Introduction

There are three kinds of military agrarian land acquisitions in the Punjab: individual border-land allocations, other individual welfare-land allocations, and collective land allocations such as for a stud farm. As documented in the previous chapter, the practice of allotting land to military personnel in irrigated districts of Punjab has a long history. With the inception of the new state, this practice continued, with General Ayub Khan's regime initiating allotment schemes on the eastern border with India. This process intensified with each new military regime and with General Musharraf they reached a new high in the form of nonborder allocations in districts in the Siraiki belt such as Bahawalpur, Layyah and Bhakkar. Even collective land allocations are often reduced to individual allocations, as indicated in chapters 4 and 5. Unless otherwise specified, the two broad categories we work with in this, and the next two, chapters are border and nonborder allocations. Allocations vary positively across the military hierarchy by rank.

The military's agrarian interventions are in both the Punjab and Sindh provinces. We focused on the Punjab because it is here that a distinct state– society consensus has been forged (see chapter 2). In the rest of this chapter, we explain our evolving research design and method, and outline the institutional issues pertinent to our research including the conceptualization of the border allotment scheme, the allocation process, legal issues including those pertaining to civil-military conflict and border Rangers and police jurisdiction issues. We follow with information on the scope of the nonborder allocations and end with a preview of the field research based chapters that follow.

An Evolving Research Design and Method

We originally intended to focus only on the border allocation scheme and to select a stratified random sample. The border allotments are made in a five-mile belt all along the Indian–Pakistan border. In Punjab, this starts from Sialkot district in the north and ends with Rahim Yar Khan district to the south. The interim districts are Narowal, Sheikhupura, Lahore, Kasur, Okara, Bahawalnagar and Bahawalpur. Not all land in this five-mile belt has been allocated and some of the land originally owned in this belt is under civilian ownership.