I HAD an opportunity of attending a conference titled ‘Sharing land rights and social protection: consultation with political parties’ organised by the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Rights (PILER) as a representative of the PML (N).

The participants of the conference included political leaders representing the entire political divide in Sindh including the MQM, Jamat-i-Islami, the PML (F), Jeay Sindh, the PTI and the PPP.

The popular refrain during the conference was the need for ‘land reforms’ and the evils of ‘feudalism’. Both these terms were done to death without attempting to understand either their meaning or the significance of any purported action.

Land reforms have wrongly been understood as an exercise of expropriating and redistributing agricultural land when, in fact, it is an advocacy of thorough reforms of the agrarian economy which must, at its core, address issues related to agricultural productivity along with those related to the pattern of land ownership, tenancy arrangements and labour regulations.

Unfortunately, the researchers of PILER placed their data in the hands of professional ‘leftists’ and partisan political interests.

On the basis of those statistics, one ‘expert’ was able to come to the conclusion that if all agricultural lands were expropriated from their present owners and redistributed, each landless hari would come to own less than one acre of land which he deemed sufficient for the hari’s immediate food needs.

He was unmindful of the fact that such fragmentation will create hordes of subsistence farmers when the need of the day is to engage in commercial agriculture.

Commercial agriculture can utilise technology for enhancing agricultural production and productivity and reverting to subsistence farming will be a hugely retrogressive step.

We need to produce a surplus not only for the food needs of the urban population, which now probably stands at about half the population of Sindh, but also for feeding industries such as textiles, sugar, edible oils, etc., and for exports which are dependent largely on agricultural production.

One cannot possibly disagree with the highly laudable aim of ameliorating the lot of the poor, disenfranchised and long suffering haris of Sindh. But that cannot be done by further impoverishing the rural economy. It would be akin to cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Let us also address the bogey of ‘feudalism’ in Sindh which has continued to be raised mainly, and curiously, by urban interests.

Let me state categorically that feudalism as a system of organising production and defining production relations does not now exist in Sindh nor has it existed in the recent past.

The so-called feudal lords are dysfunctional and parasitical elite whose main source of income is not related to agricultural production. Theirs are the wages of corruption and in this heinous crime against humanity they are aided and abetted by urban interests.

The so-called ‘feudals’ are in fact a comprador class and are in no small measure beholden to the urban interests who probably own three fourths of the entire wealth of Sindh.

Ironically, a necessary requirement of feudalism as a system is that the ‘serf’ be tied to the land. That is precisely what the urban interests require their ‘compradors’ to manage. Subsistence farming will further ensure that the hari is tied to his land or else hordes of grossly underemployed and unemployed Sindhis will descend like locust on the urban centres. That would be at counter purposes to both the interests of the urban and rural elite.

The economic division of Sindh has long been a reality and its maintenance is a continuing ‘work in progress’. But the economic division is constantly threatened by the possibility of mass migration of Sindhis to the major urban centres of Sindh. In Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, migrations from the hinterland to the urban centres within the province would raise no eyebrows. This cannot be permitted in Sindh precisely because ethnic and linguistic divisions also define rural and urban divisions.

The need for a political division of Sindh is now being felt most acutely by the urban interests because of the decidedly changed mood of Sindhis. The Trojan horse of the PPP stands exposed and hence such frantic activities.

DR MUZAFFAR A. ISANI Karachi