Christians will take me to their graveyard. Do you think I am fighting for a burial spot?'

Moreover, post-AMP mobilisation enrolment of girls in schools in the area has increased and women have refused to go back to the same position of subordination that they were in before they stepped into the battle with the state (Shirkat Gah Documentary, 2010).

 Enduring colonial patterns of military recruitment and critical support by capitalist powers have resulted in the Punjab province being the center of the military's power base in Pakistan. Due to the peculiar nature of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi post-colonial state (with an under-developed native bourgeoisie and a top-down imposed colonial state), a civil-militarybureaucratic oligarchyhas come to dominate what Alavi has termed 'the overdeveloped state' (1972). Developed during the British Raj with the express intention of 'controlling the natives' and extracting resources for the mother country, the 'over-developed state' continues to retain the existence and pervading mechanisms of control and oppression developed during the era of formal colonialism. Moreover, Alavi posits that due to its grafted nature, it is the state itself which has become the site for contestation between competing interests. It is in this context of the hangover of colonial institutions and the AMP's refusal to seek redress in colonial-era institutions of justice and law that the Okara peasants' struggle signified an unprecedented challenge to hegemony of the state and its military-centered post-colonial elite.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51勛圖’s editorial policy.

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Just before his untimely death and in the aftermath of the US raid in Pakistan that resulted in Osama bin Laden's killing, renowned intellectual Christopher Hitchens described Pakistan as a country “completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred.” Referring to abuses of women’s rights, Hitchens declared Pakistan a society where 'the most elemental of human instincts become warped.' He then went on to list the litany of American objections against the Pakistani ruling classes' efforts in the so called War on Terror (WoT) and finished with the following call to arms for the world's only superpower: “How could it be “worse” if we listened to the brave Afghans, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country?”

Hitchens' expose on Pakistan is not a one-off piece of writing by a pro-war author nor is his use of terms such 'us' and 'we' an isolated occurrence. It is a perpetuation of certain binaries: the ‘Orient’ versus the ‘Occident,’ the West versus the ‘Other.’ Characterising Pakistan as one of the 'vilest and most dangerous countries of the world,' the use of 'us' and 'we' feeds into what Edward Said called the 'principal dogmas of Orientalism.' It is a process of defining the Orient in opposition to the 'rational, developed, humane [and] superior' West while at the same time defining the 'West' itself. In a particularly prescient chapter titled 'Culture Talk' from his book 'Good Muslim, Bad Muslim', Mahmood Mamdani traces how the idea of the 'West' has evolved in combination with, and as a result of, European imperialism. Mamdani explains that the 'West' has been framed in opposition to the 'Other' (in this case, colonised natives) and it has morphed from a geographical entity into a 'racialised,' cultural notion referring to people of European origin anywhere in the world. This particular aspect of identity formation, in opposition to the colonised native, is also described by Jean Paul Sartre in his preface to Frantz Fanon's powerful exposition of colonial violence and revolutionary warfare titled 'The Wretched of the Earth.’ In his account of colonial oppression and resistance in Algeria, Sartre says 'High minded people, liberal or just soft hearted… were either mistaken or dishonest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters.’

What is particularly striking in all the above texts, and often gets overlooked in popular representations of Muslim countries, is how in both the case of the 'West' and the 'Orient,' the formation of identities are deeply tied to political processes of power and domination. Certainly, such representations legitimize formal neoimperialism. Additionally, they make the popular narrative blind to actual processes of change and resistance ongoing in parts of the world characterised exclusively in terms of 'Islam' and 'Muslim.'

Such tropes of knowledge have come to be particularly prevalent in the popular discourse on Pakistan. So, for example, in the aftermath of the devastating floods in Pakistan in 2010, there was much wrangling over the question of giving aid to the country. The Daily Beast published an article titled and the New York Times ran a story The narrative was stuck on the fact that aid must be provided to the flood victims not because they were human beings whose homes and livelihoods had been destroyed, but so that they do not fall prey to the network of charities run by Islamist extremist groups. The implication is clear: we should help the suffering people because otherwise they might become a nuisance for us.

Similar binaries are also seen in operation when reporting on other aspects of Pakistan. An details the underground culture of 'partying' in Pakistan where an atmosphere similar to a 'Saturday night at a club in New York, London or Paris' exists. Juxtaposed on this 'modern' context, the article then goes on immediately to talk about 'creeping Islamic conservatism' in the country and how 'lonely liberals' are cowering for cover under the onslaught of Islamist extremism. No mention is made to the contribution of capitalist imperialism in the creation and sustenance of such extremist groups. The article alludes to the changes forced upon Pakistani society by the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s. But then, the article suffers from what Mamdani terms a 'collective amnesia' when it fails to account for the role that hegemonic powers play in fostering forces in the name of Islamic jihad' against communism. While the role of capitalist powers in the rise of Islamist extremism has been well documented by scholars such as Tariq Ali and Timothy Mitchell, the Reuters article falls into the trap of perpetuating binaries such as Islamic/secular and liberal/conservative. Moreover, the phenomenon of Islamist violence and extremism takes on a cultural identity of its own, coming to define all Pakistanis in opposition to the (so-called) 'Westernised', 'secular' elite, and thus stripping the wider context of its genesis in late colonialism and the Cold War.

Neo-Orientalist epistemologies of knowledge are even more apparent in representations of Pakistan's border areas with Afghanistan. These areas, the site of drone attacks by the US military to target 'extremists,' are constantly characterised in popular discourse as 'lawless,' 'barren' landscapes where terrorists roam about freely. In an echo of Edward Said's 'exotic' and 'sensuous' Orient, the tribal 'badlands' of Pakistan/Afghanistan are not seen as areas where actual living people reside, but areas to be 'tamed' and 'purged' off terrorists through (in this case) remote-controlled, imperial bombardment. Mamdani's 'collective amnesia' is all the more apparent here, as little mention is made of the fact that it was the imperial war of the 1980s (with more than $3.9 billion of funding from the Reagan administration) that turned the Afghan-Pakistan border areas into the safe haven for militants that they are today. These areas, their people, and their conditions are stripped of their history and context. It is as if history came into being on September 11th, 2001.

In all of the focus on security, terrorism and geo-strategy, what gets lost are the people of these regions — the people who are shaping history in different parts of Pakistan every day, offering resistance to the hegemonic machinations of the neoliberal state in an effort to, as Fanon would put it, say 'no to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.’ It is only through writing a history of the subaltern and a conscious move away from top-down accounts of change that we can even begin to understand the various struggles of contestation and emancipation that are ongoing in Pakistan.

Read part two .

*[A version of this article was published in .] 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51勛圖’s editorial policy.

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