Hundreds of people wearing red caps and waving red flags gathered in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Monday, October 27, to commemorate the historical peasant movement in the region and to demand an end to the ongoing state repression against their leaders.
The event was organized by the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP) on the anniversary of the Hashtnagar peasant movement. The attendees remembered and paid tribute to the martyrs of the historic movement.
The meeting was addressed by various provincial and national leaders of the MKP and other left groups such as Salar Faiyaz Ali, chairman of the MKP, Rubina Jamil from the All Pakistan Trade Union Federation (APTUF), Syeda Ghulam Fatima Gilani from the Bonded Labor Liberation Front (BLLF), Irfan Ali and several others.
The Hashtnagar movement was led by the MKP in the 1970s after its foundation in 1968. It was a movement to claim ownership rights for the tenants over the land they cultivated for generations. Such rights were denied to tenants in Pakistan as the landlord-state nexus refused to carry out land reforms.
The speakers highlighted how MKP leadership organized and led the peasants in the region to liberate and reclaim hundreds of acres of land from the big landlords at the time despite facing violent oppression unleashed by both the landlords and the state.
Salar Faiyaz Ali, chairman of the MKP assured the farmers and workers in the region that, staying true to its long legacy, the MKP will continue to fight for the rights of the workers and peasants in the coming days, irrespective of the threats and intimidation from the state and wealthy classes.
Participants raised slogans against the state’s growing repression against MKP leadership, with speakers pressing the demand for the immediate withdrawal of all false cases against Faiyaz Ali and his comrades.
State oppression continues
Several leaders of the MKP, including Ali, have been charged with false cases under the anti-terrorism act of 1997 and put under the proscribed offenders list by the provincial government for their participation in peasant movements.
In July of this year, scores of MKP leaders, including Salar Amjad Ali, brother of Faiyaz, were arrested and put behind bars for months after their bails in previous cases were arbitrarily revoked.
MKP had alleged that the arrests were carried out to suppress the movement against the illegal land grab in the region undertaken by its leadership.
All of them have been granted bail after spending months in jail now.
Earlier this month a massive raid was conducted by the security forces on Faiyaz Ali’s residence and a case was filed against him under the anti-terrorism act of 1997.
Ramis, a lawyer by profession and activist with the MKP, told Peoples Dispatch that the recent rise in the state repression against the leadership in the KP and elsewhere is a result of authorities sensing the growing popular support for the movement which was repressed for decades.
Pakistan has recently seen mass popular movements against the state’s decisions to hand over land to big corporate houses or the army in the name of development in the Punjab and Sindh provinces.
The protests against a new Indus canal related to the so-called Green Pakistan Initiative (GPI) earlier this year were one of the largest such protests in Pakistan’s recent history.
The growing number of popular movements for rights over land and other resources has scared the state-landlord nexus and they want to curb any eventuality where it becomes difficult for them to continue their rule unchallenged, Ramis asserts.
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