Srinagar: The Jammu and Kashmir administration is taking over land nearly equalling the size of Hong Kong under the garb of removing illegal encroachments since last January, after the erstwhile state’s special status was revoked in 2019, a report by a global rights advocacy group has said.
In a 56-page report published on its website on Wednesday (October 2), International Federation for Human Rights (Fédération internationale pour les droits humains or FIDH), a French group which works in 116 countries across the globe, has said that the “drastic” legal and policy changes post 2019 have had a “disastrous impact on the human rights of Kashmiris, particularly with regard to land and related human rights issues.”
“The changes in Kashmir’s land laws have enabled the Indian authorities to forcibly evict and dispossess thousands of Kashmiris from their homes, without due process, and in violation of India’s international human rights obligations,” the report has said, calling for a “full, independent and transparent” investigation into the allegations of unlawful land seizures and compensation for those whose rights were violated in Jammu and Kashmir.
New laws and rules promulgated by the Centre after 2019 have allowed any Indian citizen to become permanent resident of Jammu and Kashmir which grants them the right to purchase land in the region, apply for jobs, vote in elections and others.
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Referring to the United Nations guidelines, the FIDH said that by “removing protections and rights to land that existed in Jammu and Kashmir prior to August 2019,” the Bhartiya Janta Party-led (BJP-led) Union government has “implemented policies… that risk causing significant alterations to Jammu and Kashmir’s socio-demographic composition, with severe ramification for socio-economic and political rights of Kashmiris.”
“Changes made to land laws after August 2019 (which)… allow for land acquisition by any Indian citizen… has intensified fear of demographic changes, with many Kashmiris perceiving them as acts of ‘demographic aggression’ that threaten the identity of Muslim-majority Jammu & Kashmir,” the report said.
‘Land takeover’
In January last year, the J&K administration launched an “anti-encroachment” drive to free about 2.24 million kanals of “illegally encroached” land in the Union Territory. The FIDH report has said that the drive against “encroached land,” “roughly the size of Hong Kong,” has left the residents of J&K terrified as they fear losing their land and property.
The report underlined that the land takeover, which has adversely affected the tribal Gujjar and Bakkerwal communities, was possible after a series of new rules were extended by the Union government to the J&K administration post 2019 and the old land laws, which were in force when Jammu and Kashmir was a state, were amended or scrapped entirely.
“Ten lakh kanals (250,000 acres, or approximately 1,011.7 sq km) of land … including shamilat (village common land) and kahcharai (common grazing land)” were taken over by the administration within a month after the eviction drive was launched in January 2023, the report said, adding that there are raging concerns that the move was “part of the Indian government’s ethno-nationalist project of targeting Muslim households, dispossessing locals of land, and engineering a demographic change.”
The rights advocacy group has noted that most of the land seized by the administration was not allocated, even as some of it was “already being developed for infrastructure projects.”
“Many of these projects have significant human rights and environmental impacts,” the report said.
The report added, “The government did not release official data on the number of structures demolished or seized, the number of trees the revenue authorities felled, or crops that were destroyed during the campaign. Many affected residents reported the loss of their shops and homes without prior notification from the authorities.”
Questioning the proposal for the development of J&K’s summer capital which has sought 19,700 acres of land in Srinagar metropolitan region to “transform the urban landscape of Srinagar” and accommodate “an expected three million people by 2035,” the report has noted that the “plan to more than double the population of Srinagar in a decade has given rise to significant concerns” that “large numbers of new residents” were going to be settled in the city.
At present, Srinagar has a population of about two million and the master plan envisages nearly 4.5 million residents in the city by 2035. According to a United Nations report, the population of New Delhi was expected to grow from the present 33.81 million to 43.3 million by 2035, a jump of approximately 30% only.
The French group, which was set up in 1922, has criticised the proposal of J&K administration to set up a “Special Investment Corridor” in Srinagar for “creating over a million new jobs”. It said that the corridor “has raised concerns among Kashmiris about its potential to attract non-locals.”
‘Changes in political makeup’
The FIDH report has also noted that the changes in the permanent residence rules, land laws and lease agreements with the promulgation of J&K Reorganisation Act in 2019 could alter the “political makeup” of Jammu and Kashmir.
“The new rules could cause ownership change in significant areas of Jammu & Kashmir, including all of Gulmarg and parts of Srinagar, Pahalgam, and Patnitop. Business owners, particularly in the tourist industry, face expropriation of their infrastructure and the closure of their businesses, as most tourist facilities were built on leased land,” the report said.
Quoting an official, the FIDH stated that 2.5 million new voters were added to J&K’s electoral list in 2022 which “has been accompanied by several moves by the Indian government to fundamentally alter the electoral boundaries and… dilute the Kashmiri Muslim vote,” while pointing to the 2022 Delimitation Commission that led to the creation of seven additional constituencies in J&K with six in Jammu, the Hindu-majority region, and only one in Kashmir.
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“This is despite the fact that Jammu’s population is 5.3 million, around 1.5 million less than Kashmir’s population of approximately 6.8 million, according to the last census in 2011. In the revised electoral map, the average population of a constituency of the Jammu & Kashmir Legislative Assembly would be 140,000 in Muslim-majority Kashmir and 120,000 in Jammu,” the report said.
The report has alleged that the new reservation rules rolled out in Jammu and Kashmir since 2019 under the garb of “empowering historically marginalised communities” are “aimed to unduly benefit predominantly Hindu, privileged, high-caste, and pro-BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) ethnic groups”, adding that the strategy was also aimed “to woo sections of marginalised Muslim communities in J&K… for electoral gains (by the BJP).”
The report has called on the government of India to restore the democratic rights of people of Jammu and Kashmir by repealing the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA), the Foreign Contributions (Regulation) Act and the colonial-era sedition law.
The advocacy group has said that the research for the report was conducted between January and August 2024 by conducting interviews with primary sources including academics, lawyers and journalists based in Kashmir while media reports and history books on Kashmir have been cited as secondary sources.
The Paris-based group has dedicated the report to human rights activist Khurram Pervez who was arrested by the National Investigations Agency on November 21, 2021 under the anti-terror law.
