LAHORE, May 5: Police have launched a crackdown against tenants of state land across the Punjab to curb the Anjuman Mazareen drive for ownership rights.

As is now Ferozewala police have arrested 15 tenants from Chaks 37 and 38 near Kala Shah Kaku while seven Chaks in the Khanewal district have been besieged by the police as tenants and their families are holding out their arrests.

The Labour Party Pakistan has decided to hold a protest rally at the Ferozewala courts on Monday against these arrests.

The crackdown was said to have been launched when the tenants occupying 68,000 acres of state land for the last about a century refused to pay the government dues after a Supreme Court verdict on May 3.

The court on Anjuman’s writ petition decreed that tenants would pay only 40 per cent share of the crops to the government, retaining the rest with them. All the expenses incurred for cultivation would be equally shared by the tenant and the government, while the latter would also be responsible for the provision of irrigation water.

Anjuman’s leaders believe that since from the outset they had been paying at least 10 per cent extra share to the state, besides incurring all the cultivation expenses, they were not liable to pay even a single penny to the state.

Tenants from Kala Shah Kaku were arrested on a case registered on a report by the Rice Research Institute’s administration on charges of breach of trust and hurling life threats.

The tenants had supported the presidential referendum on assurances of the government ministers that they would be granted proprietary rights.

Labour Party secretary-general Farooq Tariq, at a meeting of the tenants here, condemned the arrests and asked the government to resolve the issue through dialogues.