Instead of fighting terrorists, the Pakistan Army is busy carving out the country for its own benefit.
After usurping vast swathes of land in Punjab and South Waziristan, the Army is now set to take over 70,000 acres in Sindh. Such an unprecedented spree of land grab will reaffirm the army’s position as the biggest landlord in Pakistan and, as once a high court judge had remarked, the biggest land grabber.
Wayback in 2015, Sindh was forced to give away 9000 acres of land to the army reportedly to be redistributed to the families of martyrs and military personnel. The army’s demand was 35,521 acres. Now it gets double the amount because the interim government in Sindh is under its control.
It is not really known whether the army will get more land at a later date. The army plans to start different projects including fish farming through joint ventures. The Sindh government will transfer over 28,000 acres in Khairpur, 11,000 acres in Keti Bandar, 3,400 acres in Shah Bandar and 1,000 acres of land in Badin.
The cost of the land being transferred will be over several billion rupees.
In times of poverty and distress across the country, the land bank of the army has increased more than what noted analyst Ayesha Siddiqa had calculated in her classic work on Pakistan army’s business ventures as 12 percent of the total land in the country. In May 2002, the Lahore High Court, ruling on a petition against Defence Housing Authority, another real estate venture of the Fauji Foundation, had called the army as the biggest land grabber in the country.
The land grab project of the army now has a new cover–Special Investment Facilitation Council set up during the Shahbaz Sharif’s stop-gap government. The chief facilitator was Army chief, General Asim Munir. The army is all over the council with the army chief being a member of its apex committee and the army itself serving as the national coordinator for both the apex and executive committees. An army official will also be the director general of the body’s implementation committee. General Munir projected it as his intervention to set the economy in doldrum right. In effect, it was the army’s move to counter any legal hassles since the Lahore High Court had rejected the government’s move to hand over 40000 acres of land in Punjab to the army. The government found a devious way to do it anyway and one such mechanism was the council.
The council, set up in June 2023, has, however, failed to attract much foreign investment although the government had claimed that it expected 60 billion rupees of investment in the near future. A noted think tank, the Policy Research Institute of Market Economy (PRME), had recently cautioned that “the inclusion of the military in economic decision-making without the requisite expertise could not only destabilise the country but also lead to the failure of key initiatives.” The report said the council was likely to fail in achieving its objective target of investment.
The only success the army could point out has been to acquire thousands of acres of land which can, in the name of corporate farming, be used to parcel out to foreign investors. After Punjab and Waziristan, the army has turned its attention to Sindh for land under the name of joint venture projects. There is a great hurry to survey land available so that transfer could take place soon. The interim governments at the provincial level or federal level have not bothered to seek the opinion of the people of Sindh.
There is a brewing anger among the people against the military and the government over many issues, largely about the partiality of the Punjabi-dominated army and civilian governments against Sindh. In September this year, anger had erupted in Sindh after Pakistan Rangers, a para-military outfit headed by an Army General, killed four residents of Sakrand village. The parceling of land could trigger another round of animosity against the army and government in Sindh.