The Senate of Pakistan’s defence committee on 19th June constituted a sub-committee to investigate allegations that the armed forces have forcibly occupied lands in Quetta for their projects.
Committee Chairman Senator Mushahid Hussain said that the three-member sub-committee, which would be led by Senator Abdul Qayyum, a retired general. Other members include PPP secretary general Senator Farhatullah Babar and Senator Hidayatullah.
The matter had been referred to the defence committee after Senators Usman Kakar, Azam Khan Musakhel and Gul Bashra moved an adjournment motion in the upper house of parliament on alleged “alarming rise in the occupation of land by military and Air Force in Quetta causing disharmony among the people”.
Since the early 1950s, the military has acquired millions of acres of land throughout the country for distribution to serving and retired armed forces personnel. According to one estimate, the armed forces control about 12 million acres, constituting about 12 per cent of total state land. Out of this, 62 per cent is in the Punjab, 27 per cent in Sindh and 11 per cent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan. About seven million acres of the total is agricultural land and has an estimated worth of Rs700 billion. Interestingly, only about 100,000 acres are directly controlled by the armed forces and its subsidiary companies, the Fauji Foundation, the AWT and the Bahria Foundation, and distributed amongst serving and retired personnel. The remainder was given (at highly subsidised rates) to army personnel as awards to be used for their personal gratification.
Some of the prominent beneficiaries of the land reclamation scheme from the armed forces included General Ayub Khan (247 acres), General Muhammad Musa (250 acres), and Maj. General Umrao Khan (246 acres).
The military, including its serving and retired members, own massive tracts of land in rural as well as urban centres. They believe that the distribution of land amongst military personnel, particularly within the various housing schemes, denotes the defence establishment’s superior capacity at managing resources. However, the mechanics behind the issue are not so simple. Is the allocation of military land nothing more than a tradition inherited from the British to reward defence services personnel? Or should the acquisition of land by the military be viewed in the larger perspective of the power the armed forces wield over the state and its resources?