Lahore: The Anjuman Mazareen Punjab is a group of tenant households seeking ownership rights of farms across the Punjab they claim to have been tilling for decades preceding the partition of British India. The movement had started in the wake of June 2000 decision of the Okara Military Farms administration to transfer its arrangement with tenant cultivators from sharecropping involving rents payable in kind to a fixed rent payable in cash. In his research paper on the movement, Academic Aasim Sajjad Akhtar has noted that the new arrangement was opposed by tenant cultivators because it deprived them of security against arbitrary evictions. Under the contact system proposed by the administration, tenants were offered a seven-year lease with annual reviews but there were clauses providing for eviction on multiple grounds. At heart of the dispute between tenant cultivators represented by the AMP and the Military Farms administration is the mystery surrounding ownership of the land. Academic Imran Ali’s research shows that disputed farms were part of large tracts of land made cultivate under a canal colonisation project started by the British colonial administration in late 19th century. Besides households from castes considered as agrarian by the British, British Indian Army’s officials and the military administration itself were granted land made cultivate in these colonies through the then newly constructed canals. The latter was given land on lease by the then Punjab government for a 20-year term. Akhtar’s research shows that documentary evidence available in public shows that the lease term was last extended till 1938 and annual rents paid till 1943. There is no record available for renewal of lease term and payment of rents afterwards, putting a question mark over the Military Farms administration’s control of the disputed land.
Published in Daily Times, August 24th 2017.