LHC bench overturns order barring lease of farmlands to Army

LAHORE: A division bench of the Lahore High Court (LHC) suspended an earlier order of the single bench that barred the transfer of the state lands to the Pakistan Army for corporate farming on a 20-year lease.

The bench, headed by Justice Ali Baqar Najafi, issued the order while hearing a petition of the Punjab government, seeking cancellation of the earlier ruling by the LHC’s judge upholding the contention that the complainants opposing the leasing of agricultural lands to the Army were lawyers based in Lahore, hence not the affected party to the lease. The division bench order ruled that it is not the court’s job to regulate agricultural policies.

LHC Judge Abid Hussain Chattha last month declared the leasing of land to the Pakistan Army for corporate farming as illegal, ruling that the armed forces had no constitutional and legal mandate to indulge in corporate farming. In his written judgment, Justice Chattha said that the caretaker government of Punjab had no constitutional mandate or moral authority to allot huge lands for corporate farming measuring over 45,267 acres to the army in three districts including Bhakkar, Khushab and Sahiwal. In the judgment, the LHC judge ruled that 1 million acres of land requested to be leased to the Pakistan Army were nearly 2pc of the total territory of Punjab.

The Punjab government allotted the land in response to a letter of February 8, by the director general of strategic projects of the Pakistan Army to the Board of Revenue Punjab requesting to grant up to one million acres of state land in Punjab for the purpose of “corporate agriculture farming”.

Petitioners, Fahad Malik Advocate and Rafay Alam Advocate, representing the NGO the Public Interest Law Association of Pakistan, had filed a petition in the LHC challenging the government’s decision, after a government notification of March 10 was circulated on social media about Punjab government’s decision to allot over 45,267 acres of state land to the army for corporate farming.

DG ISPR, Major General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, while responding to a question about Army’s bid to lease the said state land in a press conference on April 25, said that both developing and developed countries had used their armies in many ways to improve agriculture sector, but added that the final decision regarding what role the military can play in making the lands more cultivable was that of the provincial and federal government to take.