The event has no widespread name. It occurred at the Colony Textile Mills in Multan, an industrial city in Pakistan’s Punjab. The workers were protesting wage arrears and poor conditions. They were on strike, a peaceful gathering outside the mill gates on the morning of January 2, 1978. The government of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, which had taken power in a coup months earlier, had little patience for dissent, especially the organized kind.
On the president’s direct orders, the paramilitary Punjab Rangers were dispatched. They did not disperse the crowd with batons or tear gas. They opened fire with automatic weapons. The number of dead was never officially, honestly tallied. Estimates from labor groups and witnesses range from dozens to over a hundred. The wounded were many. The news was suppressed, the incident buried beneath the weight of martial law and state-controlled media.
It exists now in oral histories, in the memories of the labor movement, and in brief, stark entries in human rights chronologies. It was a surgical demonstration of power at the dawn of Zia’s decade-long regime, a message written in bullets to the working class: the new order would not negotiate. The specificity of the location—a textile mill, the heart of Pakistan’s industrial base—and the directness of the command from the top make it a chillingly clear artifact of authoritarian logic. It is a stark, obscure knot in the history of Pakistan’s labor relations, known deeply to those affected and almost entirely overlooked beyond them.