In 1925, the persistent theft of she-camels from Chhachhro by “badmashes” in neighbouring Jaisalmere and Jodhpur became the subject of a flurry of letters between the District Magistrate of Thar Parkar, the Commissioner of Sind and the Resident of the Western Rajputana States. The Thari villagers and their pere?, who specialises in reading footprints in the sand, tracked the camels to a village across state lines, but they had to cough up 180 rupees in bhung or gratification to get them back. As camel stealing was not a cognisable offence under the Indian Extradition Act of 1903, however, the police could not arrest the thieves and extradite them to face punishment. Amending the law was out of the question, the correspondence debated, and so would a Border Badmash Conference be considered to tackle the menace?

Exactly 100 years later, the Tharis are still complaining of camel snatchings, but with one anthropological exception — they can no longer play detective in the desert. You see, it is impossible to track footprints on a road, whose construction in the 21st century changed all that.

I recently went to Tharparkar to report on these and other complaints, for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), which was holding its first ever camps in the district’s four main towns. The Commission had invited people from all over to talk about the violations they face, their problems and what they consider are their remedies. It wanted me to travel from Karachi to Islamkot with its team, stay overnight and then head to one camp being held in Nagar. The trip would wrap up the next day in Mithi at a meeting with members of civil society. My job was to write the information shared at the camp within 3,000 words. This was a task that should have barely taken a week but it took me three months. For you to understand why, allow me to take you back to the first night, in Islamkot.

Urine theft

My nanny for this visit is a socialist Thari of indeterminate age, S— sahib, whom I adore at first sight because he carries the air of someone who knows the land and has kept its time. Most of all, he understands that I am a foreigner who will need Thar to be translated. I am already fearful no ethical reporting can come out of parachuting in, hoovering up a few interviews and dressing them up as a feature.

I confide in S— sahib a self-conscious burden that writing about Tharparkar risks having an anaesthetic effect on the reader. If by some miracle, however, they remain conscious beyond the second paragraph, the sedative is sure to set in once the two inescapable topics of hydrology and petrology make an appearance. You feel compelled to always mention that there isn’t enough water in Thar but there are stupid amounts of coal.

Mercifully, S— sahib understands my predicament and elegantly plans an off-the-cuff briefing for me with his friends, a group of journalists, doctors, activists, tradesmen and babus. And so, on our first evening in Islamkot we head to dinner at a Hindu businessman’s office in the bazaar.

S— sahib’s group of friends tolerates my infantile questions on their material circumstances. As the evening wears on and my ink runs out, however, I dread that I’ve heard it all before: the necessities of civic life are in short supply but government neglect is in ample abundance. Thar does not have rain, colleges, hospitals and intolerance, but it does have deaf revenue officers, a land mafia and simplicity. To make matters worse, my ability to process all this information for a story is compromised by hypoglycaemia. It is well past my dinner time.

Suddenly, our host, the businessman, heaves himself up and proclaims, “What’s the matter S— sahib, won’t you have something to drink?” It dawns on me that my presence has probably had an inhibitory effect on the katchehri.

S— sahib does not answer and casts around the room for moral support, but his friends abandon him to disappear into their cell phones or check their manicures with their teeth.

“Well, I’ll have one.”

Our host freezes in the middle of proffering options extracted from his desk drawer. Everyone’s eyes snap to me.

I sit back and cock my head.

The businessman laughs. “Well, S— sahib,” he says with a twinkle in his eye, “What’s it gonna be?” And without bothering to wait for an answer, he plonks down the Toyo Nasic glasses and hollers for ice.

Relieved laughter defrosts the room. The gamble paid off. They feel as if I am one of them and can speak freely now.

This marked a turning point in my assignment, and so what follows below is as tight a version as I can muster of what I heard over three days in Thar. This includes insights I had the privilege to hear as a ‘female reporter’ in a room full of Sindhi- and Dhātki-speaking Meghwars, Lohanas, Sharmas and Kumars in Islamkot. Much of what these men said was corroborated by the villagers and townsfolk who spoke at the camp the next day and at the consultation in Mithi the next. By the end of the visit, I suspected that one single ailment could perhaps convey what they were all speaking of: the injury caused by Thar’s violent encounter with Capitalism. Allow me to make the case.

The Road

Tharis are not nature’s favoured subjects. It conspires against them from subterranean depths by offering up eyewatering supplies of black gold, rendering them vulnerable to corporate greed, displacement and ecological disaster. Meanwhile, it is tight-fisted with another precious resource, water, from on high above, leaving them to battle droughts every two to three years.

Qehet and coal gave Musharraf reason enough in the 2000s to decide that the desert needed to be open for business. The red carpet was rolled out, as a network of roads connecting towns like never before. The Road has since acquired metonymic status with Thari time being marked by the phrase Jab Road bana, just as Muhammad bin Qasim’s arrival is given as the beginning of Sindh’s official history in textbooks.

The Road made it possible for outsiders — businessmen, middlemen, opportunists — to penetrate a land that had otherwise been shut off for centuries, so much so that the Tharis began to complain that they stopped being able to recognise faces in the market. Theft and robbery went up, bringing with it a sense of insecurity that had never before been experienced here. (For an in-depth study, consider Arif Hasan’s Tharparkar: Drought, Development And Social Change)

The Road made Thar known to the rest of Pakistan and as a result of the drought, one of the first things that the new media access paid attention to were the dying babies. In reaction, sarkar and other saviours decided the solution was to bankroll nutrition programs and cash handouts. Even today, pregnant women, new mothers and children receive about Rs3,000 each a month under the Benazir Income Support Programme. The government doctor at the katchehri felt that these interventions have had a corrupting effect on Thari society. “Naturally, when one woman receives that money, she tells the others,” he said, before going on to confess his own capitulation. He could take one pregnant woman’s urine and make it possible for three non-gravid women to cash in. “It’s the truth, why should I lie?” he added. (I was not able to independently verify his claims.)

These so-called ‘fake’ pregnancies aren’t even what needs to be investigated, for Rs3,000 a month hardly enriches households under the poverty line. What the doctor claimed next is worrying: Women are having more babies — for cash. “They talk about family planning,” he scoffed, “but at the same time, they are giving money to encourage people to have more children.” His correlation between welfare checks and fertility rates is a tenuous one at best, but these remarks deepen my suspicion that government and non-government decision-making is doing more harm than good in a place like this.

Identity theft

I was further persuaded that it has always been easy to do systemic violence in Thar when I learnt how its very name came about. There was no such thing as ‘Tharparkar’ until the British squished together Thar and Parkar when they turned it into a district in the 1900s. This region was actually called Dhāt, and it was part of the Greater Rajputana states (Rajasthan desert). Parkar was an entirely separate region in Kutch.

This history lesson unfolded in Chhachhro, which nanny S— had persuaded me with his geriatric flirtations to go to, instead of Nagar, my original assignment. No one ever goes to Chhachhro, he told me. Indeed, this taluka’s sense of isolation became clear at its press club, where I was greeted with wonderment by activists Ali Akbar Rahimoo and Gautam Rathi. “We ourselves were wondering how come the HRCP had chosen to organise a camp here,” Ali Akbar said. “No one ever comes to Chhachhro.” In fact, when he sent out invitations for the HRCP human rights camp, people were confused. Did he want them to have their eyesight checked like at a medical camp?

Before the session began, Gautam Rathi and Ali Akbar felt I must understand the contours of Chhachhro’s history, which sets it apart from Thar’s and would help me understand present-day concerns.

Crucially, they say, up until the British showed up here, all this land was collectively owned and people lived close to water (wells and tarais or natural ponds). Throughout history, the Tharis lived off their livestock and whatever they could grow and barter (milk, ghee, wool, leather). The British introduced the ‘Rani Chaap’ coins with the Queen’s relief, a police force and a Revenue system and by 1930 had started granting people state land. But even then, the gowcher was left untouched so everyone’s animals could graze freely.

The British stayed here for about a hundred years, building dispensaries and schools, which made them well-liked by the Thari people who had not experienced governance in this shape before under Muslim Talpur, Kalhoro and Rajputana conquerors. The phrase, ‘Jee bhoora tina’ (lit. you did the White man thing) is still used today as praise for accomplishing what no one else does. When it came time for the British to leave at Partition in 1947, there was a general disbelief compounded by the upheaval caused by migrations.

The other major shaper of Thari history was the war with India in 1965, when this area was severed from Rajasthan. Thari Hindus were viewed with suspicion as they had family ties in India, giving the government a reason to step up surveillance. Paranoia ratcheted up by 1971 when India took over Chhachhro briefly and gutted it. It was only two years later, after the Shimla agreement, that the district was returned to Pakistan. It took a while for men to rebuild Chhachhro and for a long time it was known as the town of single men because it was unfit for families.

This historical tangent explains why Chhachhro was kept hermetically sealed up to 2001, so it could act as a buffer zone with India. “Since the 1971 war,” said one man at the camp, “The state of Pakistan has never treated [the people of] Tharparkar like a proper citizenry. We survive here like a colony.” There could be no roads into it, no TV, no tourists, no radio. That is why, the men told me, when The Road was built in the 2000s, everything changed.

The wrong address

Chhachhro Press Club is a no-computer, no furniture affair on the town’s main road. The HRCP organisers elect to seat people indoors and they leave the black refrigerator-sized speaker in the driveway. In a stroke of marketing genius, Ali Akbar Rahimoo tells the HRCP volunteers to keep the boombox facing the street so anyone who had gone about their business in town that day was sure to have heard about two dozen men blast out an untrammelled stream of anger about what was happening from villages Tar Dos to Khensar. HRCP didn’t need social media. It just held a five-hour organic live audio broadcast.

Some men spoke into the microphone with hands squarely gripping the lectern. Then there were others who had come clutching files and stood like children. They held back from the mic as if it were an unpredictable object that would steal their voice. They had come from all over Chhachhro and the new tehsil Dahli, which together are home to about a third of Thar’s population. Despite their scale, however, both districts are so thin on government presence that you have to drive two hours to Mithi to get any official business done. Dahli still doesn’t have a press club, and thus you never really hear about it.

You might assume that water scarcity topped the list of speaker priorities. It didn’t. Another natural resource, one that is in obscene amounts, emerged as the root of human rights violations: land. Gul Sher, a dignified young man whose family has lived in Khokhrapar for nine generations or three hundred years, came bearing news that about 800 sq km at the border had been sold to private companies. “But in the eyes of the law, none of this land belongs to us,” he said. “There are no ownership documents — nothing that proves we exist here.”

I was expecting people to talk about garden variety human rights abuses (enforced disappearances, religious discrimination) at the HRCP camp for this is what we are used to hearing in Pakistan. And while they may very well be taking place at some scale, a far greater collective violence is being visited upon this land. It is just not visibly perpetrated by other humans as it is linked to the way people are impacted by the invisible flow of Capital and the alienation and abstraction it creates.

Tharis are constantly at risk of dislocation and dispossession even though they are perhaps the only people in Pakistan who all own homes, even if it is a thatched hut. The trouble is that they do not have the papers to prove it because the government has not surveyed the land. (A project was abandoned with only Kaloi and Islamkot covered two years ago). Proof lies in the number of court cases, which lawyer Shaukat Sindhi mentioned in Mithi. “Naturally, people will end up killing each other over plots,” he said. “The shame is that some of them are dying for fifty square yards, which is barely worth fifty thousand rupees.”

A map (above) explains why the Tharis are worried and the lack of a land survey could lead to widespread long-term inequalities. In the centre of Thar is a great 9,000 sq km chunk of land under which coal has been found. People fear they will have to eventually be told to vacate it. If Thar is 19,000 sq km large, that leaves about 10,000 sq km for the population. The government claims that half of the remaining land is cultivable and half is not.

Even if you go by the government’s standards and divide the cultivable half, that leaves 3.5 acres per family. Ali Akbar, who proposed this quick math, said, “Just computerise the land records for each family’s 3.5 acres at least. Do it and get it over with and do us all a favour.” If the Thari right to land were acknowledged, they could lease their property to outsiders and have proprietary and financial protection.

Selective application of state power leaves vacuums where local muscle can flex and businessmen can benefit from the absence of regulation. No one helps when feudals cut off access to gowcher by blocking pathways. Kalo Meghwar, in a scarlet turban, fluffy dhoti and scuffed brogues, said his graveyard, gowcher and pond have been taken over for four years by a badmash. “Our things are stolen, our homes are taken over, but since we are poor, we can’t take names,” he said. “The last time I took names, they treated me badly.” He stopped complaining three years ago but it has become too much. The HRCP team pressed him to be specific, but eventually let him be. There could have been informants in the room.

In a way, the Tharis are fighting less for their own human rights and more for their animals’ right to thrive and flourish. “Our way of rearing the livestock is centuries old,” said Dr Mashooq Ali in Mithi. “You go to any village and people don’t even know a Livestock Department exists, Animal Husbandry Department exists.” If this region is home to eight million or 15pc of Sindh’s livestock, why has more research not been done? Why don’t the three hundred veterinary centres work so the animals are vaccinated and can receive first aid? How can forty veterinary staffers for the district cater to eight million animals? Even if the vet makes it to your village in five hours, you won’t have the five thousand rupees to pay him for a sick goat.

Shopfront government

I would be doing a disservice to the people I met at the human rights camp by merely regurgitating what they said and not conveying the sophistication with which they said it. Each man made a concerted effort not to repeat what the previous speakers had said and instead add to the knowledge being shared. It was as if everyone valued the time and effort all of us had made to travel to Chhachhro and wanted to ensure that the HRCP team received as diverse a briefing as possible. (Usually at seminars, men will not stop speaking until you pry the mic from their necrotic hands). No, here I was witnessing something else: the spirit of community and mutual respect.

The men’s complaints were not discrete; something deeper connected them all. In my search for answers, I stumbled across a few thinkers whose theories fit beautifully (Claude Lévi-Strauss, David Harvey, Arturo Escobar, James C Scott, James Ferguson for those interested). The more I read their work, the more Thar seemed like a textbook example of a violent encounter with modernity.

Isolated places like it disintegrate when the powerful forces of modernity arrive at its doorstep — in this case because coal was discovered. Capitalism speeds up the collapse of such a society because it introduces the logics of profit, individualism and accelerated time. A self-sufficient region that fed, clothed and housed itself, is told that it is primitive and backward and needs to live better, easier, healthier, richer. They replace barter with cash, eat into gowcher for roads and railways, and introduce digital banking. A family who managed with their livestock and open land is forced into daily wage labour so its children can buy ten-rupee factory biscuits from Karachi.

When a coal-hungry State becomes interested in places like Thar then, they first have to make it easy to navigate and decipher. They need to be made ‘legible’ so maps, surveys and roads are drawn on what is considered a blank slate. As this new system is codified and becomes the formal documented way to manage Thar, intangible local knowledge and autonomy is replaced. The Road erases the centuries old wisdom of tracking prints in the sand.

The Road made it possible to penetrate the land so that Capitalism could invade the commons (gowcher and tarais) and turn them into profit-generating assets.

Corporations can now extract minerals, exploit labour, eat up land shared between villages. This is called accumulation by dispossession. Mandir leader Krishan Sharma gave an example of it in Mithi: “There is so much talk about Thar coal that little space is left for Thar salt.” At the border, the Sindh government has given corporate giant Hubsalt leases. Its machinery at plants in Ankerio and Mokhai process more salt than labourers can by hand. The mazdoor who would be able to make a year’s living in the saltflat in the winter has been replaced, I was told.

A reservoir was built with water taken from Nabisar village but it is meant to cool the power plant, not people. That plant sends 2700MW to the grid but the place it comes from doesn’t even get 10MW. Meanwhile, people have to shell out Rs18,000 for water tankers. “They say that Thar will change Pakistan,” scoffed activist Qamaruddin Rahimoo in Chhachhro. “But who will change Pakistan? They’ve discovered coal! Well, you expect us to eat coal? There is no light where they found coal.”

Even Thar rail is a cruel joke, they said, because not only is the government taking their land, it is cutting trees to make way for it — sheer blasphemy as one tree feeds 12 goats. They watched in horror as an NED university campus was built on what they say was a swathe of gowcher. Is all this construction even necessary? “For the last 15 years, Tharparkar has been a resource dumping site,” argues Ali Akbar. “There has been so much civil work here, you cannot even fathom it. You are making two-two hundred dispensaries.” The airport is just for the ‘corporates’ because Tharis certainly can’t afford the fare.

The rush to modernise and spend money is called ‘isomorphic mimicry’. The State copies what it thinks looks modern but without actually building capability to make it work. This is why Ghulam Murtaza Samejo said all he could report on the performance of elected union councillors is that tiles have been installed from the chowk to the press club with the Rs1.2 million Chhachhro budget. The town is otherwise turning into a garbage dump. Isomorphic mimicry is why only a fraction of the reverse osmosis plants work today and their staff is either not paid or their pay grazes the minimum wage. This applies to the health unit opened in Musharraf’s time. It was upgraded to a taluka headquarters hospital and given a brand new takhti, but it is still operating with its original 20 beds, according to Qamaruddin Rahimoo.

I hear you saying: But who is against development? Surely the Tharis wanted The Road. In each town I visited, people demanded connecting roads, electricity, water, hospitals, fresh textbooks every school year. No one wants isolation, to be hungry or not have food and medicine. The trouble with the way in which this kind of ‘modernity’ arrives is who decides it, who benefits and who is left out. The government and not the Tharis decide where the roads will be built. These roads are then marketed as a public good. Development does not solve problems, but redefines them to fit the logic of intervention.

I should mention here that the aforementioned theorists never said that traditional societies are devoid of injustice or their own cruelties. But removing them in the name of progress leads to collapse. As long as Tharis are not calling the shots, the burra sahib is merely replaced by the babu in Islamabad. It is no coincidence that Thar’s MNAs and MPAs were not even from Thar (but pirs such as the Jeelanis, Makhdooms, Mirs of Mirpurkhas, Sanghar, Umarkot) up until The Road was built. In the meantime, infrastructure and energy projects have all been decided elsewhere.

Fall sick with the healing

The clearest evidence of this systemic violence done in the name of modernity with the machinery of Capitalism then, to my mind, is the suicide, and they were on everyone’s lips. About seven Tharis per 100,000 are killing themselves each year. I suspect, each individual case’s reasons aside, this is an expression of helplessness in a society whose culture is atrophying, people are being exploited and entire lifeways are being erased.

Early media coverage led to some government attention. A study was done, journalists were bussed in to scratch around, and a toll-free helpline was set up — imagine the Tharis dialing in. Mobile phone brain rot and unrequited love top the list of culprits but no one was satisfied with these explanations at the Mithi consultation. Lawyer Bhooro Mal Kohli wanted to know why every case of a young woman’s suicide is put down to one explanation: her “zehni tawazun” or mental balance was not right. Others said suicides are taking place when people cannot pay back their microfinance loans.

One reason for the lack of agreement on the cause of suicides is the absence of post-mortems. They are legally required in suspected cases but the police have to back off if the community resists. Then there are logistical challenges, according to SSP Adil Memon who oversees the district. If a person dies by suicide in a disconnected part of Thar, moving the body to a centre for a post-mortem is expensive. He has to dedicate an officer to take the tissue samples all the way to the nearest serologist, in Sukkur. Chhachhro does not have a woman MLO and even where they are available, they are reluctant to do a case because they will have to keep showing up in court.

An economist’s blueprint

Plenty of plans for Tharparkar are afoot but I find their self-confidence frightening so I ask what the Tharis would prefer as a solution and one man’s name kept coming up: economist Dr Kaiser Bengali.

I was told that his poverty reduction plan for Sindh had methods that would work for Thar as he understood how ‘development’ should take place without ruining the region. There should be a town every 40km, rainwater harvesting and mobile schools and healthcare facilties. These plans did not prioritise cement-heavy spending and were actually approved by the cabinet in 2021, but he says, it hasn’t been put into action.

Dr Bengali’s plan finds favour because it takes its cues from Thari knowledge. Take, for instance, how the people have dwelled in the desert. Maps show villages dotted nearly equidistantly; the Tharis spaced themselves out by the location of wells and availability of water. There are no dense cities.

This principle flies in the face of modern city planning. A state cannot afford to set up and manage a hospital for a five-hut village but it could for a cluster of villages with a population of 10,000. Dr Bengali’s answer takes the middle ground by proposing rural clusters, which he says has already worked in Sujawal’s Chohar Jamali where they built 17 roads at a 40-km radius to connect villages. Other proposals to the government have specified a 10-km distance, according to work done by Sohail Sangi, Ali Akbar Rahimoo and a few other Thari activists.

The formula takes it a step further by giving rural growth centres functionality: Mithi for government, Nagar for the coal industry and so on. But all this has to happen soon for the land mafia has a free hand. Dr Bengali says the size of plots have to be policed so density does not develop given the water scarcity.

When I argue with Dr Bengali that Capitalist forces destroy cultures, he is blunt: “That culture [you are talking about] in Thar was largely starvation.” His prescription for it smarts even more. “Chhachhro should be phased out,” he says. “There is simply no water there.” It should not become a high-density population area. He even believes that livestock should stop being a source of livelihood as it is too water-intensive. Half of the animals die in the drought anyway, he says primly.

Dr Bengali’s attitude may be deflating but his formula is promising. I come away from this brief exposure to people in Islamkot, Mithi and Chhachhro certain of only one thing: it is not that easy to run Thar because the usual methods do more damage even if they seem to deliver.

What happens in Thar, stays in Thar

As S— sahib wraps up the katchehri in Islamkot and I exchange telephone numbers with the group of men, a chorus of protests erupt. This is zyadti [unfair], I am told, “You didn’t finish.”

Nanny S— gravely tells the group. “This is a test for us. Ye hamara imtehan hai: How much we keep this to ourselves is our zarf. A sahafi will do anything for their story.” I have a feeling he is referring to me.

But the others understand. What happened here, says one of them. “Kia hua?”

“Nothing,” I reply. “I have no idea. What happened?” I gather up my notebook, bag and prepare to leave.

Yes, we didn’t see anything, comes the reply.

And so, on that cool night in Islamkot, deep in the heart of Dhāt, no one saw anything. There was no story to tell. No one was the wiser.

Header image: A satellite view of Mithi — via ?Mapbox, ?OpenStreetMap