LAHORE: The Awami Workers Party (AWP) on Sunday announced organising a series of protests and conferences to build momentum against what it says violent grabbing of land, forests, minerals, mountains and water bodies.

The land grab is being done all over the country, Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan by global and local powerful capitalist groups and state organisations dispossessing millions of working people and generating unprecedented social, ecological, and political crises, it says.

Speaking at a press conference here on Sunday at the conclusion of its two-day federal committee meeting, AWP President Yousuf Musti Khan, general secretary Akhtar Hussain, Farzana Bari, Baba Jan, Nisar Shah, Haider Zaman, Farhat Abbas and others announced that the party units all over the country would hold protest demonstrations against unbridled land grab as well as the ongoing demolitions of katchi abadis in Karachi and other major metropolitan centres.

They also announced a national conference on “land, dispossession and development” in Islamabad on July 11 in which progressive and democratic forces from across the country will gather to develop a consensus for a pro-people and ecologically-sustainable development model.

They rejected the recently announced federal budget describing it as an eyewash in which big businessmen have been favoured. Even some populist ‘pro-poor’ announcements have been made to distract from the harsh social and economic conditions of the working masses, they said.

The budget actually confirms that the PTI government, like its successive governments, is ruthlessly implementing an IMF agenda that has systematically reproduced immiserating policies of dispossession, casualization of labour and repression alongside, they said.

Economic hardship is exacerbating a massive social crisis; violence against working class, women, religious minorities and depressed castes is endemic and intensifying.

The religious right in particular is capitalising on ordinary people’s alienation, not to mention economic hardships by diverting their anger from the ruling elite to oppressed communities, they said. The party also opposed a move by the government in granting military bases and ground and air communication facilities to the US that will jeopardise relations with regional and neighbouring countries.

Now, practices of development through dispossession have begun to gain pace in Punjab in the shape of forced displacement of farmers through the Ravi Urban Development Authority in Lahore and the Rawalpindi Ring Road, they said, adding this model of capitalist development is also wreaking havoc on local ecology.

Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2021