News Desk
The Multan killings of January 1978 sit in a peculiar place in Pakistan’s political memory. They were vast in scale, brutal in execution, and revealing in what they exposed about the country’s governing order. Yet they remain largely unspoken, pushed to the margins of public history. The silence is not accidental. It reflects a state that has long preferred erasure over accountability, especially when the victims are workers and the perpetrators sit close to the military establishment.
The events at Colony Textile Mills unfolded during Gen. Zia‑ul‑Haq’s martial law, a period defined by the consolidation of military power and the systematic dismantling of political dissent. Workers demanding a bonus were met not with negotiation but with live ammunition.
Independent estimates place the death toll at around 133. The state insisted it was closer to a dozen. No civilian inquiry followed. No court examined the evidence. The military’s own report was sealed away, as if the truth itself were a threat.
The contrast between the scale of the violence and the state’s eagerness to bury it is striking. Pakistan has a long history of suppressing labour movements, but Multan stands out for the sheer force used against unarmed workers.
The massacre did not emerge from a vacuum. By the late 1970s, workers had become one of the few organised blocs capable of challenging elite power. Their mobilisation dated back to the student–worker alliances of 1969, which had shaken the Ayub regime. Yet the structural inequalities that fuelled those protests persisted. Bhutto’s labour reforms promised dignity but delivered little in practice. At Colony Mills, the demand for a 4.5‑month bonus was modest compared with the profits of the industrial families who dominated Pakistan’s economy.
The Colony Group was not just wealthy. It was deeply embedded in the state’s power networks. Its ties to the military establishment were well known, and Gen. Zia’s personal presence in Multan on the day of the killings underscored how closely intertwined Pakistan’s economic and military elites had become. The workers’ demands were not simply a labour dispute. They were a challenge to a system in which industrial fortunes were protected by state force.
The state’s response extended beyond bullets. It sought to control the story. The official news agency reported only five deaths, a figure repeated by international outlets that relied on government dispatches. Pakistani journalists who attempted to report the truth faced transfers, intimidation, or silence. The manipulation was not subtle. It was a reminder of how tightly information was managed under martial law and how easily the state could erase the suffering of its own citizens.
Accounts from workers and researchers paint a far darker picture. They describe hours of sustained firing, bodies hidden in mass graves, and families barred from retrieving their dead. Some victims were allegedly dumped in sewage drains. These are not the details of a chaotic clash. They suggest a deliberate effort to eliminate evidence and prevent mourning from becoming mobilisation.
In the aftermath, the state turned its courts not on the perpetrators but on the survivors. Workers were jailed, flogged, and tried under martial law regulations. The message was unmistakable. The state would not tolerate labour activism, and it would not allow the massacre to become a rallying cry.
Unlike the 1972 labour killings in Karachi, which at least received public acknowledgment, Multan was left without memorials, plaques, or official recognition. The absence is itself a political act.
Decades later, the state’s refusal to confront the massacre persists. The inquiry remains sealed. No government has revisited the case. In a gesture that borders on the surreal, Punjab’s Labour Department awarded Colony Mills a “Best Employer Award” in 2022. It was a reminder of how thoroughly the narrative has been inverted: the powerful rehabilitated, the victims forgotten.
The Multan massacre is not just a historical footnote. It reveals the architecture of power in Pakistan, where the interests of capital and the military often align and where labour movements are treated as existential threats. It remains the deadliest attack on workers in the country’s history, yet it has been denied the recognition that even tragedies demand.
Remembering Multan is not simply about revisiting the past. It is about acknowledging the cost of a political order that has repeatedly chosen repression over reform. The families of the dead still wait for truth, for acknowledgment, for the basic dignity of having their loss recognised. Their wait has stretched nearly half a century.
And Pakistan, still uneasy with its own history, continues to look away.
