An army colonel was booked for unlawful assembly with armed and deadly weapons by Khed police in rural Pune. Along with the colonel, 30 to 40 army jawans were also booked after villagers groused that the army men destroyed crops and terrorised people of Gulani villages – 54 km away from Nashik, on June 22, reported the Times Of India.

Police said that scuffle was due to 65-acre farmland where the names of colonel family along with two other families were present on papers. Currently, a civil suit relating to the disputed land is pending in the Khed session court since 2013. An appeal regarding the dispute is also pending before the sub-divisional officer in Khed.

The police said that on June 22, the colonel who is posted in Hyderabad and is on leave brought up around 30-40 armed jawans from Hyderabad in four military vehicles and used a tractor to plough the disputed farmland destroying the sowed soybean crops. The women belonging from the opposite family filed the FIR and also mentioned that the colonel prevented them from accessing the land.

However, the colonel rebuffed the allegation charged against him and denied committing any such act. He also said that FIR was a conspiracy concocted by the opponent families to frame him and besmirch his image.

The colonel justifying the presence of a jawan unit in his village said that the unit was travelling from Hyderabad to the School of Artillery at Deolali camp near Nashik to attend firing drills by road. He said that the unit made a halt at Dehu Road ordnance depot near Pune to pick ammunition and stopped at his native village of Gulani for lunch.

He also said that the jawans accompanying him had no role as they did not commit any act or threaten the villagers.

Sandip Patil, the Pune rural superintendent of police, said, “All the jawans were in uniform and were armed when they reached the village in the military vehicles. They also accompanied the colonel and his family members to the disputed land. They stood guard around the land as the colonel’s family members ploughed it using a tractor.”

The police have booked a case under sections 143 (unlawful assembly), 144 (unlawful assembly with armed and deadly weapons), and 149 (being part of an unlawful assembly with common objectives) of the Indian Penal Code.

On June 14, the police intervened after the colonel’s father and brother had a spared over the land with two other families and their supporter. The colonel had told TOI that the land is the only ancestral property that he, his father and brother held for the last 50 years. The colonel alleged that the opposing families had forged the death certificate of his grandmother to buy the land at half the price. He also said that the families had threatened colonel’s father to hand over the land.

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