Daily Times

OKARA: When he was released on bail a few weeks ago, Anjuman-Mazaraeen Punjab (AMP) general secretary Mehr Abdul Sattar returned to his native Chak 4/4 L amid cheers and roars of jubilant peasant women and children gathered along the main road.

Prior to his release, he had been held at a high security prison in Sahiwal where he was the only under trial inmate, the rest being convicts in terrorism and other serious cases.

For the beleaguered peasant families of Okara Military Farm, the announcement of Sattar’s release came as a welcome relief after the shocking news of veteran lawyer and activist Asma Jahangir’s death. Jahangir had stood with the movement and even represented Sattar in several cases.

The relief was short-lived, however. This Tuesday, Sattar, the force behind the two-decade-long movement for land rights, was sentenced to a 10-year prison term by an anti-terrorism special judge in Okara, Malik Shabbir Hussain Awan. The verdict was announced in FIR N0 731/15, registered at Okara Saddar police station on September 3, 2015. Interestingly, the same judge has acquitted Sattar in FIRs No(s), 531/16, 908/16 and 817/17, registered under sections 337TP, 324, 353, 167, 120/B, 186, 149, 21/L of the PPC, and Section 7 of the ATA.

Of the 165 farmers nominated in the FIR, 16 were arrested and two, including Sattar, were eventually found guilty. Abdul Ghafoor was the other farmer sentenced in the case. The complainant in the case was the then SHO of the Okara Saddar station himself. Mehar Ismael submitted in his complaint that Mehar Sattar had led a farmers’ agitation blocking the Lahore-Karachi rail track and Lahore Multan motorway. “The police tried to disperse them; in the clash Asghar and Israr-ul-Haq, two policemen suffered injuries,” stated the complaint. Another accusation against Sattar and others was that they distributed hate material against the military and opened fire on the police.

Though the peasant households have been in possession of the land since the pre-partition time, they started their campaign for ownership rights in the year 1998. This marks 2023 as the year when they would have been in possession of the land for 25 years after the emergence of the issue, and the country’s law states that a farmer gets a right to claim the title of any untitled or public agricultural land that remains in their possession for 25 years.

AMP activists and their supporters in civil society and progressive political parties claim that peasant leaders only crime is that they have been fighting for the title of the land their forefathers made cultivable. They say multiple generations of peasant households have been tilling the 17,013 acres of land in their lawful possession. However, the military farm authorities are not willing to let go of the land because it is highly fertile. They say their unarmed women and children have faced armored vehicles, guns, demolitions, torture, and police cases merely for demanding what is rightfully theirs.

Speaking to Daily Times after the announcement of Sattar’s prison term, Aqila Naz, AMP finance secretary, recalls Jahangir untimely death and says, “When a gathering held in a village to mark Asma’s chaleeswan (prayer to mark 40 days of death) was attacked by the police, the AMP figured that it had lost its guardian angel. There were children and women gathered to pay homage to her. The police attacked us, beating and shelling innocent children and women.”

Naz added that 10-days after Jahangir’s death, AMP leader Younas Iqbal and five others were picked up by security personnel and forced to sign on a rental agreement against their will.

Published in Daily Times, June 29^th 2018.