KARACHI: The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has done great injustice to people by inserting anti-labour clauses in the Tenancy Act which it amended during its previous tenure.

These ‘dangerous amendments’, it was pointed out, allowed forced labour, led to discrimination against religious minorities and allowed landlords to transfer undue financial burden to farmers, said speakers at a conference held at the Jinnah Medical and Dental College on Thursday to mark the International Labour Day.

The conference titled ‘History and the masses’ was organised by S.M. Sohail Trust, Pakistan Labour Trust and Karachi University’s Pakistan Study Centre.

“The old Tenancy Act banned work without will but this clause was dropped in the amended version. In addition, it transferred the entire cost of production and transport to the farmer which was earlier shared between the landlord and farmer.

“Another worrisome amendment relates to discrimination against the minorities as the amended act only talks of a Muslim peasant and says that if he dies, the right to cultivation will be passed on to his legal heirs. It is very unfair as a huge number of landless peasants in Sindh are non-Muslims,” said writer-cum-activist Amar Sindhu, who is a lecturer at the Sindh University’s philosophy department.

She lamented civil society’s silence over anti-labour laws and exploitation of the poor and said one major reason why society had failed to produce great people like Haider Baksh Jatoi was the fact that political workers had turned into NGO (non-governmental organisation) workers who were busy promoting agendas of certain vested interests.

“What is making the situation complicated is that organisations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have become a third power and are dictating policies,” she said.

She criticised what she termed the phenomenon of ‘neo-feudalism’ and said there was a need to check how people, who were part of the bureaucracy, became owners of thousands of acres of land within a few years.

Retired justice Rasheed Rizvi said in his brief address that nothing would change unless society learnt to speak the truth. “The biggest blunder Mr Jinnah made was to dismiss the government of what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Why don’t we say that? Unless society develops the courage to speak the truth, nothing will change,” he said.

The legal situation about labour laws, he said, was presently so confusing that the labour class had no forum to take their cases to. He criticised the devolution process which, he said, had been carried out without proper homework.

The major problem post-devolution, he said, would be faced by people who had come from other provinces to work in Sindh at the time of delivery of their pension and dues. “The PPP government that claims to follow in the footsteps of its founder chairman is the one strongly opposing the land reforms of 1970 which were brought in by Bhutto,” he said.

The army, he said, was the biggest employer and no pro-labour legislation could ever get official approval until the institution was brought within the ambit of law and the constitution.

Historian and poet Ahmed Saleem said that generally documented history showed what the state had to say and not what the people believed in and struggled for.

In the case of Pakistan, he said, people’s movements could not be documented because comprehensive relevant documents were not available. Most archives with details of struggles of left-wing parties like the Communist Party had been destroyed during police raids and what had been de-classified, for instance, in the case of Rawalpindi conspiracy case, only showed version of state officials and no account by the accused.

He said that some institutions which had preserved rare records were facilitating people in research and said there was a dire need that a sustained effort was made to document history of people’s movements in Pakistan.

Presenting his paper on Pakistan’s political parties and their manifestos of 2013 elections, writer and teacher Abid Abbasi said that not a single manifesto had made any reference to any the ILO (International Labour Organisation) convention -- Pakistan is a signatory to 34 such conventions.

“There is no mention of land reforms in any manifesto. Only PPP has talked of registering informal workers but hasn’t done anything to materialise it,” he said.

Later, the Sobho Gianchandani Aitaraf-i-Kamal Award was presented to Dr Mubarak Ali who delivered the Sibte Hasan memorial lecture.