It was a dispute over wood chopped from military farms in Okara that started a prairie fire in Punjab: landless peasant women fought tooth and nail in October 2001 to defend their loved ones from the might of the military farms administration and law enforcement personnel. Their weapon: a Thaapa or wooden dowel, often used by rural women to beat clothes while washing them.

For almost 15 years now, landless peasants in Punjab have been struggling for land ownership rights. Back in 2001, at the start of the movement, General Pervez Musharraf was in power and was intent on instituting corporate farming on military-owned farms across Punjab. But a spanner was thrown in the works when the landless peasants tilling military land refused to accept new terms of sharecropping. Most of these tenants were settled on military land since centuries and through generations, to the extent that the land tenancy law of the land could allow them to claim ownership rights over the land they tilled.

The peasants had organised themselves into the Anjuman Muzareen Punjab (AMP) or the Society of Landless Peasants of Punjab. They were in no mood to continue being tenants, and instead, they wanted ownership rights. The AMP’s slogan was perhaps among the more emotionally charged ones too: “Malki Ya Maut” (land ownership or death) — they would neither accept the revised sharecropping arrangement nor would they be driven out of the farm lands where they lived.

In the second week of October, while the men were negotiating with the district commissioner in Okara, the farm administration asked law enforcement to recover the wood that had been chopped without permission from Chak 10/4-L. The police complied, only to discover that it wasn’t the farmers who had stolen wood but the owner of a dera nearby.

And yet, law enforcement attempted to attack Chak 10/4-L. A day earlier, AMP chief Younas Iqbal and his comrades had met with women in various villages, urging them and their families to join the struggle since it was one that involved households. In a sense, the women were prepared to fight, although perhaps no one had foreseen just how soon they’d be pressed into action.

When the might of the state sought to crush a landless peasants’ movement in Punjab, it met unusual resistance from peasant women

“We told them that the villagers are up against the might of the state, which had all kinds of weapons and bullets at their disposal. We just had strength in our bodies and our Thaapas, and women were the best at wielding those,” says Iqbal.

Indeed, 15-20 women first stood up to the local police, beating any police mobile that tried making their way into their village. They were all middle-aged women, mostly from Christian households. By the time the men reached home from their meeting with the district commissioner, the village had already been defended.

“This was the time when our struggle left the purview of men or patriarchs of the family, because the issue was now being discussed by women,” says Akeela Naz, among the most celebrated leaders and mobilisers of the AMP.

Naz herself was not in Okara that day, but she was inspired by what other women achieved that day. She decided to join the movement and organise the women proper. “I was in my mid-20s at the time, so was Rubina Albert who joined around the same time. Mumtaz Prem was 18. But of course, we all came from Christian households,” she narrates.

A year on, the women’s force hadn’t just gathered pace but were steaming on.

“We were 10 women in Okara, each in a separate chak. We decided to walk together to all villages to gather support. We’d go to one village, convince women, and then bring them along to the next village. When we organised our convention in 2002, our women did most of the mobilisation,” she says.

The organised women’s force was now being acknowledged as a Thaapa-wielding outfit. More than the AMP, the movement began being recognised as the struggle of the Thaapa Force.

And the Thaapa Force was instrumental in defending and furthering the cause. The might of the state had already resolved to take down the movement, and the two AMP leaders at the time, Younas Iqbal from Okara and Dr Christopher John in Khanewal, were both incarcerated as were the young men following these leaders.

Their villages were put under heavy surveillance and scrutiny: almost every man walking into the villages was whisked; almost every outsider making their way into the villages was questioned about their intent. Activists were routinely picked up on their way out of these villages, while their office in Lahore was also sealed and their documents seized.

With the men gone, government expectation was that the movement would collapse from within. Even the youngsters who were released by law enforcement returned with tales of torture in the gallows. Local police and other security officials believed that it would now be easier to bully the families of those incarcerated into signing deeds to vacate land.

But things did not go down as was being predicted, largely because of the Thaapa Force. Not only were they instrumental in mobilising support but they also managed to get police check-posts around their villages removed. Law enforcement began seeing the Thaapa Force as more dangerous than the men; they’d routinely ask Iqbal to ask them to cease and desist.

But eventually, the movement fell prey to caste and religions, as Muslim peasants began arguing that not only were they of superior caste backgrounds, but that they didn’t want to follow a Christian leadership either. There were accusations of this activist having been turned by law enforcement and that one too; none of these charges could be proved but in the immediacy of struggle, a shadow cast once was a shadow cast forever. The AMP split, one faction led by the old guard and the other by Muslim peasants.

But perhaps the largest setback received was to the Thaapa Force, an outfit that cut through caste and religion.

“The greatest gift that the Thaapa Force provided to us was instilling self-respect among women. They wanted respect and now they were getting them in bucketloads,” says Naz. Gender-based and domestic violence decreased considerably, they now had electoral agency, and more girls began being educated.

Although days of the dizzy heights of the movement have long passed, women of the force have now organised themselves as Peasants Women Society. “We want women to be recognised in property deeds in any land reforms process undertaken by the government. Land is granted by the government but only to men. We want joint ownership of land, and the Punjab government is now looking into our proposals,” says Naz.

The writer tweets @ASYusuf

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 24th, 2016