Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Jan 4: Residents of some 4,000 odd houses of a locality in Haldwani near Nainital in Uttarakhand will be anxiously waiting for some relief from the Supreme Court which has agreed to hear on Thursday a petition challenging the Uttarakhand High Court’s order for demolition of the structures encroaching on railways land.
Besides the thousands of residents, the area even has four government schools, 11 private schools, a bank, two overhead water tanks, 10 mosques, and four temples, besides shops, built over decades. One of the government schools, a girls’ school, dates back to 1952 as a junior high school before being upgraded over the years to become an inter college in 2005, a staff member of the institution said.
The disputed area is some 29 acres of land covering some two-kilometre strip of land near the Haldwani railway station — Gafoor Basti, Dholak Basti and Indira Nagar, in Banbhoolpura area. Nearly half of the families residing in the disputed land claim to have land lease from the local authorities.
For the local residents, the year 2023 began in a bad note with the morning newspapers carrying a notice issued by the North-Eastern Railways asking all “illegal encroachments” to evacuate in a week’s time. If not, the notice said, all encroachments would be demolished and the cost recovered from the encroachers. The district administration, following the court’s order of December 20 after a long litigation, also asked the people to take away their belongings by January 9.
Officials carried out an on-ground inspection while residents continued to hold candle marches, sits-ins and prayers to stop the eviction. A congregational prayer, ‘Ijtemai dua’, was performed by hundreds of them at a mosque in the locality. Imam of Masjid Umar, Maulana Mukim Qasmi, said all people collectively prayed for a solution. Some of the protesters were seen crying.
After activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan made a formal mention in the Supreme Court, a bench comprising Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justices SA Nazeer and PS Narasimha said it would be heard on Thursday. Mr. Bhushan submitted that the case — of more than 5,000 houses in Haldwani being demolished — is similar to the matter scheduled to be heard on Thursday. The apex court agreed to tag the matter and posted the matter for hearing on Thursday. Earlier, some Haldwani residents had moved the top court on the issue.
The Uttarakhand High Court on December 20 ordered the removal of encroachments from 29 acres of railway land in the town’s Banbhoolpura area after giving a one week advance notice to encroachers to vacate it. Thousands of residents of Banbhoolpura had protested the removal of encroachments, saying it would render them homeless and jeopardise the future of their school-going children. The move will affect a large number of women, children and the elderly.
The issue has also taken political overtones as majority of the residents in the encroached land were said to be Muslims while the BJP was in power in the state. Blaming the BJP government for action against the people in the area, activists and politicians have also joined the protests for “targeting Muslims.”
Senior Congress leader and former chief minister Harish Rawat held an hour-long ‘maun vrat’ (vow of silence) at his home in state capital Dehradun. “Uttarakhand is a spiritual state,” he said, “If 50,000 people including children, pregnant women, old men and women are forced to vacate their homes and come out on roads, then it would be a very sad sight.” The BJP chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has only said his government would respect the Supreme Court’s decision.
Police and the civic administration say the high court’s order as applicable for now has to be followed. “We’ve divided the area into zones for easy implementation,” regional police chief Nilesh A Bharne said. Residents have been questioning the timing and intent of the railways. Many of the residents showed the “approved map” for their homes. Others asked how they had been given sewerage connections by the government, which had also built schools on the land, if the constructions on the land were all illegal.
District Magistrate Dheeraj S Garbyal, however, said, “People stay here on railway land. They have to be removed. Our preparations are going on for this. We have demanded force. We’ll remove them soon.”
The matter reached court in 2013, when a petition was originally about illegal sand mining in a river near the area. The Government Girls’ Inter College (GGIC), which also faces the prospect of demolition has over 1,000 students on its roll. The administration has acknowledged that over 2,000 students will be affected. The plan is to shift them into prefabricated structures in another area nearby for now.
Asked about how such large-scale construction was permitted on its land, divisional railway official Vivek Gupta said, “This (encroachment along railway lines) is a nationwide phenomenon. We regret this.”