Anjuman-i-Mazareen Punjab

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Labour and Hope

Published in Dawn on August 3rd 2018

The miserable have no other medicine/ But only hope. — Shakespeare

New legislative bodies are about to be installed at the centre and in the provinces, and amid controversies and misgivings, the common citizens are heaving a sigh of relief that the democratic process continues. Meanwhile, civil society groups, professional associations and collective forums are engaging in closed-door consultations with their members on how to advocate policies that matter the most to them in a setup and that have gone from bad to worse.

Powerful bodies, like chambers of commerce and industries, the employers’ federations, would have their own projections of the future policy and institutional environment, but the trade union bodies — greatly shrunk in number and strength — have nothing but hope to hold on to in their struggles.

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Map of Resistance

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2017

INVISIBLE to the frenzied world of urban dwellers, and anchored in the rural hinterlands of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, live communities of peasants — small farmers, tenants, sharecroppers — joined together in their tumultuous fight against forces bent upon usurping their rights to land, to produce and to continue their way of life. La Via Campesina (literally ‘the peasant way’) is a unique international labour movement representing 200 million rural workers in 73 countries.

Today, April 17, is the International Day of Peasants Struggles celebrated by La Via Campesina the world over to honour the 19 members of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement who were shot dead by the military police on this day in 1996 in the village of Eldorado Los Carajás during a demonstration against federal appropriation of land cultivated by 3,000 rural families.

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