'Where do we go', Budgam residents protest against state land eviction drives

February 1, 2023 by News Desk

Scores of local residents on Wednesday staged a protest in the Magam area of central Kashmir’s Budgam District against the ongoing eviction drives across Jammu Kashmir.

Eyewitnesses told The Kashmiriyat that locals including women and a large number of youth holding various placards ‘stand up for your rights, ‘we want justice’, ‘It is time to wake up’, raised slogans demanding an immediate rollback of the order calling for a removal of people from “state land.”

They said that several shopkeepers have received eviction notices from the admin informing that their shops were encroachments upon state land.

Protestors said that Kashmiris are being deprived of their rights and their lands as well. “This is not a question of the present generations now, this is about the coming generations of Kashmir. What Kashmir do we leave behind for them,” a protestor said.

They said that if the administration was taking their land, the admin should first tell is where shall we go?

“If the amdin claims that the land belongs to the state and they want to use it for public works. Let them use the land which is unoccupied. Not more than 20 per cent of what they call the state land is occupied by locals,” they said.

When the unoccupied 80 percent of the state land is used for public purposes, then they should evict farm lands, shops, houses of local residents, they demanded.

They appealed to the admin to stop the ongoing eviction drives.

Pertinently, the move of the Jammu Kashmir administration to remove “encroachers” from state land has met with protests in Jammu Kashmir.

The eviction order over state land includes the beneficiaries of Jammu Kashmir’s state land law, Roshni Act. The act was declared a scam by the court in 2020.

A total of 6,04,602 kanal of State land in Jammu and 33,392 kanal in the Kashmir province, was regularised and transferred to people under Roshni the Act.