New Delhi, June 22: A farmers' agitation in Maharashtra has sucked the Indian Navy into a dispute over land acquisition that has turned violent this month, leaving the military arm in rare confrontation with civilians.
Farmers in Kalyan have since June 1 blocked sections of the Thane-Badlapur highway, tonsuring their heads in protest against plans to build a new airport on land that they claim as theirs but that the navy insists it owns.
Today, protesters burnt vehicles along the highway, and clashed with police trying to douse the agitation that till now had witnessed only intermittent violence. At least four protesters and 10 police officers were injured.
The agitation is the latest in a series of farmer protests that have spread across the country - from Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana. But the protests in Kalyan have pitched the Indian Navy into a rare clash of interests over claims by local farmers.
The navy is dubbing the protesters encroachers.
"The land was acquired by the ministry of defence," commander Rahul Sinha, the chief public relations officer (defence) in Mumbai, said. "The navy is constructing a peripheral boundary wall to protect and safeguard defence land from further encroachment."
The land in Kalyan's Nevali, 40km from Mumbai, hosts an abandoned World War II airbase, which the government wants to turn into the state's third international airport. The construction of a boundary wall sparked the protests, officials said, with some farmers claiming that they had tilled the land for decades.
The navy has run into controversies over land in recent years.
Residents of Ramanthali in Kerala's Kannur district protested earlier this year after the Indian Naval Academy built a sewage treatment plant. Their fear: the plant may contaminate their drinking water.
In 2014, the Indian Navy faced criticism in Goa for refusing to part with a patch of its land for the expansion of the civilian Dabolim airport.
But the Kalyan protests threaten to drag the Indian Navy into the midst of a broader national agitation.
Today, the navy asserted that the defence estate officer in Mumbai had the land records proving its ownership of the property in Nevali claimed by farmers.
The Maharashtra government too has backed the navy's assertion. The state government, Sinha said, "is providing police protection" and support from state, district and revenue authorities.
