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These eye-popping figures reverberate in the deepest, darkest trellises of Kashmir’s grapevine, with regard to what has come to be known as the ‘Roshni scam’.
Some think the scam only concerns forest land in the far corners of the erstwhile state. But businessmen in Kashmir say the scheme was used even in urban centres, sometimes to take freehold possession of what was once a government-owned place taken on rent.
In a legally formalised version of the ‘regularisation’ schemes that are so common for slums in cities across the country, Jammu and Kashmir had a law that allowed a settler to get legal possession by paying a fraction of what the land was worth.
There were scams within a scam. For instance, the Rs 35 lakh for the Bund-adjacent three kanals, mentioned at the beginning of this article, was paid into a government account – with a receipt – but the government has no record of the allotment.
There were also instances of some with influence among the powers-that-were marking out desirable ‘virgin’ property on a map, pre-selling it in parcels, and then paying a fraction of that income for paperwork to claim that land.
Since the Centre took direct control of Jammu and Kashmir in June 2018, there’s been intermittent talk of setting things right—cases, investigations and much publicised naming-and-shaming, focusing on newly rehashed ‘anti-national’ politicians.
‘Phusss!’, as Shakespeare wouldn’t have said. For, the latest twist in the ‘Roshni land scam’ saga is that the government has requested the high court to reconsider its order for a CBI inquiry into the scam.
Everyone’s asking: why the clumsy about-turn?
Well, one delicious (and no doubt significant) irony is that the reversal has come bang in the middle of an amazingly energetic round of panchayat, municipal, and district elections.
The BJP has put a lot of effort into these polls, but there are signs that it might be disappointed—not only in the Valley, and the Chenab basin, but also perhaps in some Hindu-dominated portions of the Jammu region.
It turns out that the communal undercurrent behind that sham ‘shame-shame’ was a bit of a mirage. The plain fact is that the largest category of ‘Roshni’ beneficiaries are middle class Hindu families settled in Jammu.
Of the 158,000 kanals of land that are reported to have been regularised in the Jammu Division, 44,000 kanals are in Jammu district alone. And the city has spread across much of the district—and beyond.
The city has mushroomed from a sleepy little town into a jam-packed sprawl over the past quarter-century. Families have migrated to it from distant corners of the erstwhile state, most often from Hindu-dominated districts relatively closer to the city.
It is these latter that were in the angry cross-hairs of some of those who went to court. For years now, many in Jammu have resented the mansions in Jammu’s Bathindi suburb, many of which are owned by Muslims, including Kashmiri politicians such as Farooq Abdullah.
But, of the 44,000 kanals regularised in Jammu district, less than 1,200 (150 acres) are listed as now owned by Muslims.
Nor did the angry resentful realise that beneficiaries elsewhere included BJP leaders.
One BJP leader’s name has so far figured on the name-and-shame lists—ironically, a promising young leader with a fine reputation—but Jammu’s buzzing grapevine suggests that other names are still under wraps.
Certainly, there are FIRs for land grabbing against two former BJP ministers, and a land-related case in the high court against the senior-most of them, lawyer-activist Sheikh Shakeel points out.
Another major cause for the cloddish about-turn is potentially the most crucial: the petty bureaucrat. Those who focused on that communally charged mirage tend to forget the power of that extremely potent Mughal invention, the tehsildar.
Whoever might have gained from a myriad scams, the paperwork for the property deeds would have been processed and signed by those ground-level karta-dhartas, the tehsildars of the erstwhile state.
As one rather senior wag in the government put it, there would have been a long line of tehsildars outside the CBI’s front door if the court-ordered investigations went forward. Hundreds of them, current and retired, would have had to be questioned about files relating to the past three decades.
So, many glass houses are vulnerable to the petty bureaucrats who actually shuffle files.
Lining up those tehsildars at the CBI could have brought down many more houses of cards than all those scammed mansions.
(David Devadas is the author of ‘The Story of Kashmir’ and ‘The Generation of Rage’ in Kashmir (OUP). He tweets @david_devadas. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the authors’ own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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Published: 11 Dec 2020,10:08 PM IST