Numbers don’t lie. And the BJP has realised it the hard way in Kashmir. Two months after the Jammu and Kashmir High Court struck down a decades-old law enacted for transfering ownership rights of land, the Kashmir administration has rushed to the same court seeking a review of the October 9 order.
The BJP had dubbed the JK State Land (Vesting of Ownership to the Occupants) Act, 2001—commonly known as the Roshni Act—as land jihad and ran a high-pitch campaign against political opponents who allegedly grabbed large tracts of land under the legislation.
A petition filed by special secretary in the revenue department has sought modification of the judgment, saying that it would hurt a large number of common people, including landless cultivators and individuals residing in dwellings on small plots. The petition said there was a need to distinguish between the common people and “wealthy land grabbers” among the beneficiaries, and favoured that landless labourers or those with one house in personal use be allowed to keep the allotted land. The court had scrapped all transfers made under the now-defunct law. Since the funds raised from the sale of land was meant to be used for the power sector, the law came to be associated with roshni or light.
According to the lawyers associated with the case, transfer of ownership rights was approved for 33,345 kanals (one kanal equals 0.8 acre) in the Valley as against 3.14 lakh kanals in Jammu. The approval committee fixed the total price of these land at Rs 318 crore, but only Rs 76 crore was deposited. In Kashmir, the beneficiaries paid Rs 54 crore while in Jammu, beneficiaries paid Rs 22.40 crore.
“I consider Roshni a scam only because some officials made a lot of money. There is a scam in the implementation of the law. The land which was commercial was shown residential, which was residential was shown as agriculture. But to call it land jihad is a lie and propaganda and the government and the BJP have realised it once figures started coming out,” says Shakeel. He accuses the government of selectively leaking the names of Muslim politicians, including NCP leader Farooq Abdullah, to project as if only one community benefited from the law.
Under the law enacted in 2001, people who were occupying state land up to 1990 had to pay about Rs 20 lakh per kanal land to get ownership rights. In May 2005, then chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad brought amendments to the law and extended the cut-off date to 2004. It also came up with several clauses making occupants of state land, who had raised residential and commercial buildings, to pay 10 to 15 per cent of the total of actual price to get ownership rights. For agriculture land, illegal occupants were asked to pay Rs 100 per kanal.
Senior journalist Ahmed Ali Fayaz, who was in the advisory committee of the Comptroller and Auditor General in 2014, says political and bureaucratic elites and their affiliates in Srinagar and Jammu cities succeeded in transferring land under the law in their names. “The high court has done well to nullify these transfer deeds but I wish the court will allow farmers to retain their land,” he says.
By Naseer Ganai in Srinagar
