Daily Times

In a recent hearing of the Okara military farmland dispute, the representatives of the armed forces have admitted in front of the National Commission for Human Rights that the ownership of the disputed land lies with the provincial government of Punjab. This is a welcome departure from the farm administration’s earlier position on the matter.

Now that the dust around the issue of ownership seems to be settled, it must be recognised immediately that there are three parties to the dispute: peasant households who have tilled the land for generations making it cultivable, military farms administration which was given the land on lease before partition, and the provincial government, which is the owner of the land.

As the NCHR proceedings move on, and an agreement is reached on the matter, the interests of the tenant households must be given supreme importance since they are the weakest party that has suffered the most as a result of ill-advised policies that had triggered the dispute in the 2000s. The military farm administration’s proposal to shift from sharecropping to fixed-rent farming was opposed by tenants on grounds that the new setup could undo the security that accompanied their status as occupancy tenants. Under the Tenancy Act, an occupancy tenant cannot be evicted without a court’s order. However, the fixed-rent agreement would have entailed the surrender of land in case a tenant was unable to pay the cash rent any given year. This was unacceptable to the tenants, and it led to a widespread protest movement organised by a grassroots body Anjuman Mazareen Punjab (Association of Punjab Tenants). Instead of engaging the tenants in a dialogue, state agencies cracked down on this movement, a move condemned by rights activists.

Now that there is a possibility of reconciliation, all tenant leaders incarcerated on charges of terrorism must be released immediately and the cases against them dropped. This will send a positive signal to the villages that have suffered countless curfews and raids by law enforcers in the past two decades. Secondly, a mechanism should be set up to compensate tenant households for their losses: physical, financial and mental. These measures will help state agencies to establish goodwill in these villages, and enable a more reconciliatory arrangement to prevail in coming years. *

Published in Daily Times, January 5^th 2019