INDUSTRIALIZATION AND LABOR

Pakistan, at its independence in 1947, inherited only 9 percent of the total industrial establishment of British India. The lack of industrial capital was mirrored by the weakness of organized industrial labor and the peasantry.¹³

The nascent Pakistani government followed an import-substitution model to industrialize the economy rapidly. The state also relied heavily on agricultural exports—specifically, East Pakistani jute—to subsidize industrial development in West Pakistan.¹⁴

The state promoted industrialization by providing soft loans and tax holidays and by setting up the Pakistan Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation in the late 1940s with assistance from the World Bank and foreign capital. Because of lack of response from local merchant capital, the state also formed the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), through which it initiated industrial projects that were then transferred to the private sector at bargain prices.¹⁵

The first phase of private industrialization occurred after the Korean war, when the profits gained by Pakistani traders were channeled into industrial investment. Special areas were developed in Karachi—the Sindh Industrial Trading Estate (SITE), and the Landhi–Korangi industrial areas—and land was sold to construct factories at extremely generous rates. Between 1947 and 1955, 774 new industrial units were established in Karachi, representing almost 50 percent of all industrialization in Pakistan.¹⁶ As the state took a role in setting up industrial units, the bureaucracy became intrinsically involved in the control of this expansion. State agencies directly financed the industrial concerns or participated in legislating laws to favor this growth. The collusion of the bureaucracy and the industrialists was manifested in facilitating the finances for expansion of industrial houses. At the same time, this alliance kept wages down and insured industrial peace through brutal suppression of the working class.

Despite state-sponsored repressive measures, worker unrest increased. The declining social and economic conditions of the working class and the disparity in income levels that were becoming shamelessly evident in the Pakistan of the 1950s gave rise to several labor strikes. According to estimates, between 1954 and 1957 there were more than 250 strikes in which more than 200,000 workers were involved.¹⁷

An example of workers' living conditions in the early 1950s is evident in a report filed by an International Labour Organisation (ILO) representative in 1953.¹⁸ According to the report, Karachi was still a city where a large section of the population, being refugees from India, did not have adequate housing. People were living on sidewalks, and workers' living conditions were extremely precarious. Trade-union representatives occasionally raised issues of housing and welfare with the factory owners. These requests were periodically turned down on the basis that such investments would lower the margin of profit.

Earlier in 1951, the government had ratified the ILO convention on freedom of association and the right to organize. Irrespective of the lofty ideals of higher wages and workers' participation that were guaranteed in these conventions, workers' living condition did not improve in practice. Moreover, labor was periodically warned by government functionaries to not hamper the industrialization process with strikes and upheaval.¹⁹

The emerging state subordinated labor organizations by sponsoring anti-communist trade unions,²⁰ banning leftist and popular trade unions, and passing draconian labor laws that effectively prevented collective bargaining and the right to strike. Trade-union workers with whom I spoke remembered how radical workers and those who desired to form unions were harassed, beaten by local goons hired by the industrialists, or fired from their jobs on one pretext or another. With rampant unemployment and a surplus of labor, many workers desisted from joining unions out of fear of such reprisals.

The military take-over of the Pakistani state in 1958 intensified this repression. The Industrial Disputes Act of 1947, under which most labor laws had been functioning, was repealed and re-enacted under the rubric of the Industrial Dispute Ordinance. The ordinance brought more industries under the banner of essential services, prohibiting the formation of unions there. Strikes were made illegal, and the registration of unions was made difficult. To safeguard against contravening ILO conventions, a system of conciliation and mediation was devised. Conciliation officers were government functionaries who referred unsettled disputes to industrial courts for mediation, where the process could take months to settle. The idea was to move labor grievances from the streets to the courts and boardrooms under the watchful eye of state functionaries. The already beleaguered common worker was further entangled in the alien language of rules and regulations to fight for his rights.

During General Ayub Khan's rule (1958–69), bureaucrats and former army officers began to run major industrial units directly. This was an era of unprecedented growth in the wealth and holdings of Pakistan's major industrial houses. They moved into banking and insurance, which further supplied funds for expansion. Pakistan's growth was heralded by U.S. economists as a model for the rest of the Third World and as a premier example of “free enterprise.” Gustav Papanek, head of the Harvard Advisory Group to Pakistan, affectionately called Pakistan's state-sponsored bourgeoisie “robber barons” and argued that the rising social and economic inequality contributed to the economy's growth and would eventually lead to improvement in the living conditions of the lower-income groups.²¹

Irrespective of Papanek's “rosy” predictions, through the 1960s retrenchment and dismissals were common tools for disciplining workers. An outburst of workers' accumulated frustration was evident in the March 1963 demonstration in the SITE area under the Mazdoor Rabita Committee (Workers' Coordinating Committee). The strikes led to firing on demonstrating laborers by police, and several people were killed. This in turn led to an increased radicalization among the workers that was crushed by mass arrests of the mill-level leadership. Industrialists, taking note of the state's response, continued with their policy of dismissals and retrenchment. Usman Baluch, a trade-union leader who lived through this and later labor struggles, represented the situation by stating that “the bureaucracy through the labor courts, the industrialists through their jobbers, masters and paid strongmen, and the police through violent suppression of demonstrations worked in unison to suppress the labor movement.”²²

Between 1947 and 1958, the economy had been sluggish in its growth (3.2% growth in the gross national product [GNP]); the largest employment was in the agricultural sector, which contributed about 50 percent of the output. However, manufacturing in this period had a growth rate of 9.6 percent. In contrast, during the entire Ayub era, the GNP rates hovered around the 6 percent mark, and manufacturing maintained a high 9.1 percent growth rate. Even the agricultural sector grew at a rate of 4.1 percent as huge subsidies were given to large landowners for mechanization, with additional public investments in irrigation and drainage works.²³

By the mid-1960s, the industrial sector accounted for almost 20 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), and about 18 percent of the working population was involved in industrial labor. Pakistan was still primarily an agricultural economy, with 40 percent of the GDP and 61 percent of the labor force tied to the agricultural sector. Yet the change was phenomenal compared with Pakistan of the 1950s.

The heavy reliance on foreign capital for industrialization faced a major setback when, after the 1965 war with India, World Bank funds were cut off and then resumed at much lower levels. As the entire structure was built on large inflow of foreign capital, the growth began to sputter. Bad harvests in 1965 and 1966, along with the demand of the eastern Pakistani middle classes for a more equitable share of the spoils of development, created major political turmoil in the country.²⁴

Ayub Khan's much heralded “decade of development” came to an abrupt end when, in 1968–69, students, intellectuals, the urban poor, and the working classes participated in a massive civil-disobedience movement. Spearheaded by the PPP in the west and the Awami League in the eastern wing, this movement protested not only the political bankruptcy of the Ayub regime but also the deteriorating economic conditions and increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth.²⁵

As a result of these disturbances, a new military regime came to power with the promise of social and political reform. One of the first tasks of this junta was to call a tripartite labor conference and work on a fresh labor ordinance. Due to the extreme pressure from the working class, the new government in 1969 introduced an Industrial Relations Ordinance. The ordinance was liberal-democratic in orientation and favored a trade-union policy that relied on negotiation instead of confrontation as the main mode of communication between the laborers and the industrialists. Registration of unions was made easier, and where there was more than one union in an industrial unit, a system of election to choose collective-bargaining agents (CBAs) was devised. Rhetorically, the ordinance's language was critical of previous labor laws and those industrialists who used extra-legal means to curtail trade unionism's growth in the country.²⁶

However, the regime remained committed to the prevention of strikes and lockouts that were undermining production goals in most industrial units. Within this context, legal proceedings in military courts and arrests of labor leaders, workers, and other pro-democracy activists persisted unabated. Irrespective of the ordinance, the military regime gave industrialists virtual freedom in hiring and firing decisions. It is estimated that in Karachi alone, almost 45,000 workers were retrenched between 1969–71.²⁷

Yet the ordinance, after decades of state repression, did bring new energy into the labor movement. Taking advantage of the clauses for registration and constituting CBAs, moribund and underground unions started to come to life. New alliances were made as communist groups and student activists assisted the working-class leadership in reorganizing the trade unions. Before long, in response to the sustained repression of its leaders, an alternate leadership started to take hold in many trade unions. Following the lead of the Bengali working-class and peasant leader Maulana Abdul Hamid Bhashani, the labor groups, now under a more radicalized leadership, took to encirclements of industries (gherao).²⁸

Using these new tactics, the workers started to demand bonuses, better working conditions, and back pay. In some cases, they also protested the dismissal of their comrades.

LABOR AND ETHNICITY

The oldest unions in Karachi were for dock and port workers, which were dominated by the Makrani/Baluch workers of old Karachi.²⁹

In immediate post-independence Pakistan (1947), the Mohajirs (migrants from India, mainly Urdu-speaking), being more educated and having had previous experience of industrial labor and urban life, soon became the majority of the rank-and-file industrial workers. They started to occupy the leadership positions within the already volatile and diversified labor population.³⁰ Subsequently, the Mohajir-dominated trade-union leadership played an important role in advocacy and struggles for labor rights in Karachi. The leadership may have also managed to contain, much to its advantage, the cultural and linguistic tensions between the more highly skilled local workers (Mohajir) and the less skilled up-country migrants (Pashtun/Southern Punjabis) through a rhetoric of class solidarity and proletarian politics. By the late 1960s, however, the ethnic makeup of Karachi's labor population had changed considerably. Skilled Mohajir workers mostly populated the heavy industrial complexes and multinational firms, where working conditions were better. The textile mills, where working conditions were far worse, had up-country migrant laborers or Bengali workers.

In the 1960s, jobbers, who as agents of factory owners recruited men from specific districts in the NWFP and Southern Punjab through economic and social coercion, guaranteed a docile and disciplined workforce to specific factory management. The workers themselves resided in areas populated mostly by people from their own regions and linguistic groups. The radicalized left-wing movement in 1968–69 sought to organize these workers, who until then had mostly known management-controlled unions (popularly called pocket unions), into supporting more independent trade unions. The movement in this process also challenged the complex set of ethnic differences and hierarchies in the workplace and in workers' colonies.

For example, the textile mills were mostly populated by Pashtun workers or workers from Swat and Hazara, also in the NWFP. These workers had come to Karachi in the early 1960s and settled on vacant land at the edge of the industrial area. Workers' neighborhoods with names such as Frontier Colony (NWFP is popularly called “Frontier”) and Pathan Colony were created overnight—names that reflected the population shifts in the local ethnicity of the labor population. Mohajir workers also lived in these areas, but by the late 1960s many had a more established presence in Old Golimar (Bismillah hotel), Bara Board, and Nazimabad, all of which were middle- to lower-middle-class neighborhoods. The new immigrant colonies were largely unplanned and on non-regularized government land and, until the early 1970s, did not have direct water or electricity connections. In the streets one could regularly hear Pashto, Hindko (from Hazara), and Swati being spoken, making these areas somewhat distinct from the Urdu-dominated culture of the larger city. To cater to the growing number of immigrants, a range of popular restaurants, workers' hostels, and bathhouses started to crowd the main thoroughfares of these areas. Gradually, the laborers settled down and in some cases got married in the city or brought their families from their villages and small towns to Karachi. These areas also had civic organizations that catered to specific ethnicities, sometimes to people from a particular district in the NWFP or Southern Punjab. These organizations were led by relatively influential men who at times were linked to factory managements or political parties and had the social and political power to mediate local disputes and conflicts.

Keeping this in perspective, a major problem that the leftist groups faced was that, although the laborers were from different parts of the country and steeped in various traditions of constructing social relations, the Karachi-based leftist cadre was mostly urban, middle class, and Urdu-speaking. Hence, those left-wing activists who belonged to the working class, were ethnically similar, and had cultural affinity with different regional languages and cultures were the most successful in organizing these workers politically.

THE EVENT

The industrial workers' hopes were raised as Bhutto assumed control of the country after the creation of Bangladesh and the surrender of the Pakistani Army in East Pakistan.³¹

In their interviews with me, workers and labor leaders from that era attested to the sense of elation among the workers as they were encouraged by the initial anti-industrialist rhetoric of the PPP. Many had worked with the party and had suffered jail sentences to end martial law and to bring about democratic rule in the country. During the election campaign, Bhutto had also promised to get workers reinstated who had been dismissed by mill owners in the previous several years. He had publicly warned the industrialists to bring back money that they had deposited in foreign banks and had threatened that their passports would be withdrawn, making it difficult for them to travel. Such statements, coupled with the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the government-controlled media during the initial period of Bhutto's rule, raised hopes among the workers that Bhutto was on their side and would finally force the industrialists to accede to labor's demands.³²

Laborers and working-class leaders intensified their struggle, and during the first six months of 1972 periodic lockouts and encirclements of industrial units continued in the two major industrial areas of Karachi.³³

The workers insisted on the reinstatement of those retrenched during the marital-law years, opening of those industries that management had closed without notice or compensation, distribution of bonuses, and payment into workers' participatory funds. They also demanded back pay that they were due in some cases. My informants told me that laborers belonging to different factories, and sometimes rival unions, would walk to other factories where there was a dispute to demonstrate in favor of the workers there. A vivid example of this solidarity was the spontaneous strike of 28 March 1972, when 200,000 workers stopped working, bringing the entire SITE area to a standstill, in response to a continuing lockout by the owners of the Zebtun Textile Mill. The mill owners had closed the factory and laid off 2,000 workers for almost two months. An agreement had been reached with the management by the workers' union that production would start on 24 March, but the mill remained closed even on the morning of 28 March. The Zebtun workers went around to different mills, and work was stopped everywhere in solidarity.³⁴

With the rising militancy, the provincial and central government responded by gradually taking a firmer stand on the labor issue. The government-controlled press published reports that the industrialists were fomenting the labor unrest as a sign of their displeasure with the state's recent nationalization policy.³⁵

Bhutto and his ministers also raised the specter of a “foreign hand” that was supposedly behind these occurrences and wanted to destabilize the popular government.³⁶ Threats such as the one voiced by Bhutto while announcing his labor policy were periodically made by his ministers and by his cousin, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, the governor and, later, chief minister of Sind Province.³⁷ Interestingly, in some cases industrialists were even asked by Bhutto's ministers to provide a list of “undesirable” workers who could then be dealt with by the state authorities.³⁸

There were, however, other voices within the government that reflected the PPP's varied power base. The labor-friendly, left-leaning PPP cadres, some of whom now held government ministries and offices,³⁹

would periodically make pro-labor pronouncements and seek to work out compromises between the state and the striking labor unions. For example, the senior adviser to the governor of Sind, who later became governor, Mir Rasool Baksh Talpur; Mairaj Mohammad Khan, the president's adviser on public affairs; and Abdul Sattar Gabol, the provincial labor minister for Sind regularly met with labor leaders and workers. In their meetings they condemned police excesses against the workers and promised the release of any industrial laborers who were arrested during the continuing disturbances. However, they also requested that, instead of striking and demonstrating, the workers co-operate with the PPP government, consider it their true representative, and, in this spirit, help it solve the people's problems.⁴⁰

Simultaneously, others in the government and a section of the media continuously called for industrial peace on the basis that the country was going through difficult times: one-half of the country had been lost, and the economy was in shambles. By continuing their agitation, the laborers, newspaper editorials argued, were halting needed production to stabilize inflation and export manufactured goods, both of which were necessary to solve the country's financial problems.⁴¹

Going by these and other statements, it was clear to many in the labor movement that the government, irrespective of its pro-labor rhetoric, was seeking to reassert itself and would ultimately crack down on labor on the premise of maintaining law and order.⁴²

A response to the government's hardening position was the formation of the Sind Workers' Convention in the SITE area, which brought together major labor federations in the province to lead the labor movement in this moment of crisis. This unity was partially forced onto some of the labor federations, as they were becoming isolated by the rising tide of labor militancy, and their own rank and file was deserting them to form alliances with other groups. Hence, the federations, whose primary task in the 1960s was to negotiate with the factory management and involve itself in legal procedures to procure labor rights, were forced to make changes through pressure from below. The most powerful trade-union federation in the SITE area was the Mutahida Mazdoor Federation (MMF; lit., United Workers' Federation).⁴³

Since the late 1960s, the MMF had maintained an independent policy toward most political parties, although its members had past and present links with many leftist formations in Karachi. It had in the process become a space where a range of disaffected cadres from bickering communist groups, radical students, mobilized workers, and liberal civil libertarians had come together. Because of its radicalized stance on labor issues, the MMF had within a couple of years become immensely popular among the rank and file within the SITE area.

The confrontation finally came on 7 June 1972.⁴⁴

It was payday at the Feroz Sultan textile mill in the SITE area. The mill's management refused to pay the laborers back pay that was a month overdue and their portion of the workers' participation fund, citing the unavailability of funds.⁴⁵ Instead, the mill owners declared the mill closed—a lockout. This mill's management, like that of several others, had a particularly confrontational relationship with its increasingly militant trade union. The workers, angry over the lack of payment, encircled the mill, confined the executives to their offices inside, and started putting pressure on them to come to terms. The management called the police, who used tear gas to disperse the workers. The police then locked the gates, confining a large number of workers inside the factory; they also arrested fourteen persons for illegally confining the management staff. The workers regrouped and other laborers joined them from nearby factories and workers' residential colonies. By late afternoon, about 5,000 people had encircled the factory, demanding the release of their comrades and asking that the factory doors be opened so the workers could come out. Some workers also started throwing stones at the police contingent at the factory gates. The police then opened fire, claiming that they had been fired on. Official reports accounted for three dead and scores injured, including three policemen.⁴⁶ Two bodies were retrieved by the police, and the third was taken away by the retreating workers.⁴⁷

The very next day, the funeral procession for the third worker was taken from the labor colonies near the Benaras chowk (roundabout or circle), a thoroughfare in the western part of the city near the workers' colonies. A police contingent waiting at the roundabout stopped the procession from proceeding. In retaliation, the workers raised slogans. The police then fired tear-gas shells to disperse the crowd. The crowd reacted by pelting the police with stones. The police force retreated, regrouped, and then opened fire as the marchers walked onto the main road, killing ten people and injuring dozens.⁴⁸

Eyewitnesses told me that the scene was total mayhem, with people running everywhere to avoid the barrage of bullets. According to estimates, the shooting went on for about a half-hour.⁴⁹ Two people I spoke to recalled seeing several bodies with their heads blown away, showing that the police were not merely dispersing the crowd but were taking aim at people to kill. Another informant remembered counting seven dead bodies. This filled him with extreme rage, and he wanted to keep walking with the funeral even though he could have been injured or even killed.⁵⁰ In an editorial, the English-language daily Dawn condemned the incident by reporting that the shooting was not only prolonged but also indiscriminate, as some people were killed and injured at great distance from where the clash with the laborers had happened.⁵¹ A journalistic account from the Urdu press describes the immediate aftermath of the incident in the following terms:

These two incidents on two consecutive days created a wild-fire strike in all the labor areas of the city, and industrial production in the SITE area and Landhi-Korangi area came to a halt for twelve days. More than 900 units were closed while workers wore black badges and red and black flags flew from nearly all factories in Karachi. The impact was felt all over the county; workers went on strike in many industrial units in Hyderabad, Sind, and other parts of the province. In Punjab, trade-union leaders organized protest marches, and their offices flew black flags to show their solidarity with their comrades in Karachi.⁵³

THE POST-EVENT SITUATION

Eight labor-federation leaders, along with eight workers' representatives, organized a Joint Action Committee to respond to the series of events that had occurred.⁵⁴

The action committee held the police officers and the district commissioner responsible for the killings and demanded their immediate suspension.⁵⁵ In its negotiation with the action committee, the state was unwilling to discuss the issue of suspending the officials. Some leaders complained about the state representatives' dragging their feet: they would meet the provincial labor minister, Abdus Sattar Gabol, on one day; the governor of Sindh, Mir Rasool Baksh Talpur, on the second; and the chief minister, Mumtaz Bhutto, on the third. In turn, all three government officials relayed their discussions to President Bhutto, who was on a foreign trip. In the meantime, the workers' demands had increased to include the release of all workers arrested after the killings and the withdrawal of cases against them. The state partly agreed to these demands and to provide civic amenities in labor colonies, but it would not agree on the issue of suspending the responsible officials. After not meeting with the labor leadership for two days, the provincial labor minister unilaterally announced on 15 June that an agreement had been reached. The government had decided to set up a one-member inquiry board headed by a high-court judge and decided that some officials would be transferred. There were other vague promises about the release of arrested workers from custody and civic benefits for the striking workers. The government's offer was contrary to the agreements that the labor leaders had earlier negotiated with the provincial government.⁵⁶

The Joint Action Committee was caught by surprise. The government's strategy was clearly to undermine their status and to portray them as incompetent in front of the workers. Some among the leadership, however, argued that sustaining the movement any longer would create economic hardships for the workers and that a more volatile situation could ensue. They suspected that the state, by dragging out the negotiations, wanted the workers' unity to unravel, as some workers would return to work in desperation to feed their families. Fearing that prolonging the movement might aid the government's plan to manipulate the situation to its own advantage, the action committee decided to accept the state's demands. The leaders had met in a marathon session to weigh the pros and cons of the government's offer and to assess their own strength. Some SITE leaders were in favor of prolonging the strike for a few more days to put more pressure on the government to accede to their demands. Others in the coalition did not feel confident that they could control the situation further and thought that the Landhi area might not be able to sustain the strike—hence the workers' unity would be undermined. But before giving its reply to the government, it sought to put the issue in front of a people's court (

avami

adalat).

⁵⁷

On 16 June, laborers and their leaders met at an open rally near Benaras chowk, the site of the earlier police shooting. The leadership of different federations within the action committee had decided by consensus to persuade the workers to bring the strike to an end. However, when the leaders spoke, there was total confusion of line and action. Some encouraged the emotional and angry crowd to accept the demands while others continued to shout for blood and created such fervor among the workers that the gathering was dispersed with a decision to continue the strike. A group of workers also raised slogans such as “Khun becha pani liya” (Exchanged water for our blood) against the negotiating team and accused it of betraying the workers because it had accepted the government's false promises of civic benefits (for example, piped water connections) and because it had not demanded justice for the deaths of their fellow workers. Although by raising slogans the workers were clearly showing their extreme disappointment and rage at not receiving a just solution to their demands, some of the slogans and disruption at this event can be attributed to the rivalry among different left-wing political groups vying for the workers' support.

The MMF, as mentioned earlier, was the most organized and prominent group in the SITE area, and its leadership (in particular, Usman Baluch) had emerged as the leaders of the movement. But other labor organizations were also jockeying for this position. For example, the Labour Organizing Committee, which had larger numerical strength in the Landhi–Korangi area, was affiliated with a pro–China communist group.⁵⁸

This group was critical of the MMF for not providing a more revolutionary direction to the strike and challenged the other labor-federation leaders regarding their credentials to negotiate on behalf of the workers.⁵⁹

The following day, after a long procession, workers assembled at a city park.⁶⁰

The leaders tried again to convince them to resume their duties. The workers remained vociferous in their opposition to the idea of ending the strike and asked the leaders not to compromise with the government. They kept raising slogans such as “Khun ka badla khun” (Blood for blood) and persisted with their defiant posture until a shop-floor leader, Bawar Khan, took the microphone and finally succeeded in persuading them to end the strike.⁶¹

THE MULTIPLE RESPONSES

As much as the strike showed labor solidarity among various groups, it is also an interesting example that highlights the differences and competing politics among the movement's leaders and their allied left-wing political groups. The strike leaders, along with the striking workers, had participated in the pro-democracy movement of the late 1960s alongside some of the leftist elements in the PPP. They had struggled together against the bureaucracy and the army. As the Pakistan Times reported on 13 June, the most outspoken of the PPP leftist leaders, Mairaj Mohammad Khan, stated that if the deputy commissioner could not see the coffin of the workers when the shooting started, he would soon see the coffins of major industrialists.⁶²

While speaking to me, Khan reiterated that the police shooting was purposefully encouraged by the bureaucracy and the industrialists to undermine the pro-worker government and isolate the more radical cadres of the party.⁶³ Leaders such as Khan and others on the PPP's left, however, also feared that by prolonging the strike, long-term political benefits could be lost as the party could take on a rigid position and become dominated by its more retrogressive forces.

Other left-leaning groups, such as the pro–China Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP), made statements about how Pashtuns (instead of the working poor) were being killed in Karachi.⁶⁴

The pro–China National Awami Party (NAP), true to its Maoist line, also criticized the movement. In a statement, the party praised and honored the sacrifices of the workers but called it directionless movement that could not succeed in bringing about meaningful change unless the peasants were included in the struggle with a comprehensive program for revolutionary transformation.⁶⁵

As the strike progressed, a section of the middle-class Mohajir population in Karachi was gearing up for another fight. The creation of Bangladesh and the dissolution of the One Unit system had opened up the long-dormant language and ethnicity question in Pakistani politics.⁶⁶

Within this context, as the labor struggle was continuing in Karachi, the Sind government made a corresponding move as a response to sustained demands by the Sindhi people to restore the original status of Sindhi as a compulsory second language in schools. The bill also favored, without prejudice to the national language (Urdu), the gradual learning of Sindhi by all provincial government officials. This bill created a violent reaction by a large section of Karachi's Mohajir population that was closely aligned with the Urdu language and its constructed linkage with Muslim nationalism.⁶⁷

As a result of the language conflict in Karachi, as some non-Mohajir trade-union leaders with whom I spoke remembered, the Mohajir workers of larger industrial units did not participate as much in the 1972 movement as the Pashtun and up-country workers who dominated in the textile mills. This is quite probable, as working conditions in the non-textile heavy-industry sector, where Mohajirs were in the majority as workers, were far better than the conditions prevalent in the textile mills. The situation reflected a hierarchy of labor positions, where those who were better off did not identify culturally or politically with the larger struggle. However, the comments by my informants may also represent a contemporary emphasis on identity politics in Pakistan and signify Karachi's recent history of ethnic violence, which at times has polarized the city.⁶⁸

In contrast to these leaders, rank-and-file workers remembered the period as one in which ethnic difference did not play any role, and Mohajirs, Pashtuns, and Punjabis—that is, workers of all ethnicities—participated equally in the strike. This may be so, yet such formulations may yet represent a yearning for simpler times by these workers, who have recently suffered economically—and, in some cases, physically through loss of lives—because of the increase in ethnic conflict and violence in Karachi.

As a response to civic unrest in the city, the government portrayed the situation as being manipulated by anti-state elements that were simultaneously creating the language disturbances and the labor problems.⁶⁹

“Anti-state” in this context basically meant to be working for India or the Soviet Union. The PPP government also invoked anti-communist rhetoric to attack the NAP, especially its pro–Soviet wing, along with other groups that remained a political threat from the left for the PPP.⁷⁰ This inference was laced into the ethnic and political culture of Pakistan. The pro–Soviet NAP had its power base in the NWFP and in Baluchistan (both provinces having large Pashtun populations), where it had won provincial elections and formed the state government. (In the NWFP, it was a coalition partner with the Jamiat Ulema i-Islam [JUI].) By calling the predominantly Pashtun striking workers “anti-state,” the PPP leadership was seeking to discredit the NAP (pro–Soviet) by linking it to Pashtun nationalism and portraying it as a Soviet stooge within Pakistani politics. The NAP (pro–Soviet) was indeed nationalist in orientation and had a broad progressive agenda, but it had very little influence on the actual workers in Karachi during the strike, which to a large extent was led by the more locally based MMF and its allied leadership. In a briefing to the press, however, Bhutto himself sought to link the MMF with the NAP (pro–Soviet).⁷¹ Further, the chief minister of Sind, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, who was the administrative head of the province, seldom met the labor leaders during the negotiations. He delegated this work to the governor, who was a representative of the federal government. Yet Mumtaz Bhutto did meet some Pashtun civic leaders and asked for their help in restoring civic peace within the city. This gesture was clearly made to inculcate an idea that the labor strike was not a class issue or one of law and order but specifically a Pashtun problem.⁷²

With such a move against the NAP, and by playing the ethnic card, the PPP was also echoing a more deeply seated political rhetoric in Pakistan's political history. Khan Abdul Wali Khan, president of the pro–Soviet NAP, was the son of the Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Pashtun nationalist leader.⁷³

This family had historically been portrayed as anti–Pakistan by Pakistan's political establishment because of Ghaffar Khan's close association with the Indian National Congress in the years preceding the independence of Pakistan. Moreover, the pro–Soviet NAP was one of the few political parties in Pakistan that had not only condemned army action in East Pakistan (while the PPP left had supported it), but had also considered the Indian Army's involvement in the former eastern wing as support for the liberation struggle of the Bengali people. The party had also called for Bangladesh's recognition after its creation.⁷⁴ It is hence conceivable that Bhutto wanted to paint the NAP (pro–Soviet) as anti–Pakistan early in his tenure. This argument holds if we analyze the accusations against the NAP as a preliminary move to create a political space for the future dismissal of the NAP-led governments in Baluchistan and the NWFP, which Bhutto carried out in 1973.

In addition to the ethnic card, the PPP government continuously tried to challenge the trade unions' claims of representing the workers by evoking its own history of introducing labor-friendly laws and representing the true aspirations of the working masses. The state periodically argued that a disciplined workforce was important for production and if the workers behaved, then the state would deliver on its promise of protecting their just rights.⁷⁵

This paternalistic attitude toward the workers was surprisingly close to that of the trade-union leadership.

At the level of the trade-union leadership, there was genuine fear of the chaotic and anarchic potential of the workers themselves. In interviews, the trade-union leaders continually stressed that the movement was like an exploding volcano.⁷⁶

They argued that workers were finally taking out their frustration after years of oppression by the previous regimes. In saying this, they emphasized the untrained nature of the labor force. They highlighted the lack of discipline that comes from not being part of organized trade unions that give workers a sense of working within the decisions made by the leadership and hence inculcates within them an understanding of when to go forward and when to stop. The mob-like character of the labor movement needed to be checked, as it could set dangerous precedents for prolonged anarchic violence.⁷⁷

The workers who had lived through the strikes, however, painted a different picture of workers' discipline and life during the struggle when they spoke to me. Many with whom I spoke remembered the strike in June 1972 as a pivotal moment in their lives. In comparison with the uncertainties that they faced in their contemporary life, with little job security, contract labor, and other social and economic difficulties, they recalled their participation in the strikes for better pay and living conditions as an empowering phase in their lives. One said: “if such a movement begins today, we shall be delivered benefits at home.” Clearly, they were proud of the fact that they controlled the SITE area and the government was forced to recognize their strength. They also explained that, despite provocations in the form of police harassment and periodic arrests of labor activists, not a single untoward or violent act could be attributed to the labor movement, an example of the workers' unprecedented discipline and solidarity. They spelled out in great detail how, within the colonies, people survived through mutual help and through the generosity of local shopkeepers who extended credit for food and other essentials to the families of the striking workers. They offered these stories as examples of how the workers' just cause was appreciated and reciprocated in the community at large. Indeed, this may be a romantic picture of the past and needs to be understood with reference to the precarious conditions of the workers' present-day life.

THE PATERNAL UNIONS

An understanding of Pakistani trade-union leadership comes from a recent review of a book on the subcontinent's trade-union politics. In the review, the late sociologist Hamza Alavi argues that Pakistani trade-union leaders historically were primarily middlemen (labor lawyers) between the working masses and Pakistan's government-sponsored, highly bureaucratized system of labor arbitration.⁷⁸

The government created institutions such as labor courts and tribunals, gave authority to officials in labor departments to mediate labor disputes, and created a maze of laws and procedures that made it virtually impossible for local factory-based leadership to negotiate with the state. Professional trade-union leadership consisting of labor lawyers, Alavi stresses, represented the laborers in government-designated forums and had very little incentive to change this system of redress, as it only strengthened their own position in relation to the rank and file.

My interviews with workers and left-wing student leaders who were active in 1972 confirm the gap that Alavi depicts. This form of leadership was not much different from the one discussed by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his text on jute workers in colonial Bengal. Chakrabarty shows how the relationship between the leadership and the workers can be read within the idiom of babu–coolie, where the babus (trade-union leaders) held office outside the factory, occasionally writing petitions or holding meetings at different venues.⁷⁹

He continues to argue that the Bengali leftist leaders remained entrenched in a paradox in which they sought to radicalize the workers yet themselves were situated in a hierarchical relationship with the laboring poor.⁸⁰

Similarly, in the 1972 movement the trade unionists spoke of representing and leading the workers. Not unlike the state, the predominantly urban leadership sought to contain, the chaotic potential that it saw in the workers. The majority of the non–Urdu-speaking workers were considered bodies that needed to be tamed and organized. They were seen as newly urban people who had yet to shed their tribal culture, which was steeped in hierarchical social relations. For that matter, the workers may have been conceived as peasants who could not represent themselves but needed to be educated into the trade-union culture of discipline and constraint, which would give them distance from their non-egalitarian past and move them toward an egalitarian membership in a democratic process.⁸¹

These arguments echo teleological assumptions in various renditions of labor history that begin with the expectation that the capitalist factory, in its ideal construction, acts as a powerful agent of social change that transforms older, particular- istic identities of peasants/tribals into new, universalistic, ties of class solidarity.⁸²

In this process, the trade-union leaders always retained the onus of educating and guiding. In the 1972 movement, this distance is evident in the example of the the shop-floor leader Bawar Khan, who asked the workers to agree to terms for ending the strike for the second day in a row. Even though multiple trade-union leaders had implored the workers to end the strike, the laborers remained unconvinced and kept raising slogans. Bawar Khan then took the mike and made a very passionate speech for almost three-quarters of an hour. Bawar was extremely popular among the workers and was famous for his integrity and honesty. He made appeals against disunity and warned the laborers that this was what the government was looking for. He asked the workers to use their brains instead of their emotions; in this, he was echoing the words of Nabi Ahmed, the veteran trade unionist who had unsuccessfully sought to convince the workers on both days. He also swore on his children that he would never betray the laborers and would always work for their benefit. Finally, he compared the leadership to generals, who, unlike the generals of the Pakistani Army, would not let the jawans (foot soldiers) down.⁸³

By swearing on his children, Bawar Khan invoked an important cultural symbol: he asked the laborers to trust the leaders' decision to stop the strikes, stressing that if there were to be an underhand deal with the government on this issue, then blight and ill health might come to his own children. To invoke the supernatural and God's wrath on his own kin was an idiom that was familiar to the majority of the participants—and a somewhat unmodern belief within a gathering of the “vanguard proletariat.”⁸⁴

The use of the language of generals and foot soldiers, which finally convinced the workers to stop the strike, may have had multiple meanings for the workers, as well. As mentioned, a majority of the workers were ethnically Pashtun. There is a tradition among the Pathans of avenging their dead and of safeguarding their honor (Pakhtunwali). Such histories were tempered by the participation of Pashtuns in India's freedom struggle under the guidance of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the “Frontier Gandhi.” As Mukulika Banerjee describes, in the 1930s and '40s, Ghaffar Khan persuaded Pashtun tribes to end their internal feuding and to self-discipline themselves into non-violent nationalist political actors, the Khudai Khitmatgars.⁸⁵

This transformation, as Guha also suggests, was brought about by taming the more autonomous local sentiments into those of a controlled national movement that responded to its leaders.⁸⁶ The Khudai Khitmatgars had training camps and a hierarchy of officials with titles of captain, major, and general.⁸⁷

Some older workers may have participated in the nationalist movement themselves; others may have had fathers, uncles, and elder brothers who were Khudai Khitmatgars. Among the workers, there may have been a memory steeped in the construction of an officer corps that was far more egalitarian—where a person of low social position or status could attain a high rank—than the regular Pakistani army, in which lineage, social status, and wealth created a vast gulf between the commissioned officers and the rest of the men. Hence, Bawar Khan's use of the military metaphor, even though it was steeped in a language of hierarchy, may have resonated within the framework of a historical experience of the radicalized Pashtun workers. Yet the appeal to the workers in a language of army generals and soldiers does not conform (Khudai Khitmatgars or otherwise) to the ideal of a voluntary contractual relationship that is commonly linked with bourgeois and modern notions of a democratic trade-union movement. Rather, it falls back on the imagery of the unquestioned trust and loyalty of a more hierarchical order.

I argue that the trade-union movement's leadership at this juncture, regardless of its rhetoric of radical change, did not want to go beyond pushing for liberal democratic rights of association, speech, and statal welfare. They understood that the workers had not become disciplined and trained enough (they were still emotional, not using their brains) for the final transcendence beyond a capitalist bourgeois order. The halting of the strike therefore needs to be understood within such analytical parameters.

THE CONTINUING STRUGGLE

While the crisis in the SITE area came to a somewhat unsure end, labor strife intensified in the Landhi–Korangi area. This was the newer of the two industrial areas, and the labor federations were not as entrenched among the unions there. This area had almost 300 industrial units, employing 80,000 workers. After the 1969 Industrial Relations Ordinance, when CBAs were allowed to operate openly, young radicals who had come up from the shop floor and had connections with underground communist groups started forming unions that in many industrial units defeated the older federations and management-supported unions.

During the ongoing struggle in the early 1970s, the workers had formed the Landhi–Korangi Labour Organizing Committee (LOC) to press for the demands that were similar to the ones in the SITE area. However, the radicalized nature of the workers in some mills led to the takeover of the mills rather than their mere encirclement, which was the favored form of action in SITE. The workers occasionally took managers hostage to press for their demands. To protest the dismissal and arrest of union leaders in a government-owned factory in September 1972, for example, the LOC demanded their release and ordered a two-hour strike every day until the demands were met.⁸⁸

Sirens were heard from one factory to another, and workers brought production to a stop. To intensify their struggle, the workers organized a sixty-hour strike in sympathy with the arrested workers. The workers raised their demands further and asked to be paid for the strike period along with the release of their fellow workers.⁸⁹ This situation prevailed until early October, when a faction of the workers decided to occupy two mills, Gul Ahmed Textiles and Dawood Cotton. As a response, large contingents of the provincial police and paramilitary forces were deployed by the state. The workers threatened to blow up the boiler of one of the mills if the police dared to enter the premises. The police then cut off the mills' power and gas supply. An attack on the workers inside was imminent. The occupying labor leaders spurned mediation by left-leaning PPP leaders and other trade-union leaders.⁹⁰ They claimed that the SITE leadership had failed to pursue the workers' cause and had surrendered their momentum, gaining nothing in return from the state.

It was the Muslim month of Ramadan and dawn on 18 October 1972. As the workers were preparing their breakfasts, the police used bulldozers to break down the factory walls and entered the occupied mills. Official reports give an account of four dead and more than fifty injured, and eyewitnesses claim that mortality rates were far higher. The leadership within the mills managed to flee and regrouped the next day on the hills adjacent to the industrial area. A few days later, another shooting incident occurred in these hills in which three more people were killed. The army, for the first time since its 1971 defeat, was called in to control the situation, and the workers were forced back to work under their supervision. This ended the confrontation of 1972.

The extreme action by the state corresponded to the extreme position taken by the workers. Unlike those in the SITE area, the Landhi–Korangi trade unions were politically closer to the LOC, whose leadership, as mentioned earlier, was influenced by a pro–China communist group. The group itself had internal factions, and Mairaj Mohammad Khan, the minister in the PPP government, was a member of this group. While Khan sought to mediate between the government and the striking workers, other members of the pro–China group, such as Zainuddin Khan Lodhi and Rashid Hasan Khan, a charismatic student leader, were militant in their approach to the strike.⁹¹

These leaders, along with radical elements in other communist groups, such as the MKP, guided the workers. They believed that the state had become weak due to its defeat in eastern Pakistan/Bangladesh and the workers had finally arisen from their slumber. This, according to them, was an insurrectionary moment much like that of 1917 in Russia. They argued that once state violence against the working classes would be exposed, the nation and all the progressive forces would rise in their support and sweep the state away. People I spoke to also attested to the fact that the LOC members had felt sidelined during the SITE upheaval earlier in the summer and had not agreed with the way the strike had ended. The Landhi strike was their response to the Bhutto government for its atrocities.⁹² It should be noted that, although in the SITE area there was much worker anger against the industrialists, the strike itself was spontaneous and was a reaction to the killings on 7 and 8 June. In Landhi, the events that led to the confrontation were partly created by the workers and their leaders. How idealistic their non-compromising position was continues to be debated among left-wing cadres to this day. Some argue against the workers' position as left-wing extremism, and others say that the undisciplined workers did not know when to stop. What remains unanalyzed or represented in these debates are the points of view of the workers themselves. Why many participated, under what conditions, and for what kinds of imaginary future people were willing to risk their lives is still an open question. Much research needs to be done on this very crucial aspect of the 1972 struggle. Yet the left's debates echo the intellectual hierarchy and physical distance between those on the receiving end of state violence and those who made theoretical plans for this tragedy. By continuously reframing the events in terms of whether it was the correct moment to confront the state, such arguments reinsert and reduce the multiplicity and plurality of the struggle, merely subordinating these issues to a predetermined point of view of whether it was a progressive or a retrogressive move.⁹³

THE AFTERMATH

In its effort to re-establish state authority after the debacle in Bangladesh, the Bhutto government not only crushed the radicalized movement but sought to reconfigure the working class according to its own vision of clientilist politics. There was also severe repression, in the shape of arrests and dismissals, of any dissenting voice from within the working class. Bawar Khan, the working-class leader who through his oratory convinced the workers to stop the strike, was arrested soon after the strike ended and tortured for several days. Economic and social pressure to feed his family forced him to take a job as a shiphand. He left the country for some years and never entered active labor politics again. Such examples made others uneasy about entering the arena of confrontational politics. Even PPP members and ministers such as Mairaj Mohammad Khan were not spared. Khan resigned as minister of state in protest against the October action in the Landhi area. In November 1973, he resigned from basic membership in the party in opposition to the increasing undemocratic character of the Bhutto regime.⁹⁴

He was also later arrested and tortured in prison on charges of aiding the popular insurrection in Baluchistan.

There is no doubt that Bhutto's labor laws gave workers unheard-of benefits in Pakistan's labor history: allowances for inflation, social-security benefits, old-age pensions, increased participation in management, and increases in the participatory fund and gratuity funds are some of their salient features. However, the trade-union movement also suffered immensely in this period. Labor laws were periodically announced without taking into account labor's view. Strikes were broken up using administrative and coercive means. There was a continuation of centralized and bureaucratized handling of industrial disputes as the state's labor department and the newly formed industrial-relations commission became prominent in coercing or corrupting the labor leadership.

In nationalized industries, people were given employment far and beyond the maximum required, thus diluting the influence of the existing unions and helping in the formation of a union supportive of the PPP. Some prominent labor leaders were given material incentives to support the state machinery, and a general corruption of values seeped into the movement. Through the introduction of quota system, workers in most state industries were hired according to regional and ethnically fixed quotas. This move did provide jobs to those who had been excluded on the basis of their ethnicity, but it also divided the working class according to ethnic criteria, where vertical linkages became more important than horizontal solidarity.

The collapse of the textile industry in the mid-1970s led to a large-scale dislocation of textile workers. The immigration of Pakistani labor to the oil-rich Arab Gulf states also brought a qualitative change in the labor movement. Bhutto's government, inclusive of its populist rhetoric and genuine attempts to institute reform in Pakistan's cultural and political life, continued to harass and persecute any and all political opponents within and outside the party, from the left and the right of the political spectrum. One of the most egregious acts was the dismissal of Baluchistan's NAP government in 1973 on the pretext that it was receiving arms shipments from Iraq and was involved in a conspiracy with the Soviet Union and Iraq to break up Pakistan and Iran. This dismissal led to the protest resignation of the NAP–JUI coalition government in the NWFP. On a more serious note, it led to a popular armed insurgency in Baluchistan that was brutally crushed by the PPP government. Bhutto gave the Pakistan military free rein in that province, enabling the military to return to public life after its defeat in East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. Through a coup in 1977, this invigorated military forced Bhutto out of power. In an ongoing saga of deprivation, Bhutto's overthrow by another military regime intensified brutality against labor organizations during General Zia-ul-Haq's tenure (1977–88). That untold history needs a detailed discussion in another text—or several other texts. Today, the low level of unionization, contract labor, flexible manufacturing regimes, and dominance of informal-sector work create new challenges for those involved in organizing workers.