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Soc, Heritage: From the South China Morning Post
Every night as he lay on his frayed straw cot, Chatan
Bheel plotted his escape. The plantation where he
worked as a bonded labourer is a four-day walk from the
nearest town, and the sole road cutting through the fields
is policed by gun-toting guards.
So when he saw a chance to make a break last year -
while the field foreman fell asleep after a heavy lunch -
he took it. He set off on foot, dragging his leg irons
through chest-high sugar cane until he found a blacksmith
to cut him free.
His landlord, Ayaz Virk Punjabi, denied Mr Bheel was
ever chained. But he acknowledged that his former
labourer was a slave to a debt he could never repay.
"They will never get out of this thing," he said, of the
dozens of bonded labourers working on his plantation. He
told how he had bought Mr Bheel from another landlord,
to whom he said the labourer also owed money, adding, "I
have the receipt to prove it."
There are tens of thousands of bonded labourers living in
Pakistan's southern Sindh province, despite a 1992 law
outlawing the practice, according to the Human Rights
Commission of Pakistan. The group has freed 7,500
people since 1995, when it started raids on plantations so
remote few people ever venture there.
Today, most of the freed labourers are housed in
makeshift camps on the outskirts of Hyderabad city,
home to much of Sindh's landed elite. The labourers live
in flimsy straw huts and eke out a living cutting cane on
nearby plantations, usually for just 30 rupees (HK$4.50) a
day. They are terrified of pursuing work farther away for
fear of being kidnapped by their former owners, to whom
they owe huge sums of money.
Most, like Mr Bheel, fell into an ancient trap. He took a
loan for a son's wedding, only to watch his debt magnify
beyond his wildest nightmares in the books of his
employer. When he questioned the amount - which had
grown from 15,000 rupees (HK$2,250) to 150,000
(HK$22,500) rupees within a year - he claimed Mr Virk
put him and his four sons in chains to prevent their
escape.
"I am still not free. If I go out from here, I can always be
caught," said Mr Bheel, 40, who recently brought his
family to a camp run by the human rights group. His sons,
who were released in a raid on Mr Virk's farm in March,
squatted on leathery feet in the dirt as their father told
how the landlord's men had come to recapture them two
weeks before. The labourers beat the men back with
sticks, then tied them up for three hours before the police
arrived, according to camp residents.
Such stories sound far-fetched to outsiders. But human
rights workers say they are only a glimmer of the
nightmare the labourers endure every day.
A video the group secretly made in 1996 shows dozens of
male labourers in leg irons, while at work cutting cane on
a farm near Hyderabad.
Most of the bonded labourers are low-caste Hindus from
the nearby Thar Desert, who remained behind at partition
only to face exploitation in the newly created Muslim
Pakistan. Since most come from traditionally nomadic
communities and are illiterate, they are helpless to defend
their rights.
A high profile campaign against the exploitation of brick
kiln workers in northern Punjab province prompted the
parliament to pass the Bonded Labour Abolition Act in
1992. The law made it illegal for landlords to offer loans
in exchange for work or to hold workers hostage to their
debts. But the practice has only grown more entrenched,
as the powerful landowning elite struggle to maintain their
grip on cheap labour.
The backlash can be felt in the growing threats against
human rights workers, many of whom said they had been
fired upon by irate landlords, and lawyers, who said they
are under huge pressure to stop defending labourers. In
March, the commissioner of Sindh's Mir Purkhas district -
the area where most of the human rights violations take
place - assured landlords there would be no more police
raids to free bonded labourers, according to local
newspaper reports. As a result, the human rights group
said no labourers had been released by police in four
months.
Despite mounting evidence of violations by landlords,
none had been arrested for flouting the law - much less
been sentenced to the minimum two years in jail or
50,000 rupees fine it prescribes.
"A paper law makes a change only in terms of initiating
action," said Pakistan's law minister, Khalid Anwar, in an
interview in his Islamabad office. "Unless you change the
cultural practices, you're not going to change the reality."
He blamed the failure of a string of land reforms to wrest
power from the traditional feudal elite for the persistence
of bonded labour in Sindh. Unlike India, which imposed
draconian land reforms in the 1960s and 70s limiting
farms to five hectares per person, Pakistan enacted more
liberal limits of 80 hectares per owner. And even those
restrictions were never enforced, with the largest
plantations still spanning hundreds of hectares.
Mr Anwar acknowledged that bonded labour was a
major problem in Sindh, and that there could be hundreds
of labourers living in chains or in private plantation jails.
But he said their release was the job of local government,
which itself is comprised mostly of big landlords.
"How are they going to enforce a law like this?" he said.
Indeed, most of the landlords, known as zamindars,
dismissed allegations of human rights abuses. They said
labourers demand loans they never intend to pay off, and
that without bonded labour, the agricultural system would
collapse.
"They are bonded only if they feel they are not able to do
the work and they want to leave and you have already
paid them," said Qamer-uz-Zaman Shah, the polished
chairman of the Sindh Chamber of Agriculture. "We tell
them either you return the money or you do the work."
Others spouted conspiracy theories to explain growing
public pressure to abolish the bonded labour system. "The
hari [labourer] people are Hindus and they are
blackmailing the zamindars," said Arbab Ghulam Rahim, a
member of the lower house of parliament who has been
accused of operating a private jail on his 40-hectare farm
in Sindh. "It's a conspiracy by India and the Hindu people
against the agricultural class."
Mr Rahim denied he kept his labourers locked up,
insisting the haris were not exploited. "We have one
system of human rights in our country and you have
another," he said.
However, interviews with dozens of former and current
bonded labourers painted a convincing picture of their
plight. Many claimed to have been chained day and night
and kept in private jails, while the woman told graphic
tales of sexual abuse by landlords.
"This [sexual exploitation] is a general practice with
zamindars," said Lachmi Esso, a 25-year-old
sharecropper who claimed to have been raped repeatedly
by her landlord. "They don't want sexual satisfaction.
They only want to disgrace us."
In another case, Bachi Mallah, a member of a lowly
fisherman's caste, said she and her husband escaped six
months ago from a plantation in Dumbalo, a few hours'
drive east of Hyderabad. She showed welts on her thin
arms where she said the landlord had beaten her. She
also claimed her four sons, who were left behind, were
being kept in chains - though she said the family did not
owe any money. Dressed in a shabby pink sari and the
thick silver bangles of the Thar Desert region, she now
earns 50 rupees a day cutting cane on a nearby
plantation. It is enough to buy a sack of wheat flour and a
few onions, unheard of luxuries in her former life.
"We are very happy to be free," she said, slumped on a
cot with a spire of coal-black cooking smoke rising behind
her. "But we want our sons back."
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