It's The Moneybags Who Lost In Amarnath

The agreement reached with the Shri Amarnath Yatra Sangharsh Samiti has been treated as a victory in Jammu, a defeat in Kashmir. It's neither. In reality it's a defeat, not for the people of Jammu or those of Kashmir, but for the economic interests that have been conniving with officials of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB) to secure land for setting up hotels, restaurants and other permanent 'modern' facilities along the yatra route. This defeat was crafted by Governor N.N. Vohra and his advisors.

Contrary to what a number of people have been saying in Kashmir, those behind that commercial attempt are not non-Kashmiris. Nor are they Hindu fanatics. Most if not all of them are hard-headed Kashmiri businessmen. What had brought the state to the brink of a fratricidal war and inflicted more than 50 deaths upon innocent Kashmiris is simply an attempt at old-fashioned land-grabbing. Jammu and Kashmir were at each other's throats, and talk even turned to a new partition, just because a bunch of unscrupulous people were trying to get richer.

SASB is not a corporation. It is a board of management whose purpose is to manage a specific, important activity of the state government. It cannot, and indeed does not, own any land. It does not even perform the major functions required by the yatra, such as the clearance and improvement of the track, the supply of essential utilities such as water, sanitation, fuel and healthcare. These are all the responsibility of the state government, as is the provision of security to the yatris.

The Farooq Abdullah government took the decision to create SASB after a freak blizzard killed over 130 pilgrims in 1996. Since 2001, SASB has been using vast tracts of land on both the routes to the cave, via Pahalgam and via Sonamarg, to set up tents, temporary shelters, langars, health and sanitation facilities for the duration of the yatra. These facilities were more than sufficient when the yatris were the sort who wouldn't expect luxury on a pilgrimage. But in the last decade, their character has changed radically. The majority are now urban traders, shopkeepers, small manufacturers and salaried professionals. A significant proportion are rich, for they come to Srinagar by air. They want creature comforts that the pilgrims of earlier days would have considered anathema—a gondola lift, a helicopter at Rs 20,000 a seat to take them on an instant pilgrimage, amusement facilities, and above all, comfortable hotels, not tents.

As a result, land along the pilgrim route has become a goldmine waiting to be exploited. Inevitably, SASB began to attract the attention of investors who were not content with setting up tented camps but had set their eyes on erecting hotels and gondola lifts. This was impossible if the land had to revert to the forest department every year after the two or three months of the yatra. Since 2004, therefore, SASB has been engaged in an unrelenting, but so far unsuccessful, attempt to get the land it has been using transferred to it permanently— to confer on whomsoever it chooses.

It made its first move on October 15, 2004, when it submitted a detailed project report for the construction of seven permanent camps on the two routes to the cave. On March 29, 2005, Sonali Kumar, the then secretary of the forest department, transferred 3,642 kanals (almost 200 hectares) to SASB for the above purpose. Kumar had apparently secured the approval of the then forest minister, Sofi Ghulam Mohiuddin. But to issue this order, she bypassed an elaborate and detailed set of procedures for such transfers laid down by law. In particular, she did not refer this very large transfer to the forest advisory committee and the ten government agencies that sit on it. Sonali Kumar is the wife of Arun Kumar, till recently the secretary of SASB.

On being informed of the transfer, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed immediately revoked the order and chargesheeted Sonali Kumar. A notification revoking the order was issued on May 20, 2005, but within days of Sayeed's order, and well before its notification, the powerful interests behind SASB had lodged a public interest litigation (PIL)—not in the Kashmir but the Jammu division of J&K High Court. There, a one-judge bench ruled that "since the board intends to upgrade the infrastructure across the track and at the different places, the state shall immediately permit the use of the land by the board". The lone judge was a former standing counsel of the SASB. Coincidence?

The state government appealed against the ruling of the high court, but in sharp contrast to the speed with which the PIL had been adjudicated, this appeal has still not been decided. The Mufti government's appeal did however frustrate SASB's attempt to obtain a clear title to the land. As a result, it failed to obtain the legal right to transfer it. The facilities on the two routes therefore remained 'temporary'.

However, SASB was not prepared to accept defeat. On May 25, 2005, the then governor of Jammu & Kashmir, Gen S.K. Sinha, sent a message to the state council of ministers asking it to reconsider the revocation of the March 29 transfer of land to SASB. Sinha did this as the chairman of SASB, but the power to send back a decision for reconsideration was one that he enjoyed under section 44C of the Jammu & Kashmir constitution. The cabinet decided that it would treat the request as coming from the board and not the governor and took no decision. This uneasy status quo was broken in 2008. A three-fold increase in yatris between 2004 and 2007 and a growing preference among them for the route via Sonamarg allowed SASB to revive its effort to acquire not only more land near Baltal—which was necessary—but also a transferable title to it, which was not. This time the government went strictly by the book. The 800 kanals it chose was forest land only in a historical sense, for it had been denuded of trees 60 years earlier during the first Kashmir war, when it housed refugees from Dras and Kargil. A corner of the plot was already being used by SASB. As a result, the ten departments represented on the forest advisory committee and the chief wildlife warden had no problem in clearing its transfer. It was only the pdp, mindful of the existing appeal before the high court, that resisted the transfer.

The proposal was brought before the cabinet during Sayeed's absence from India. Muzaffar Beg, the deputy chief minister and law minister, acquiesced with great reluctance, but only after securing an explicit caveat in the order that the land was to be transferred for only two months a year and could be used only to put up temporary facilities. This met the need of the pilgrims but not of the moneybags who were waiting to invest in the goldmine.

The degree of emphases used by the two sides in describing the order was, not surprisingly, markedly different. While the forest minister kept saying all through the first half of June that only 15 hectares had been transferred, SASB kept insisting through its public relations officer that 40 hectares had been transferred to it permanently.

The outcry that this was an attempt to change the demography of the state was not raised by the Hurriyat and not even, initially, by Geelani. It was raised cynically by the National Conference as a tool to use against the pdp in the coming election. Despite that, and the mounting unease in the Valley, nothing would have happened had not SASB secretary Arun Kumar, on June 17, imperiously rejected the state legislature's right to question the governor's decision to extend the period of the yatra and, in the same breath, announced that the transfer of land was permanent, not temporary.

Was Arun Kumar only being an arrogant bureaucrat or did he have another reason for making the announcement? In view of the sleight of hand he and his wife, Sonali Kumar, used to transfer 3,642 kanals permanently to SASB; the speed with which a PIL was filed against Sayeed's revocation of the transfer; the choice of the Jammu division of the high court for filing the PIL, and its 'coincidental' listing before a lone judge who had been a standing counsel for SASB; the subsequent 'disappearance' of files containing the chargesheet filed by the Mufti against Sonali Kumar; and the attempt by the outgoing governor to form an Amarnath Development Authority that would have the right to own and transfer land, it cannot be ruled out that Arun Kumar was fully aware of the possible consequences of his statement but made it nonetheless because he was desperate to reassure those who had business interests and had already made substantial 'investments' in SASB that the board really would have the authority to award inalienable titles to the land.

The agreement Vohra has hammered out with the Sangharsh Samiti has not only foiled these plans but also ensured that they will not be revived. It emphasises that the transfer of land is only for the period of the yatra, that only temporary structures can be put up, and that only state subjects of Jammu & Kashmir will be allowed to provide these facilities. Arun Kumar is gone, the chargesheet against his wife is being revived, and SASB is being restructured to contain only state subjects.

The real victors, therefore, are the people of Kashmir. Now that the Hurriyat and the coordinating committee find themselves at the head of a Valley-wide movement, the time has come for them to abjure agitation, fight the next election, and take the destiny of the state in their hands.