March 27, 2006	Monday	Safar 26, 1427

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RAHIM YAR KHAN, March 26: Hundreds of tenants have taken to roads to stop their ‘forceful ejection’ from the land they have been ploughing since 1940s. The land is situated in Chak 93/P, 95/P and 98/P, 18 kms in south, where 2,500 acres were bought by a British, Roberts John, before partition who made the barren tract cultivable with the help of tenants after a long hard struggle of several years.

At the time of agriculture land reforms during the ZA Bhutto rule, it was decided that 750 acres of the Roberts farms would be divided among tenants.

As such, nine tenants of Chak 95/P and 20 from Chak 98/P were allotted their share out of the 750 acres but scores of others, whose number runs in hundreds, were not allotted any piece of land due to some unknown reasons.

Last year, influential and powerful people from the ruling elite bought remaining 1,750 acres from the Roberts John family.

The new owners lifted cotton and wheat after April 2005. Of the 1750 acres bought by them, some 700 acres are toiled by the tenants.

A number of events during the last three days have alarmed tenants who not only apprehend ejection (from the 700 acres they cultivate right now) but they fear that land allotted to them under the reforms may be hit by water shortage because of being in the neighbourhood of influential people’s farms.

Their apprehensions are not unfounded. On March 23 when some tenants were going to water their fields, servants of new owners stopped them and broke the watercourse which was used to irrigate fields owned by tenants. This led to tension and FIRs and counter FIRs.

When this correspondent visited Chak 95/P on Sunday, hundreds of tenants, including men and women, had blocked roads leading to the villages. All the residents of the three villages are tenants with 2,500 of them registered voters.

Their representatives said that men of a chief minister’s adviser were harassing them to make them vacate the lands.

They said that a vehicle of Sadar police station came to 95/P on March 25. Policemen on board said that a case had been registered against some people of the village for assaulting a man.

“The same night four police vehicles entered our village at 1am and beat our women and took Bashir Ahmed Mehmood, Ahsaan and Naveed (two of them school-going boys) with them. “On Sunday morning, over a dozen vehicles led by Sadar DSP Jammat Ali Shah Bokhari came here again to stop us from blocking the road,” they said.

The protesters demanded the release of those arrested, allotment of land promised to them under the reforms, uninterrupted flow of irrigation water to their lands and surety that they would not be ejected from their villages by the new owners. They also demanded share in last cotton and wheat crops.

DPO Syed Ahsan Mehboob said police was doing its duty without any political pressure. He added that he was himself looking into the matter and if the arrested were innocent, they would be freed.

None from the new owners was available by phone to give his side of the story.