Anjuman-e-Mazareen Punjab: Ownership or Death—The Struggle Continues

Abstract

This chapter examines a land struggle initiated in 1999 by nearly a hundred thousand tenant farmers in more than twenty districts of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province. The tenants have contested nearly 70,000 acres of agricultural land in some of the most fertile areas of Pakistan. Starting in two different districts, Khanewal and Okara, independently of each other, the struggle came together under the umbrella of the Anjuman-e-Mazareen Punjab (AMP—Punjab Tenants Association). The Khanewal struggle was carried out by tenants of the Punjab Seed Corporation (PSC), a semiautonomous Punjab government body established through a 1976 Act of Provincial Assembly for systematic seed production, procurement, processing, and marketing of major and minor crop seeds. Tenants of the military farm management began the Okara struggle over lands under military control that were used for operational purposes such as camping grounds, dairy farms, and the production of oats and hay. Collectively, this is one of the biggest land struggles to have occurred in Pakistan in recent years, and to date it has succeeded in stopping the military farm management from being able to wrest control back from the tenants united under the AMP.