Introduction

It is uncommon to be confronted with popular media reports about military excess in Punjab, especially its rural areas. This is in contrast with the almost daily narration of police and administrative abuse, as well as the tedium of local courts. Every so often, an isolated incident does come to the fore, but it typically is viewed as an anomaly, at least amongst the urban public. This trend, however, appeared to change irrevocably during the Musharraf dictatorship. An argument can be made that the taboo of speaking out against military excess in Punjab was permanently undone by the high-profile conflict that erupted in Okara in 2000 between landless tenant farmers and the administration of the so-called Okara military farms. The bone of contention concerned the control of approximately seventeen thousand acres of very fertile canal colony land spread out across 18 villages. The plight of the Okara tenants – who were subjected to considerable state repression that culminated in the use of force by Rangers – was taken up by political parties and human rights organizations, and also garnered a great deal of media coverage. The Okara tenants caused the military considerable embarrassment and arguably opened the floodgates for similar exposés on military high-handedness across the length and breadth of Punjab.

While narratives of social discontent and resistance to the military in Sindh and Balochistan, and to a lesser extent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, have proliferated over the years, the Okara stand-off was viewed by many as a watershed in so far as it challenged perceptions that rural Punjabis – including those at the bottom of the social hierarchy – enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the state, and the military in particular. We have shown in chapter 2 that a broad state–society consensus was forged by the British colonial regime in Punjab over a century ago, and that, to a significant extent, this consensus has been relatively durable. However, we have also demonstrated that the military's resource grabbing in the Punjabi heartland, as well as the Siraiki peripheries of the province, is now becoming widespread.