Non - General view on
land allocation, by Ejaz Haider
0 COMMENJAN 25
2017
Islamabad must revisit and revise its current policy on land allocations
to senior military officials.
In recent days,
there has been much debate about the 90 acres of prime real estate allocated to
former Pakistan Army chief General (retd.) Raheel Sharif. The gist of the issue
is already known:
1. Roughly half of the 90 acres, we are told, he got as a four-star
general, the rest as Army chief.
2. We are also told that this is not unprecedented, i.e., every Army chief
is entitled to get this post-retirement perk. [NB: this means that if we were
to have regular, 3-year retirements of Army chiefs, which some of us have
always advocated, we would be worse off in acreage terms.]
3. On the basis of the calculation for land, one can safely assume that all
chairmen joint chiefs of staff would also get nearly 45 acres as four-stars and
possibly the same acreage—or more—for holding the CJCS office, technically the
senior-most.
4. The provincial government(s) have no say in gifting such lands. There’s
a Border Area Committee that earmarks these large swathes in collaboration with
General Headquarters and the provincial revenue departments simply
record/register the allocation(s). [NB: it should be evident that the procedure
is non-transparent and cannot be rationalized or debated since it is embedded
in some arcane, undemocratic rule(s) that, presumably (?), cannot be legally
challenged.]
5. Under the circumstances, and since the allocation is legal, everyone
must shut up.
That sounds,
technically, right. If there’s a rule, or perhaps a law, you must suck it up
even if it sucks. The problem is, many states have had bad laws and customs and
bad laws have a bad tendency of creating anomalies and distortions. In other
words, bad laws need to go. The only way to overturn them is to debate them and
challenge them on certain rational principles and to strive to create
transparent procedures and equitable norms.
But, wait, there’s
another slight problem here: as the rule goes, a former lieutenant general and
Corps Commander tells me, “Every officer is authorized land if he meets the
criteria.
The maximum allocation now is 30 acres. Maybe the chief gets a little
extra. However, once allotted land, you cannot under any circumstances get
additional allotment or a fresh allotment. We all got our quota as lieutenants
generals. Thirty acres. You cannot claim any more…nor can you surrender the
allotted land and get fresh authorization. No chief has got any such allocation.”
This makes a
logical case against land allocation for a rank and then additional allocation
for the office. Going by the logic being presented in the case of Gen. Sharif,
all general officers should get land allotted for the rank as well as the office
they held. That, obviously, is not the case.
But let’s consider
where it all began: like much else, with the British Raj.
Two factors
contributed to it: creating a class supportive of the Raj, and canal-digging
that resulted in colonies and verdant swaths of land which, earlier, lay fallow
and, mostly, barren. The British needed more and more soldiers and officers for
the British Indian Army and gifting land to people who served the Raj loyally
was a good incentive. This also included families that were politically
influential and could ensure political stability for the Raj.
With canals came
more agricultural land to gift, and the policy became established practice. It
also helped improve the socioeconomic status of the soldiers and made military
service under the Raj a financially and socially viable option.
Unfortunately, the
practice of land-gifts didn’t stop with the British leaving these shores.
What’s worse is that the undemocratic arbitrariness that attended such gifts
also continued. According to Dr. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a political scientist who
has written extensively on civil-military relations and the Pakistan Army:
“Some of Pakistan’s national dailies carried a news item … that the Punjab
Board of Revenue informed the Lahore High Court that 62 senior and 56 junior
Army officers were allotted agricultural lands in Cholistan and other
district[s] of the Punjab under various schemes in 1981, 1982, 1994, 1999 and
2000. These allotments were made under instructions of the Army Headquarters
and the details of these allotments could be made public only by the Army
Headquarters.”
Rizvi goes on to
say that “No detailed data is available on such allotments since the
establishment of Pakistan because the military authorities are not willing to
release the names of the beneficiaries of this policy and the civilian
governments (when in power) do not want to alienate the military by making
detailed data available to public. Therefore, it is not surprising that the
Punjab Board of Revenue did not provide the list of officers who were allotted
agricultural land in Cholistan and other districts of the Punjab in the
specified years.”
One of the areas,
post-1947, for settling ex-service personnel was Thal. Later, other schemes
were developed near the barrages in Sindh and Punjab. Land was also allocated
in Attock, Jhelum, Kohat, Rawalpindi and Hazara. Most of this land was
developed with the help of the Army and included smaller tracts. Lands were
also given for gallantry, though increasingly the Army has resorted to the
practice of cash rewards.
In some ways,
resettling and rehabilitating soldiers and mid-ranking officers is not a bad
policy. Unlike government service in the civilian sectors, the Army doesn’t
have 60 years age as superannuation. Most officers and soldiers retire or go on
discharge while they are relatively young, mostly in early- to mid- to
late-forties. But the policy needs to be rationalized to ensure that land
allocations for such schemes consider the sensitivities and economic wellbeing
of the local people and are not recklessly extravagant.
Also, the practice
increasingly leans heavily in favor of senior ranks, especially general
officers. This has not only served to make the hierarchy top-heavy, but also
the size of tracts allocated go far beyond the requirements of appreciating
meritorious service and rehabilitation. A case can also be made that such
economic rehabilitation policies should be more need-based than rank-focused.
For now, it’s more about the latter than the former.
A society must
honor its brave men. Equally, it must have legal-normative and transparent
standards for how that is done. That is a function of constructive social and
political debates in parliament and outside it.
Most importantly,
as Rizvi writes: “Land allotments to military personnel are not viewed in
Pakistani society as an isolated development. These represent a broader
phenomenon of the military gradually overwhelming most sectors of state and
society.”
That feeling must
go and for that the policy needs to be revisited and rationalized.
Postscript: for
further reading, see, Imran Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism,
1885-1947 (Princeton University Press, 1988); Major-General Fazal
Muqeem (retd.), The Story of the Pakistan Army (Oxford
University Press, 1963); Hasan Askari Rizvi, Military, State and
Society in Pakistan (St Martin’s Press, New York, 2000).
Haider is editor of
national-security affairs at Capital TV. He was a Ford Scholar at the Program
in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings
Institution, Washington, D.C. He tweets @ejazhaider
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