Revisiting land reforms

A report from the then Dacca, published 75 years ago, unsettles a convenient assumption about Pakistan’s agrarian history. On August 30, 1951, erstwhile East Pakistan became the first province to begin abolishing zamindari. Estates selected for acquisition included the holdings of the Nawab of Dacca, the province’s largest zamindar (landowner). The then Revenue Minister Tafazzul Ali described the measure as fulfilment of a Muslim League pledge.

This record, recently reproduced by an English daily, establishes that the Muslim League, contrary to common accusations of protecting jagirdars (landed class), possessed an agrarian reform agenda. The real question is why its programme acquired legal and administrative force in East Bengal while being neutralised in the western wing.

The Dacca announcement was not an isolated provincial gesture. In February 1949, the Council of the Pakistan Muslim League declared the inherited land-tenure system “antiquated and harmful” and called for a drastic change. Its Agrarian Committee, appointed in April under Mumtaz Muhammad Daultana, included Begum Jahanara Shah Nawaz, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan, Qazi Muhammad Isa and Haji Ali Akbar Shah.

The report was explicit. Pakistan’s first concern, it said, must be to emancipate its economy from the “oppressive shackles of a time-worn feudalism”. It recommended abolition of jagirs, tenants’ rights, protection of agricultural labour, compulsory acquisition above prescribed limits and replacement of large estates by state-regulated peasant proprietorship. The ceiling was 150 acres of average irrigated land, adjusted up to 450 acres for less productive unirrigated land.

This evidence, preserved in the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics’ Land Reforms in Pakistan: A Historical Perspective, demolishes the assertion that land reform was alien to the founding party’s programme. It reveals something more disturbing: a formal commitment existed, but the political forces capable of enforcing it did not survive the consolidation of the post-colonial state.

East Bengal possessed an institutional route and a mass constituency for reform. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 had created a hierarchy of rent-receiving intermediaries between the state and actual cultivators.

The Floud Commission of 1938 had already recommended acquisition of superior interests so that cultivators could deal directly with the state. A bill, the Bengal State Acquisition and Tenancy Bill, was introduced in April 1947, although Partition interrupted it. Thus, East Bengal inherited not merely an aspiration but a prepared legislative scheme.

The East Bengal State Acquisition and Tenancy Act abolished intermediary rent-receiving interests in phases, converted landholders into direct tenants of government and compensated zamindars. The original ceiling was 100 standard bighas, approximately 33 acres, subject to a family formula. Implementation took years and the ceiling was later relaxed. Its achievement was nevertheless profound: the institutional core of zamindari was removed.

Peasant mobilisation also mattered. Bengal had experienced the Krishak Praja and Tebhaga movements and sustained agitation against rent extraction. Partition weakened sections of the old landed order, but inclusion of the Muslim Nawab of Dacca’s holdings disproves any explanation of reform as confiscation directed only at Hindu zamindars.

The western wing inherited a different structure of power. The East India Company annexed Punjab in 1849 after defeating the Sikh kingdom. It would be historically inaccurate to attribute the conquest to a single, uniformly collaborationist Punjabi landed class.

The decisive bargain matured after annexation, especially following 1857. Revenue settlements, canal-colony grants, military recruitment and administrative patronage enabled the Raj to reconstruct and co-opt a ‘dependable’ rural elite.

The Unionist Party later converted this relationship into a durable political system based on landlords, tribal chiefs and landed shrine families. When influential rural notables and pirs moved from the Unionists towards the Muslim League before the 1946 elections, the League gained access to village vote banks.

Unionist Party simultaneously absorbed much of the colonial agrarian establishment. The party could promise reform nationally, but its provincial machinery increasingly depended on those whose land, rents and authority reform would diminish.

Sindh provides the clearest early demonstration. Masud Khaddarposh’s minority report for the Hari Committee demanded abolition of zamindari, minimum compensation for expropriated estates and creation of peasant proprietors.

The provincial government initially withheld it. Sixteen ulema attacked the proposals as un-Islamic and communist; younger Muslim Leaguers and students demanded publication.

The Sind Tenancy Act, 1950, ultimately regulated the division of produce and the formal relationship between zamindars and haris (cultivators) without redistributing ownership.

Haris remained dependent on landlords for land, credit, protection and access to public authority. The political function of landed pirs (spiritual leaders) became crucial.

Spiritual prestige, hereditary property and electoral brokerage frequently overlapped. Reform threatened not only agricultural income but the structure through which tenants’ votes and relations with the administration were managed. Landed pirs were components of a rural political economy shared across Punjab and Sindh.

The reforms imposed by Ayub Khan in 1959 and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1972 and 1977 reduced ceilings without destroying this economy. Exemptions for orchards, stud farms and mechanised cultivation, transfers among relatives, manipulation of produce-index units and weak implementation limited resumed land.

Military regimes also distributed state land and required the cooperation of landed notables. Land reform became an instrument for managing the elite rather than transferring power to cultivators.

The political retreat was eventually converted into a formidable judicial barrier. In the Qazalbash Waqf v Chief Land Commissioner, PLD 1990 SC 99, the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court held central provisions of the 1972 and 1977 reforms repugnant to Islamic injunctions, effective from March 23, 1990. The decision was not retrospectively applicable to every completed resumption, but it disabled the existing ceiling-based framework and enabled claims wherever acquisition had not become final.

The Leghari litigation illustrates the consequences, although its institutional history must be stated correctly. The restoration was not ordered directly by the Supreme Court after Farooq Leghari became president. In the Sardar Muhammad Jaffar Khan Leghari and others v Balochistan, 1997 MLD 1934, the Balochistan High Court accepted petitions concerning extensive family holdings in Barkhan, including nearly 14,000 acres attributed in the judgment to Farooq Leghari.

Drawing upon the legal position created by Qazalbash Waqf and the timing of the resumption proceedings, the court held the action ineffective. The episode remains an extraordinary example of landed power surviving successive reform laws and then finding protection in the post-reform legal order.

The result is visible in the latest official record. The 2024 Agricultural Census records only 5,295 farms of 100 acres or more in Sindh—roughly three out of every 1,000 farms. This tiny group accounts for about 1.33 million acres, or 14.5 percent of the province’s total farm area—almost one acre in every seven.

The Agricultural Census records operational farms, not necessarily ultimate or beneficial ownership. A large estate divided among family members or operated through different arrangements may appear as several farms. Therefore, the census may not capture the full concentration of landed wealth.

Pakistan cannot explain such concentration as an accidental remnant. It is the cumulative outcome of political representation, irrigation allocation, revenue administration, electoral dependence and judicial doctrine.

East Bengal succeeded relatively because it could remove an intermediary class without dismantling the entire provincial state. Western Pakistan failed because landlords, tribal chiefs, landed pirs, bureaucratic patrons and later military beneficiaries constituted the state’s rural machinery.

Meaningful reform requires more than announcing another acreage ceiling. It demands transparent digital land records; disclosure of beneficial ownership and family-controlled holdings; termination of arbitrary exemptions; protection and registration of tenants; progressive taxation of agricultural income; redistribution of resumable and state land to cultivators; and independent land tribunals insulated from revenue and political influence.

Pakistan did imagine agrarian reform; its founding party documented the case in uncompromising terms. The tragedy is that, in the western wing, the landed order proved stronger than the promise—and eventually recast its preservation as law. Unfortunately, it continues till today.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026