Conflict Resolution Mechanism in Rural Sindh: Rationalizing Life-world of Peasants

This paper explains the exploitation of Sindhi peasantry and their disorientation and alienation from the formal-rational institutions of administration, law and order, which seem incompatible, and sometimes, contradictory to the existing peasant discourse. Life-world of peasants of Sindh has been explored particularly focusing on nature of conflicts in sharecropping and peasant-landlord relationship at village level. It was found that state run courts and the police system modeled on the western rational systems could not have incorporated the practices of people into formal laws and rational systems. Informal legal systems at intra-village and kinship level are relatively in harmony with sharecroppers’ and peasants’ life-world and are perceived as practicable and more egalitarian thus rendering rational-legal and constitutional frameworks relating to peasantry and village life practically irrelevant and inapplicable. This distortion in the communication between informal life-world of the folks and theouter formal rational systems, has led to the liminality, societal disorientation and the partial social bondage. That liminal confusion has further led to the perpetuation of structural and opportunistic exploitation by feudal lords, tribal chiefs or Sardars, who have partially hegemonized the rational system as well as the relatively irrational life-world of the peasantry. To develop local communities without shunning modernization it has been suggested to restore the dialectical interplay between life-world of peasants and the system of Sindh Rice Belt. To bring about such transformation, informal conflict resolution mechanisms which have been warped by liminal tricksters should be incorporated into constitutional-legal system of the state and the rational system which is serving tricksters should be restrained so that it could be made dialectically compatible to the values and issues of the village folks, peasants and the sharecroppers.