Most visitors of rivers find themselves drawn to parks and picnic spots, adjacent to major dams, barrages or bridges. Occasionally, they might meet a fisher share some fish, and perhaps take a trip on the river in one of their boats.

A still image is conjured up, the modernity of the barrage and the power of man to tame the mighty rivers juxtaposed with the fishers and their simple way of life, humble, traditional folk from an almost bygone era. It is an image made of time -- of the modern and the past, coeval, existing simultaneously. What this image, this timescape obscures, is violence. Look harder and one sees the modern state with all its promises of hydro-infrastructure actually creating conditions of ecological devastation such as dispossession, barren salinated lands, floods, and empty rivers and where the gods of accumulation are prioritised over all other things. Look harder still and you can see slavery -- hundreds of thousands of adivasi fishers live as bonded labour.

This violence is particularly stark in the case of inland fisheries in Punjab. Without conducting a census the Punjab Fisheries Department estimates that upwards of 170,000 fishers work and live on the waters of Punjab. This figure is contested, with NGOs and fisher organisations suggesting that the figure is closer to 600,000. For an industry that is conservatively worth $120 million per annum of which at least $40-50 million comes from the yield of public waters, the public exchequer earns short of $2 million from the sale of the monopoly right, through leasing, to fish these waters.

This extraordinary equation hints at other types of economies at work in the auctioning process i.e. ‘corruption’, but more importantly it demonstrates an imagination that commercialises public resources for extractive gain, ignoring other possibilities of understanding water resources. Those less focused on the market and more orientated towards sociality and relational economics, often go through traditional forms of knowing the rivers and its ecosystem.

The commercial imagination has a long history. A cursory look at the regulatory structure of inland fisheries in the Punjab draws one into the colonial archive that first formulated these. The practices of mapping waters, its peoples, and the fish, in surveys and other cartographic practices by colonial administrators, were followed by a range of legislative instruments, in which colonial priorities were both articulated and sometimes contested. Priorities ranged from revenue extraction and the development of a fishing market, to protection of fisheries, and protection of the fishers themselves. As such it played within numerous tropes of colonial rule.

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Here the creation of loyal subjects based on the reification of custom, tradition and Victorian waterscaping, find itself apparently at odds with the modern capitalist subject wielding the contract as his tool. In the waters this involved both the enclosure of waters into units allowing them to be leased out for commercial gain as well as the granting, often by colonial largesse, of various forms of licensing, sometimes involving the recognition of customary rights to fish.

Whilst the colonial authorities allowed considerable discretion to the provincial administration as to which formulation it employed (the Fisheries Acts of 1897 and 1914 do not lay out a specified tenure rights system), eventually the demands of funds required by the Fisheries Department, created in 1912, left them increasingly pushing towards leasing for revenue extraction. This direction is entrenched in the post-colonial state by the promulgation of the 1961 Fisheries Ordinance and its subsequent Rules from 1965, which lay out the lease to the highest bidder as the primary form of organising public waters. Whilst the remnants of other forms of tenure remain in the statute for example custom and licence, they have limited articulation and are seldom used, the pre-eminent regime of ordering by the Fisheries Department is that of lease for a period of one to three years.

The ‘status to contract’ mapping of colonial historiography is a simplistic rendition of the reality of colonised lives. The idea that pushing communities to the marginality of custom and culture and thus somehow not relevant to the economy is reductive. Rendition to spaces of custom and tradition allowed the functioning of the very actors ‘the fishers in this case’ in the wider economic form of extraction whilst ensuring their very real material reproduction within that space of culture.

Ultimately, however, what this mapping obscures is the various other formulations of living -- those of indigenous adivasi fishers -- which remain incommensurable until they find themselves placed on this continuum of time towards the modern economic man, that is by being able to exploit the waters for the market. This obscuring remains true within the functioning and approach of the Fisheries Department today in its resolute silence about the people who actually work the waters. The actors, the economic actors, are the leaseholders. Fishers are largely erased in policy and law, as well as the Fisheries Department’s imagination of public waters. They are quite simply not spoken of, even barely counted.

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The National Water Policy of 2018 places fisheries, together with livestock and wildlife, third on the list of priorities -- behind first drinking and sanitation and second use of water for irrigation. The question here is how does the approach to fisheries by the Punjab government articulate this priority? It is clear that leasing forms the primary articulation of tenure rights, despite overwhelming evidence that it is constituted by, and is constitutive of, the bonded labour of fishers and second that it involves massive ecological degradation in both fish quantity and species diversity -- crudely the short term lease incentivises maximum extraction. One wonders how the department reconciles the nature and impact of leases with this policy.

It is a reconciliation that the Sindh government found wanting when it passed an amendment in 2011 whereby it both erased leases as an option of tenure rights, but further articulated a right to licence for particular communities within its rendering of ‘fisherman’ who will hold particular rights to the water, its fish and the fruits of their labour. Whilst this is a substantial shift it articulates this right as tied to an economy of right and as such is at odds with more progressive jurisprudence which attempts to articulate water rights in terms of the indigenous and particular forms of knowledge and stewarding rights. These are approaches that Pakistan has formally signed up to within the chambers of international law, but remain limited in both understanding and deployment within Pakistan.

The Fisheries Act of 1897 was the first environment protection act ‘by virtue, for example, of making illegal certain practices such as using poison and explosives in fishing’ that the British colonial authority passed, albeit within the confines of a colonially imagined waterscape, one that mimics the idea of rivers, fish and fishermen in the home country. It remains an irony that the very infrastructure of law that emerges from this intervention of 1897 provides the method by which fishers are enslaved and the rivers are emptied.