سرائیکی ڈیجیٹل لائبریری

آپݨی نگری آپ وَسا توں

پَٹ انگریزی تھاݨے

خواجہ غلام فرید

In July 2026, the Punjab government published the results of its first land ballot under the Apna Khait Apna Rozgar scheme. The district register is a model of digital transparency. It carries 9,036 names. Each entry records the allottee, the father’s name, the national identity number, the mobile number, the mouza and the lot. For the other stream of the same ballot, in Cholistan, there is one line. It reads: 10,290 lots, 51,450 acres. No names. No mouzas. Nothing.

Two-thirds of the acreage distributed that day lies behind that single line. The graziers of the Rohi appear in neither register. They never have. In 1925 the colonial administration recorded the grantees of the Sutlej Valley canals. The herders whose grazing grounds those grants extinguished were entered in no book. A century later, the record-keeping is digital. The asymmetry is intact. The grantee is named. The grazier is not. What is not recorded cannot claim.

This essay makes a simple argument. The land scheme announced from Lahore this year as poverty relief is the fifth wave of a single, continuous process. That process is the colonisation of Siraiki Wasaib’s commons under categories manufactured elsewhere. The wave is new. The machinery is old.

First the category, then the enclosure

How does a state take land that people already use? It does not begin with force. It begins with a word. Neeladri Bhattacharya has shown that the British conquest of Punjab’s countryside was, first of all, a conquest by category. Land that fed herds for generations was entered in the settlement record as “waste”. Once it was waste, its improvement became a duty. Once improvement was a duty, its users became obstacles.

The sequence has run five times across the Wasaib. In the 1880s the grazing tracts of the Bar were declared Crown waste. Six million acres went under canal command. The pastoralists of the Bar entered the colonial vocabulary as jangli: of the jungle, and therefore of nowhere. In the 1920s the Sutlej Valley Project carried the model into Bahawalpur State, over the Darbar’s objection. Dobson’s own colonisation record shows what followed. To 1932, the local share of allotted land was 3.36 per cent. Jat and Arain grantees recruited from Amritsar, Lyallpur and Montgomery took over three-quarters of it between them. The people of the riverine and the Rohi margin received, in effect, nothing.

In 1949 the Thal Development Authority carried the machinery into the Saraiki Thal. This time the category did its work in statute. The TDA Act empowered the Authority to grant land “on any condition it thinks fit”. It capped land reserved for the common purposes of a village at one-fifth of any scheme. In Sections 66 and 67 it perfected the trick. The moment land vested in the Authority, anyone grazing or cultivating it became a squatter. He was liable to summary ejection. His standing crops could be confiscated “without payment of any compensation whatsoever”. The herder did not lose his rights. The law discovered he had never possessed any. The Authority’s 1952 schemes then sited their allotments in named commons: Rakh Khasoor, Rakh Mankera, Rakh Jandanwala, Rakh Dhinghana. These were 150-acre tube-well lots, not five-acre welfare parcels. Remember these names. They return.

Marx gave this manoeuvre its name: so-called primitive accumulation, the separation of people from their commons that stands at the origin of capital. In the Wasaib it has never been primitive in the sense of finished. It is a standing administrative capacity. It is renewed statute by statute.

What the 2026 register shows

Apna Khait Apna Rozgar presents itself as the opposite of all this. The lease is small. Five acres at most. The rent is nominal. One hundred rupees an acre. The eligibility is welfare-shaped: the landless resident of the same revenue estate. The ballot is digital. On its face, this is redistribution, not colonisation.

The register itself tells another story. I have parsed all 9,036 district-stream entries. I have classified every mouza in which a lot falls. Three numbers result. They are worth more than any rhetoric.

First: 76 per cent of all acreage in the first ballot comes from grazing commons. That is some 59,300 of 78,000 acres. It is the 51,450 acres of Cholistan rangeland, plus 7,873 acres of rakh, the gazetted grazing and scrub preserves of the revenue record.

Second: the commons are not being taken evenly. In the districts of upper and central Punjab, 82 per cent of allotted lots lie in chaks, the numbered estates of the old canal colonies. Barely one lot in a hundred touches a rakh. In the Wasaib the proportions invert. Across the Saraiki districts, 38 per cent of all lots lie in rakhs. In Rajanpur the figure is 87 per cent. In Khushab’s Noorpur Thal it is 68 per cent. In Dera Ghazi Khan it is 64 per cent. Upper Punjab’s scheme redistributes state land inside its own colony geography. The Wasaib’s scheme liquidates commons.

Third, and starkest: of all rakh acreage allotted anywhere in Punjab under this scheme, 98.6 per cent lies in Siraiki Wasaib. The Damaan districts head the list. Their hill-torrent and grazing economy the canal never reached. Where the categorical conquest of the last century remained incomplete, where land somehow stayed common, is precisely where the new scheme’s land bank sits. The map of AKAR’s allotments is a map of unfinished enclosure. The enclosure is now being finished.

The honest number

Here a concession is necessary, and it should be made plainly. The settler-influx fear, the fear of upper-Punjab applicants carrying off Saraiki land by the lorry-load, is not borne out by the district register. I checked every identity number. I then checked the numbers against the estates. In the Saraiki core districts, 97.3 per cent of allottees hold their own district’s CNIC. The residency requirement held.

Cross the identity numbers against the estates and the pattern sharpens further. On the rakh land itself, the enclosed commons, upper-Punjab identity numbers are all but absent. Three lots. Fifteen acres. Out of nearly eight thousand. Ninety-seven per cent of rakh lots went to the district’s own registered poor. Most of the remainder went to neighbouring Saraiki districts whose herds share the same margins. The faint trace of out-of-region numbers sits where it always has: in the chaks, the colony estates, along the settlement map of a century ago.

Does this refute the colonial reading? It refines it. A colonialism a century mature does not need to move people. This is what internal colonialism looks like at maturity. Not settlers on lorries. A category, a register and a chain of command, all held at the centre. It metabolises the periphery’s remaining commons through the periphery’s own documented poor. The Sutlej Valley and Thal settlements already engineered the demography. The settler’s grandson is today’s “local”. The CNIC records documentation, not descent. What such a system needs is only what this scheme provides. Central command of the periphery’s remaining land. And a category, “state land”, “landless applicant”, under which the commons can be individuated, parcel by parcel.

Meanwhile the least documented are the deepest natives. The Rohi pastoralist whose claim is a grazing cycle. The kacha cultivator whose claim is a flood season. The woman whose claim was never titled at all. Only 11 per cent of the register’s names are female. None of these can appear in a ballot of the documented landless. The scheme is honest about its applicants. It is silent about its losers. So was Dobson.

Design, not accident

None of this requires an allegation of misconduct. The vulnerabilities are in the design, and they are legible. The notified tenure is a ten-year conditional lease. The Chief Minister announced twenty years at the ballot ceremony. The discrepancy between the announcement and the notification is itself a finding. Renewal is discretionary. Inspection is biannual, led by the Assistant Commissioner. That is the office that made the colony system run. The decisions issue from Lahore: the Chief Minister, the Board of Revenue, the digital land authority. The South Punjab Secretariat was created precisely so that such schemes would be steered from within the region. It has been bypassed as though it did not exist.

The Thal Development Authority granted land on any condition it thought fit. It capped the commons at one-fifth. It made graziers trespassers by operation of law. Its lots sat in Rakh Khasoor and Rakh Mankera. Seventy-four years later, Rakh Mankera returns in the 2026 register. It returns not as a memory but as an address. One hundred and eight of Bhakkar’s new lots are recorded in mouzas named “Chak No. 3, Rakh Mankera”, “Chak No. 8, Rakh Mankera”, “Chak No. 9, Rakh Mankera”. The colony’s number is stamped onto the common’s name. The whole method is compressed into one line of the revenue record. Rakh Haiderabad returns the same way. And the tehsildar inspecting the new lessee holds the office the colony manual built. The continuity is not a metaphor. It is a land category, a legal form and a chain of command. All three are still in service.

The plan beyond the ballot

The ballot is not the plan. It is the plan’s first visible instalment. Nine protected rakhs lie in or against the planned command area of the Greater Thal Canal. They appear on the Asian Development Bank’s own environmental assessment. They are Forest Department preserves, the last legal form the Thal’s commons possess. Together they cover 57,827 hectares, more than 142,000 acres, from Rakh Hundalal to Rakh Shergarh. Four sit inside the command itself. A fifth sits partly so. The assessment records that cleared parcels within Rakh Gauharwala had already been allocated for cropping. It carries the government’s assurance that no further canals will enter the rakhs. The Thal has heard such assurances before. The canal’s own branches carry the names of the commons they command: Mankera, Chaubara, Dhingana, Nurpur. The foreign loan for the second phase was approved by the bank’s board in 2021. It was never signed. Islamabad withheld the authorisation. The signing window closed. The approval lapsed in an inter-provincial standoff. No financing is before the bank today. Sindh’s objection has gone to the Council of Common Interests. The project sits dormant on the province’s books. Its feasibility is done. Its environmental assessment is filed. Its command maps are drawn. It waits only for money. A dormant plan is not a dead one. The financing has faltered. The command line has not moved.

Beyond the command area, the corporate stream shows what scale the state contemplates when the beneficiary is not a landless applicant. By October 2023, 700,000 acres of Cholistan had been leased in a single undisclosed agreement. That is thirteen times the welfare ballot’s Cholistan acreage. The lessee is a corporate vehicle run by retired military officers. The term is twenty years, with an option of ten more. A further forty-five thousand acres of the Thal went the same way through the courts. The Cholistan authority’s own managing director admits 74,000 acres handed to the military. Residents put the figure near 400,000, with no public record of it. The six new canals meant to water this empire would command over a million Cholistan acres. They were shelved in 2025 under inter-provincial protest. The farms themselves are faltering on saline groundwater and departing investors. But the leases stand. Suspended, not surrendered. And none of the nine protected rakhs appears in this year’s allotment register. That is the point. What the ballot is consuming and what the canal will expose are different tracts of the same shrinking common. Against 43,938 identified units in the district stream stands 83,425 in Cholistan. The first ballot took the rakhs the tube-wells could reach. The command area is drawn around the rest.

The line that is missing

The scheme will do some genuine good. Nine thousand landless households in a poor region will hold land, however conditionally. Most of them are local. Both truths must be held at once. The welfare is real, and so is the method. But judge the ballot by what it records and what it refuses to record. The applicant is verified nine ways. The pastoralist is verified nowhere. Not because he cannot be. Only three years ago, after decades of the Rohi’s own struggle, the state allotted 344,000 acres to twenty-seven thousand Cholistani families against the Tarni. The Tarni is the herder’s own livestock-tax receipt. It is the one document that records a grazing life. It is not new. The first Cholistan scheme, in 1959, allotted against it too. The records of that scheme were later declared lost. The instrument exists. It was won from below, and it was used. Many of those 2023 allottees still wait for water and for possession. AKAR asked for no Tarni. The erasure is not a limitation of the record. It is a choice among available records. Cholistan’s 10,290 allottees are a single line without names, exactly as the Rohi’s graziers have been a single silence for a hundred years.

In 1925 the record named the grantee and erased the herder. In 2026 the record names the grantee. It publishes his father’s name and his phone number. And it erases the herder still. The register has grown longer. The ghost in it is the same.

Farid asked for two things: the nagri settled by its own people, and the thana uprooted. A century and a half later, the state has offered the khait. It has kept the thana.