The Okara military farms, about seven thousand hectares in the Lower Bari Doab colony, were established from 1913 to supply fodder and dairy to the British Indian Army and passed to the Pakistan Army in 1947.
The land is state land. The families farming it have done so for four generations as tenants paying a crop share.
In 2000 the administration attempted to change the arrangement from crop sharing to cash leases, which the tenants understood as a step toward losing occupancy rights. They refused.
The resulting movement, the Anjuman Mazarain Punjab, has run since 2000 with a slogan of ownership or death. It has faced sieges of villages, mass cases, deaths and long detentions, and it has held.
It is one of the largest and longest-running land movements in South Asia and it is a direct descendant of the same tenancy question that produced the muzara movement in PEPSU on the Indian side in the 1940s.
The two movements are fifty years and one border apart and neither knows about the other.
The military farms at Okara are tens of thousands of acres worked by tenant families for generations under a share cropping arrangement.
The attempt to convert the tenancies to cash leases from 2000 produced a long and violent dispute, with the tenants organised as a movement and prosecutions running for years.
It is one of the largest agrarian conflicts in Pakistan and it is over land that was allotted under the canal colony settlement a century earlier.