Two contrasting scripts are currently running side by side in the farming sector.

On the one side are endless pledges for ameliorating the lot of poor farmers, offering them resources and environments for improving their income and living standards and ensuring fair prices for their produce, while on the other, they are subjected to rake-off operations, maltreatment, harassment and actions that would further darken their unlit lives, indeed dispossess them of rights as owners and tenants of lands they cultivate.

A recent question hour session in the Senate about the plight of farmers living along the border with India in Bahawalpur provides dismal, disconcerting information. The farmers were required to temporarily move out of their lands because of a threat of war from India three year back.

They were promised compensation for lost crops but not only have they not received any monetary help so far, the Punjab government is also reported to be prosecuting them for ‘non-payment of revenues’ and sending ‘defaulters’ to jails.

The exact number of affected farmers has not been indicated but, according to senators of the ruling PML (Q) and its allied parties, ‘thousands of farmers’ were dislocated from homes and lands in year 2000 due to Pakistan-India stand-off at that time; armed forces of the two countries stood across the border and the situation seemed headed for an explosion.

Firstly, these farmers have still not been allowed to return. While the discussion in the Senate sounded sympathetic towards the farmers, it concentrated on compensation and strangely did not take up the core issue, that of the farmer’s return to their lands.

It was disclosed in the Senate that as they could not cultivate their fields, many farmers were forced to shift to urban centres to find work to survive. There are three vital aspects to this issue, besides a number of relatively less important questions.

Three years is sufficient of time to ascertain if the situation on the borders is still mined or effectively cleared to allow displaced farmers to return to their base.

The second aspect is payment of agreed and announced compensation while the third question is payment of revenues on crops they never cultivated. The government cuts a terribly sorry figure on each of these counts.

Over two weeks have passed since the Senate ‘Question Hour’ but there has been no response from the government of Punjab. How the administration can levy taxes on homeless citizens whose crops were damaged and they had later no access to their fields is mind-boggling. This, however, is not an imagined situation but stark reality of farmers who lived in Pakistan’s border areas in the Bahawalpur region.

The federal government had agreed to pay an amount of Rs915 million to the affected farmers as compensation but three years down the line, not one penny has reached them. The finance ministry approved the amount but, according to ministry of Defence (MoD), its position stated in the Senate by the minister of state for health on behalf of the government, payment to farmers would be made after their names are submitted to MoD.

While three years should be more than sufficient time for finalizing the lists, the statement made in the Senate is apparently wanting in accuracy because the demand was made by MoD only ‘after making an assessment of losses and verifying the antecedents of the affected farmers’.

There are contradictions in the official position as enunciated by (MoD) and the statement made by the state minister in the Upper House.

The case, according to MoD, was being processed while the state minister informed the house that the case had been completed and only actual releases needed to be made; that would be done when names of farmers are ascertained. Both positions can obviously not be correct. This is a regrettable state of affairs and places the government in negative, anti-people light.

This shows pathetic and callous disinterest in the well-being of the farmers, particularly small, poverty ridden members of the community that was a part of General Musharraf’s seven-point agenda in October 1999 when he took over the government. He had pledged to better their lot. As it is, they seem to have been hit by processes ranging from neglect to dispossession.

There has been no dearth of declarations for changing the face of the agriculture sector, modernizing it, offering all kinds of facilities and loans on easy terms to farmers to enhance produce and earn better dividends from their sweat and toil. But events in Bahawalpur inform of a dispensation of tragic dimensions. Surely, this is not the ‘Agriculture Vision’ that would take growth in the sector to six percent.

The Agriculture Vision is to be ‘linked with poverty alleviation programme, specially in the rural areas where 49 per cent of the country’s workforce is employed’. This is not the full view of rural Pakistan.

While family members of most farmers are part of workforce, the number of people dependent on agriculture for sustaining themselves is larger.

They are collectively visited by adversity. Not just that. Vibrations of events are felt far and wide and create their impact. The message from Bahawalpur is greater, more abject and deadly poverty for farmers.

This is loud enough to be heard by farmers in other parts of the country. What kind of inspiration would the farmers in the rest of the country draw from the manner in which their counterparts in Bahawalpur’s border areas have been treated?

Bahawalpur is not the first trouble spot for poor farmers. Events on military farms of Okara have already unfolded in a terribly unjust, indeed cruel scenario of dispossession.

No one has come to the rescue of the beleaguered tenants; those that tried to help them have been subjected to a vilification campaign and painted as individuals and groups undermining the interests of the state. Fighting for human rights and deprived segments seems to have become anti-state activity.

Counterparts of Okara’s tenants tilling lands under the Seed Corporation of Punjab have also been featuring in dispatches of uncertain future and looming despair.

Whispers of uneasiness from various other farms of the provincial government are also in the air. The government, politicians in the set-up at least, should be handling these cases sympathetically. Instead, callousness and contempt for farmers has become the order of the present period.

Senators representing political parties in the government have rendered a praiseworthy service by raising their voice for the harassed farmers of Bahawalpur who have actually been dispossessed in the name of national interest. They were supposed to be compensated. Instead, they are being punished.

This is hardly a blue print for progress in the agriculture sector. If anything, these developments are a recipe for disaster on the farmlands owned and tilled by the poor. What a way to alleviate poverty.