OKARA, Jan 22: Tension mounted in military farms on Wednesday when two cases were registered against 74 tenants after a grand operation by law-enforcement agencies.

Twenty-one tenants were also arrested. Those booked included 12 women and office-bearers of Punjab AMP and Okara district.

According to the details, the law-enforcement agencies arrested Rashid Ahmad Saeed, Pervaiz, Bashir Ahmad, Muhammad Ramazan, Nazir Ahmad of Chak No 4/4-L, Aslam Masih, Gulzar Masih, Nadeem Masih and 13 other residents of 10/4-L when they were returning to their homes.

The villages committee members, Malik Muhammad Jamil and Ghulam Muhammad, lodged a complaint with the Saddar police for the registration of cases against 72 people for injuring men and women of the villages.

Those booked included AMP’s Punjab chairman Younis Iqbal, AMP’s Okara district chairman Ghani Javaid and president Ghulam Hasan, deputy secretary (women wing) Shagufta Akram, AMP’s former president and Nazim Mehr Abdul Sattar and 61 other men and women tenants.

The villages committee has been constituted allegedly with the support of military farms administration.

It was learnt that the Punjab chapter of the PPP, on the directive of party chairperson Benazir Bhutto, has assured the AMP office-bearers that the tenants’ issue would be raised in parliament.

PPP’s Punjab president and opposition leader in the Punjab Assembly, Qasim Zia, and many MNAs and MPAs will speak at a tenants’ convention to be held on Jan 24 at Chak No 10/4-L.

Meanwhile, a Rangers spokesman said that they were neither part of any operation nor arrested anyone. He, however, said that the ‘miscreants’ and the people booked by Saddar police would not be spared.

The spokesman said: “we have no information about the PPP meeting but we will not allow any political interruption in this sensitive issue”.

The local office-bearers of the PPP confirmed that Qasim Zia, Yousaf Raza Gilani, Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Raza Rabbani would speak at a meeting, organized against party dissident Rao Sikandar Iqbal.

The meeting would be held on Jan 24 at the filling station of PPP-P MPA Muhammad Ashraf Khan Sohna in the city.