The Jammu & Kashmir administration on Tuesday made public a voluminous list of beneficiaries of a two-decade-old law under which they allegedly gained proprietary rights to land they had illegally occupied, as well as encroachers on vast swathes of state land, naming former chief minister and Lok Sabha member Farooq Abdullah among the latter.
A total of 1787 beneficiaries including nine encroachers of state land from Jammu district alone have so far been put up on the government website http://divcomjammu.gov.in/# in line with a high court directive , showing Farooq Abdullah and his son Omar Abdullah as having encroached on seven kanals and seven marlas of state land (once forest land), in Bahu tehsil, village Sunjwan, in Jammu city.The names of people, including other politicians, businessmen and civil servants figured on the lists. They included former People’s Democratic Party (PDP) minister Haseeb Drabu and family, prominent hotelier Mushtaq Chaya, former bureaucrat Mohammad Shafi Pandit and his wife Nighat Pandit, and former legislator Satpal Lakhotra.
Abdullah, 83, hit back with allegations of political vendetta ahead of elections to district development councils in Jammu & Kashmir. In a clear reference to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre, the National Conference (NC) chief said: “Since elections are around the corner, I think they will dig the graves of others.”
“Kamal hai in logon ka (The wonder of these people). They want us to give in, but why should we?. Don’t people in Sunjwan have a right to live . Isn’t the army brigade in Sunjwan on forest land?. It is nothing but purely political vendetta,” he said.Abdullah said he had not purchased either the land in Jammu or house in Srinagar under the Jammu & Kashmir State Lands (Vesting of Ownership to the Occupants), popularly known as the Roshni Act, which the high court has ruled was unconstitutional and unsustainable.He said: “It is only propaganda against us. I just can’t understand what they want to do? Sunjwan colony was not raised by me.. it was raised long back. Don’t we have the right to live?”
