Land reform now
ABOUT a decade ago, when the PTI was Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court just a singe, boycotted seat from Mianwali, ruled there could be no limits on property, Imran Khan's book hit the stands. In A and that land ceilings were un-Islamic. Inrsonal Histors, we found him relating a hard-hitting dissent, Justice Nasim deeply to gbal, "my greatest influence', and Hasan Shah held otherwise "In the lqbal's ideas of kdi or seltfreliance But sel-reliance has always been a deeply property is only relative to the needs of politicalproject. As lqbal wrote to Jinnah in society. The author of the majority opin 1937: How is it possible to solve the prob ion, Mufti Taqi Usmani, was unmoved, and em ol Muslim poverty..Tbe whoke future land retorm was killed lor good. ofthe League depends on the League's Its time now to start over: Pakistan can activity to solve this question."The poet had answers of his own. The when all the evidence points the ot her way. future of Islam in India, he said elsewhere, n his extensively researched treatise or Sepends 0n the emancipatkon of thec Asa vorks, author Joe Studwell surveys ushm peasantry ol the Puna Noted economists ike Dr Pervez Tahir and credits the Asian Miracle to land have unearthed similar themes in lqbals reform in every single country as the pri- exts, Irom Barge-Ire to ArmaparH-IE. mary step: it eures key iequalities, max "Private property is the source of all evils," imises agricultural output, creates jobs, Jgbal wrote, and called for its joint ower and redistributes wealth. As even that ode shipe land was "not the result of the labour to Thatcherism, Tihe Eaonornist, was forced o a particular individual or ation but the to admit,For Asia, the path to prosperity common Etot nature.. Granted, lqbal the revolutionary is not the lqbal of our textbooks, who tells tales of oceans and eagles But in the PTls 2013 manifesto, those ideas still made the cut. Our poverty roduction strategy will Tocus on rural land reforms, it reads, "such that the maximum umbers of rural households own a minimum-specified area of land." An election and five years later, however, Islamic perspective, man's freedam to own no longer allow itself to suffer, especially Chia, JapaB oT starts with land reform." to keep, the same way it wasn't our Yet our landed clas plays down Its not theirs the problem, point lo he dimin ishing size of land- holdings. This is code for, don't come after us our ho party's2018 maifesto dropped the plan colonisers to away will soon'. fritter it's it and any mention of it. Around the same time, the PTI threw open the doors to the sa me electables it lotng despised, before roll ngg nto slamato give. not theirs to keep, the same way i wasnt oir coloni ers to give. As it is, the majority of rural With nearly halt a term down, the IK housebolds continue to own no agricultural administration has sidestepped the core land, with landlessness fuelling poverty cause of our broken system-our refusal to Feudalism, however, is a slur for many redistribute land. This country can't be of our commentators, who peg it to mid fixed witlout i. dle-class rage (a far worse beast, it soems, Consder reht trom 197, the Mustim than the wndera with his private prisoms, League's landlords throttled redistribution. or the zamindar that sold himself so Then came Ayub, who imposed a ridicu cheaply to the British), For that reason, lously high land ceiling of S00 acres. Zaulfi this piece uses the f-word nowhere else. Butto's two tries in the 1970s dove closer, It's not about isms, as much as it's about ut vwet nowhere. 1aken toether, Avub restoringrights. and Bhutto's retorms may have benefited just 0.02 per cent of the eligible population. pandemic to get through. But the PTI gov The result, one scholar wrote long ago, is ernment has to fulfil its promise from seven that the state isyet to peetrate the rural years ago too: it must join senior AsC Abid areas, the agricultural sector has been Hassan Minto's review petition against largely exempt from taxation, and the Qazalbash', table legislation with lower Landed elite control the flow of national and land ceilings, and empower the federal and provincial politics. When Nawa Sharif provincial land commissions Like the rest of the world, Pakistan has aa Our fosslised ette rd. revolu the first time a no-landowner landed the as oe of our neighbours remarked, revolu- top job 1n over three decades, save Nurul ion isnta dinner party. It would be best to Ains snt ot two weeks. Tronically, land reform was buried the land reform lies the very greatest good. same year: in Qazalbash Waqf vs Chief Land Commissioner, the Shariat The wriler is a bavistor.