Omar govt orders inquiry into demolition drive in Jammu to free forest land of illegal occupation

SRINAGAR/JAMMU: The Omar Abdullah govt Wednesday constituted a two-member committee to investigate the demolitions carried out in Jammu’s Sidhra area a day earlier to free forest land of alleged encroachments.

According to an order issued by the tribal affairs department, the committee will examine if there was any violation of Forest Rights Act-2006 in the demolition of houses of tribal Gujjar families in Raika Bandi (Sidhra) belt of the Mahamaya forest area on Jammu’s outskirts. The inquiry panel has been asked to submit its report within seven days.

The order was issued after widespread criticism and protests over the anti-encroachment drive, carried out jointly by teams of forest and revenue departments under police protection, with political parties in Kashmir and the Gujjar-Bakarwal community alleging violation of tribal rights.

The exercise has once again put the NC govt at loggerheads with the LG administration. J&K’s forest and tribal affairs minister Javed Ahmad Rana, who visited the area after the drive on Tuesday, said he was “deeply shocked and outraged by the clandestine, unilateral demolition of homes in Sidhra”.

“Decades of heritage of our innocent Gujjar-Bakarwal families has been reduced to rubble without taking the elected, popular govt or my ministry into confidence. This is not a mere regulatory drive; it is a targeted, cruel eviction explicitly aimed at terrorising and marginalising our nomadic tribal communities who have protected these lands for over half a century,” Rana said in a post on X. “We will not stand by as silent spectators to this selective harassment and high-handedness... Our people deserve justice, not displacement,” he added.

BJP supported the drive, saying state and forest land was being illegally occupied by encroachers, while Peoples Conference chief Sajad Gani Lone dismissed the inquiry as “mere eyewash.”

Officials Tuesday said 20-30 structures, mostly kachcha constructions, were razed during the exercise that went on for three-four hours amid resistance from the alleged encroachers. Nearly 60 kanals (7.5 acres) of land were retrieved during the operation, they said.

The evicted families staged a protest and alleged that no prior notice was served before razing the houses.

On May 13, hundreds of protesters led by BJP MLA Vikram Randhawa --- carrying placards that read ‘save Jammu forests’ and ‘stop grabbing Jammu lands’ --- took out a rally on Sidhra road and later staged a sit-in demanding immediate removal of illegal occupants. The protesters raised slogans against “outsider land-grabbers”, and warned of a major agitation if immediate action was not taken to stop encroachment of govt lands.

The Omar govt had earlier acknowledged that vast tracts of land had been encroached across Jammu and Kashmir. In reply to a question by BJP MLA Shakti Raj Parihar during the assembly session in March, govt had informed that over 17,22,995 kanals of state land and over 3,77,000 kanals of forest land remained under illegal occupation across the UT.