MQM often refers to agriculture land owners as waderas/jagirdars. The have proposed a bill in the national assembly to restrict the agricultural land ownership to 36 acres in case of irrigated land, and 54 acres in case of rain fed land per family. The basis of such demand is that Islam encourages equitable distribution of wealth. Before proposing this kind of suggestion they have totally ignored these factors.
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If this principle has to applied, why not apply the same on urban business and property as well.
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Ill gotten money should be confiscated irrespective of rural urban divide, or agriculture non agriculture divide. Before nationalizing honestly earned assets of private individuals, we should keep in mind our past experiences with nationalization in the name of socialism. We should also consider the economic failures of those societies which have followed this path.
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Such low land holding ceilings do not encourage any scientific/technological/corporate agriculture. With population growth at one of the highest percentage in the world, can we afford to follow a system which will be devoid of any economy of scales to source modern technologies in this sector.
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Food and agriculture are said to be the next booming business in the world for next few decades as the population grows and gets urbanized. We can exploit this growth by introducing scientific methods in agriculture, dairy, and food processing. All over the world agriculture is being taken as a business with large companies venturing in this sector. Even in China they are now establishing dairy farms with 20,000 plus animals per farm which requires large pieces of land. Most of the agriculture equipment is not operational when you have land divided in small chunks.
Our urban population can get easily disillusioned with such propaganda which will eventually prove disastrous for our economy:
http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\10\29\story_29-10-2010_pg3_6
VIEW: Politics of land reform —Haider Nizamani
The agenda of redistribution of wealth and imposing ceilings on movable and immovable property would only appear credible when it includes all propertied classes. Failing that, the demand for selective redistribution would be hardly different from initiatives of selective accountability carried out by various regimes where the coercive arm of the law became a convenient way of political victimisation
Some analysts want to take politics out of the MQM’s proposed bill on land reforms and have thrown their intellectual support behind the initiative based on technical merits of the bill. The law aimed at making major changes in the country’s power and property relations is precisely the stuff politics is made of. Let us focus here on the two key documents regarding the land reforms available on the MQM’s website. A two-page long Urdu document titled, ‘Brief Overview of the 2010 Land Reforms Bill’ provides the background, salient features of the proposed law, logic behind it, and objectives of the bill. The English version has the actual draft of the bill along with above information.
Analysts who have jumped onto the MQM bandwagon tend to offer selective reading of the proposed bill by highlighting the precise landholding ceiling of 36 acres of irrigated and 54 acres of rain-fed per family and a clause to compensate those whose excess lands will be confiscated. Little light is shed on three other integral parts of the bill, namely, background, logic and objective of the proposed law. Even a cursory glance at these features demonstrates how political is the issue that some want to depoliticise.
The first point of the background section says, “It is a proven fact that rotten feudal system is the cause of the country’s all economic, political, social, and societal problems.” Feudalism caused the “tragedy of East Pakistan and the most recent floods”. Feudalism is the reason behind “inflation, unemployment, poverty, load-shedding, and energy crisis” gripping the country. And the MQM’s bill is going to “uproot that rotten system”.
The backgrounder is an exercise in unimpressive polemics with little regard for history or the current situation of Pakistan. Bangladesh was an outcome of cultural, political, and economic exclusion of the majority community perpetrated primarily by a military-bureaucratic clique. The decision to impose Urdu as the state language was championed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Bengali members were shunned from speaking in their mother tongue in the first constituent assembly by the first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan. When the military assumed direct control of the country under Ayub Khan with civil bureaucrats firmly on its side, the Bengalis had less than two percent representation in the military. By the mid-1960s West Pakistan’s per capita income was fully 30 percent higher than East Pakistan. The educated, mainly urbanite, civil and military bureaucracies and their ideological minions were the ones who brought about the break-up of the country.
**Even ills like load shedding and unemployment are attributed to ‘feudalism’. According to the recent economic survey of Pakistan, the agriculture sector consumes 14 percent of electricity as compared to 30 percent consumed by the industrial and commercial sectors. Domestic consumption comprises 42 percent and major cities use more energy than much of rural Pakistan. Before a middle class housewife in Karachi thinks that load shedding will be taken care of only if the proposed bill becomes law, she should keep the above figures in mind. **
The section on the ‘logic’ of the land reforms makes an interesting read. The MQM realises landowners, who are likely to lose land due to the new lower land-holding ceilings, may ask for similar restrictions on urban industries, properties, and businesses. The MQM’s answer is that the wealthy in the urban areas have not amassed wealth because of the British granting them those assets before the creation of Pakistan, whereas almost all agriculture landowners of Pakistan possess lands because their ancestors were lackeys of the British and were granted lands in lieu of their support of the Raj.
I have yet to come across the argument of British allocation as the defining principle to expropriate property in the writings of analysts who have thrown their unconditional support behind MQM’s bill. The implementation of the proposed law would require positive proof that the land being expropriated was indeed granted by the British to the ancestors of the current owner. I am afraid there would hardly be enough land available out there which the state could expropriate using that criterion.
Islam is invoked to justify imposed lower land ceilings because Islam “enjoins equitable distribution of wealth and economic powers and abhors their concentration in a few hands”. Unequal access to opportunities and skewed distribution is the hallmark of Pakistani society. Inequality of opportunity cuts across the rural and urban divide. The agenda of redistribution of wealth and imposing ceilings on movable and immovable property would only appear credible when it includes all propertied classes. Failing that, the demand for selective redistribution would be hardly different from initiatives of selective accountability carried out by various regimes where the coercive arm of the law became a convenient way of political victimisation.
The writer teaches political science at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He can be reached
at [email protected]
That probably truly represents PPP.