Ex­tra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tions cre­ated by sin­is­ter poli­cies and pro­pos­als must be met with sane re­sponses and in­tel­li­gent re­but­tals. The far­fetched pro­posal of Ma­haraja Amarinder Singh to loot the lands of the poor peas­antry of Pun­jab and give it to rich land­lords, busi­ness­men, nou­veau-riche en­tre­pre­neurs is fraught with the dan­ger of de­stroy­ing the land­scape and na­ture of Pun­jab. Ace jour­nal­ist and TV com­men­ta­tor S P Singh traces the his­tory of the Land Ac­qui­si­tion Act over the decades, thrashes out the con­cerns of the com­mon man and rub­bishes to­tally the sin­is­ter pro­posal of the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment in the In­dian state of Pun­jab to forcibly ac­quire Vil­lage com­mons -Sham­lat land and dis­trib­ute it vir­tu­ally for peanuts in the name of Pun­jab Rural In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. Ex­tra­or­di­nary is­sues re­quire vastly ex­tra­or­di­nary and ex­ten­sive re­port­ing. Your deep in­dul­gence is so­licited to sit through and di­gest this long piece of in­ves­tiga­tive re­port­ing which will leave you armed with enough ma­te­r­ial to stand up for the rights of the poor and stand up to the way­ward at­ti­tude and feu­dal func­tion­ing of the rul­ing Ma­hara­jah of Pa­tiala, er..Pun­jab.

ONE FINE EVENING IN 2003, A GROUP OF VIL­LAGERS,  in a sleepy vil­lage in Pun­jab’s Pa­tiala got into a tiff with a fel­low vil­lager who was try­ing to build a house on the sham­lat land, the com­mon land of the vil­lage. It could have been set­tled through dis­cus­sions un­der a banyan tree or per­haps a scuf­fle near the street cor­ner, but in­stead, it ended up im­pact­ing all the vil­lages in all the dis­tricts of all the states in all of In­dia.

Now, the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment wants to ef­fec­tively up­turn an apex court judge­ment, wis­dom, im­pact and rea­son­ing, but since the is­sue is not as emo­tive as the SYL Canal-blocker Ter­mi­na­tion of Agree­ments Act 2004, there­fore, it has not made too many waves in the me­dia.

The Pun­jab gov­ern­ment is now guilty of open­ing the doors of the col­lec­tive wealth of Pun­jab for loot by the land sharks, but more than that, its planned move will for­ever change what our vil­lages have been for cen­turies. Pun­jab will never be the same again if the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment is al­lowed to get away with its ne­far­i­ous de­sign. In fact, there will be no vil­lages left.

Lest you think we are over­stat­ing our case, let me as­sure you that we could, in fact, be guilty of un­der­stat­ing the threat. Also, the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment is hell-bent on blow­ing to smithereens the en­tire logic built up by Rahul Gandhi against the Land Ac­qui­si­tion Act that the Modi gov­ern­ment wanted to push through but could­n’t.

But the story started way back on that evening in 2003 in vil­lage Ro­har Ja­gir in Pa­tiala when Jag­pal Singh was try­ing to ex­tend his house on a piece of Sham­lat land, or Vil­lage Com­mons.

Jag­pal Singh’s ar­gu­ment was that other peo­ple of the vil­lage had also ex­tended their houses on the same com­mon land, but the group of vil­lagers op­pos­ing him ar­gued that the land was meant for the use of the col­lec­tive.

The Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment is hell-bent on blow­ing to smithereens the en­tire logic built up by Rahul Gandhi against the Land Ac­qui­si­tion Act that the Modi gov­ern­ment wanted to push through but could­n’t.

The gram pan­chayat of Ro­har Ja­gir filed an ap­pli­ca­tion un­der Sec­tion 7 of the Pun­jab Vil­lage Com­mon Lands (Reg­u­la­tion) Act, 1961, to evict the tres­passers, in­clud­ing Jag­pal Singh. It also went to the po­lice and filed an FIR but the unau­tho­rised oc­cu­pants had the back­ing of of­fi­cials and pan­chayat mem­bers. The Pa­tiala dis­trict col­lec­tor, in­stead of telling Jag­pal Singh and his fel­low en­croach­ers to pack up and leave, held in his Sep­tem­ber 13, 2005 or­der, that do­ing so would­n’t be in the pub­lic in­ter­est since they have al­ready spent a lot of money on con­struct­ing their houses. He sim­ply asked the gram pan­chayat that all it can do was to re­cover the cost of the land from the tres­passers.

This was clearly a case of col­lu­sion in reg­u­lar­is­ing il­le­gal­ity on the ground that en­croach­ers had spent huge money on con­struct­ing houses on the usurped com­mon land of the vil­lage.

The Pun­jab gov­ern­ment is now guilty of open­ing the doors of the col­lec­tive wealth of Pun­jab for loot by the land sharks, but more than that, its planned move will for­ever change what our vil­lages have been for cen­turies. Pun­jab will never be the same again if the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment is al­lowed to get away with its ne­far­i­ous de­sign. In fact, there will be no vil­lages left.

The ag­grieved res­i­dents ap­pealed to the De­vel­op­ment Com­mis­sioner who rightly ruled that reg­u­lar­is­ing such il­le­gal en­croach­ment was not in the pan­chay­at’s in­ter­est. In fact, in his De­cem­ber 12, 2007 or­der, he held that the Gram Pan­chayat had col­luded with the en­croach­ers since it nei­ther op­posed nor filed an ap­peal against Col­lec­tor’s or­der that di­rected the Gram Pan­chayat to trans­fer the prop­erty to il­le­gal oc­cu­pants.

The tres­passers went to the high court, which threw out the plea on Feb­ru­ary 10, 2010. A di­vi­sion bench also took the same view. The tres­passers then ap­pealed to the Supreme Court.

ਇਸ ਲੇਖ ਨੂੰ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਪੜੋ

ਪੰਜਾਬ ਉੱਤੇ ਮੰਡਰਾ ਰਹੀ ਹੈ ਇਹ ਕਾਨੂੰਨੀ ਤਲਵਾਰ – ਕੀ ਬਚੇਗਾ ਪੰਜਾਬ?

The two sides to the dis­pute, as well the gov­ern­ment of Pun­jab, thought the top court might de­cide one way or the other. Not in their dreams could they have imag­ined that the judge­ment would im­pact all of In­dia. Af­ter all, it was just a tiff be­tween Jag­pal Singh and his fel­low vil­lagers in that sleepy Ro­har Ja­gir vil­lage, just half an hour drive away from Moti Bagh Palace res­i­dence of the scion of Pa­tiala Royale. Be­fore this, Ro­har Ja­gir’s whose great claim to fame was only that the lo­cal bus stopped there. Now, they en­sured the buck went all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In its ver­dict on Jan­u­ary 28, 2011, the Supreme Court said the ap­pel­lants were, in­deed, “tres­passers,” that they had in­deed il­le­gally en­croached on the gram pan­chayat land by us­ing mus­cle power/​money power, that the of­fi­cials had col­luded with the en­croach­ers, and that even the gram pan­chayat was guilty of col­lu­sion.

It or­dered that the land must be re­turned to the gram pan­chayat. “We can­not al­low the com­mon in­ter­est of the vil­lagers to suf­fer merely be­cause the unau­tho­rised oc­cu­pa­tion has sub­sisted for many years,” the SC judg­ment said.

So far, so good. And then came the bomb­shell. The Supreme Court was told that the unau­tho­rised pos­ses­sion of land by the likes of Jag­pal Singh in that vil­lage was reg­u­larised by the Pun­jab gov­ern­ment vide a let­ter dated 26.9.2007.  The top court also took note of the fact that sham­lat/com­mon land in vil­lages across In­dia has been fac­ing en­croach­ments. It also no­ticed that a lot of state gov­ern­ments have been legally au­tho­ris­ing such il­le­gal ac­tions.

Con­se­quently, the Supreme Court said the Pun­jab gov­ern­men­t’s let­ter reg­u­lar­is­ing the il­le­gal pos­ses­sion of the land was in­valid.

“We are of the opin­ion that such let­ters are wholly il­le­gal and with­out ju­ris­dic­tion. In our opin­ion, such il­le­gal­i­ties can­not be reg­u­lar­ized. We can­not al­low the com­mon in­ter­est of the vil­lagers to suf­fer merely be­cause the unau­tho­rized oc­cu­pa­tion has sub­sisted for many years,” it said.

And then came the turn of the rest of In­dia.

“In many states, Gov­ern­ment or­ders have been is­sued by the State Gov­ern­ment per­mit­ting al­lot­ment of Gram Sabha land to pri­vate per­sons and com­mer­cial en­ter­prises on pay­ment of some money. In our opin­ion all such Gov­ern­ment or­ders are il­le­gal, and should be ig­nored,” it said.

The judges were only warm­ing up: “Our an­ces­tors were not fools. They knew that in cer­tain years, there may be droughts or wa­ter short­ages… wa­ter was also re­quired for cat­tle to drink and bathe in, etc. Hence they built a pond at­tached to every vil­lage, a tank at­tached to every tem­ple, etc. These were their tra­di­tional rain wa­ter har­vest­ing meth­ods, which served them for thou­sands of years.

“Over the last few decades, how­ever, most of these ponds in our coun­try have been filled with earth and built upon by greedy peo­ple, thus de­stroy­ing their orig­i­nal char­ac­ter. This has con­tributed to the wa­ter short­ages in the coun­try,” it said.

“Our an­ces­tors were not fools. They knew that in cer­tain years, there may be droughts or wa­ter short­ages… wa­ter was also re­quired for cat­tle to drink and bathe in, etc. Hence they built a pond at­tached to every vil­lage, a tank at­tached to every tem­ple, etc. These were their tra­di­tional rain­wa­ter har­vest­ing meth­ods, which served them for thou­sands of years.

Supreme Court of In­dia

The SC also noted that ponds in vil­lages across In­dia were auc­tioned off at throw­away prices to busi­ness­men for fish­eries in col­lu­sion with au­thor­i­ties/​Gram Pan­chayat of­fi­cials, and said, “The time has come when these mal­prac­tices must stop…The time has now come to re­view all these or­ders by which the com­mon vil­lage land has been grabbed by such fraud­u­lent prac­tices.”

What came next hit all of In­dia:

“We give di­rec­tions to all the State Gov­ern­ments in the coun­try that they should pre­pare schemes for evic­tion of il­le­gal/​unau­tho­rized oc­cu­pants of Gram Sabha/​Gram Pan­chayat/​Po­ram­boke/​Sham­lat land and these must be re­stored to the Gram Sabha/​Gram Pan­chayat for the com­mon use of vil­lagers of the vil­lage.”

“The Chief Sec­re­taries of all State Gov­ern­ments/​Union Ter­ri­to­ries in In­dia are di­rected to do the need­ful… Long du­ra­tion of such il­le­gal oc­cu­pa­tion or huge ex­pen­di­ture in mak­ing con­struc­tions thereon or po­lit­i­cal con­nec­tions must not be treated as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for con­don­ing this il­le­gal act or for reg­u­lar­iz­ing the il­le­gal pos­ses­sion,” the Supreme Court said.

It also made it clear where reg­u­lar­i­sa­tion can be per­mit­ted: “Reg­u­lar­iza­tion should only be per­mit­ted in ex­cep­tional cases, e.g. where lease has been granted un­der some Gov­ern­ment no­ti­fi­ca­tion to land­less labour­ers or mem­bers of Sched­uled Castes/​Sched­uled Tribes, or where there is al­ready a school, dis­pen­sary or other pub­lic util­ity on the land.”

“We give di­rec­tions to all the State Gov­ern­ments in the coun­try that they should pre­pare schemes for evic­tion of il­le­gal/​unau­tho­rized oc­cu­pants of Gram Sabha/​Gram Pan­chayat/​Po­ram­boke/Sham­lat land and these must be re­stored to the Gram Sabha/​Gram Pan­chayat for the com­mon use of vil­lagers of the vil­lage.”

Supreme Court of In­dia

And af­ter say­ing all of this in its judge­ment, the Supreme Court was not done. It not only en­sured that “a copy of this or­der be sent to all Chief Sec­re­taries of all States and Union Ter­ri­to­ries in In­dia (to) en­sure strict and prompt com­pli­ance” but also di­rected them to “sub­mit com­pli­ance re­ports to this Court from time to time.”
Now, in the fi­nal para of the judge­ment, watch the de­ter­mi­na­tion of In­di­a’s top court: “Al­though we have dis­missed this ap­peal, it shall be listed be­fore this Court from time to time so that we can mon­i­tor im­ple­men­ta­tion of our di­rec­tions herein… all Chief Sec­re­taries in In­dia will sub­mit their re­ports.” [Ex­tract from or­der dated 28 Jan­u­ary 2011 in Civil Ap­peal No.1132 of 2011; Bench com­pris­ing Jus­tice Markandey Katju and Jus­tice Gyan Sudha Misra]

* * *

NINE YEARS AF­TER the Supreme Court judge­ment, and two and a half cen­turies af­ter the In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion that trans­formed Eu­rope and the United States, and ef­fec­tively the world, Pun­jab’s Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment has come up with a fan­tas­tic plan to usher in a Rural In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion in the state. It in­volves a scheme that will fa­cil­i­tate set­ting up of in­dus­try and en­tre­pre­neur busi­nesses in vir­tu­ally every vil­lage of Pun­jab that has sham­lat land.

ਇਸ ਲੇਖ ਨੂੰ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਪੜੋ

ਪੰਜਾਬ ਉੱਤੇ ਮੰਡਰਾ ਰਹੀ ਹੈ ਇਹ ਕਾਨੂੰਨੀ ਤਲਵਾਰ – ਕੀ ਬਚੇਗਾ ਪੰਜਾਬ?

Just as the world was prepar­ing to bid good­bye to 2019 and In­dia was in the throes of an ag­i­ta­tion against the Cit­i­zen­ship Amend­ment Act (CAA) and the pro­posed Na­tional Reg­is­ter of Cit­i­zens (NRC), and Rahul Gandhi was busy paint­ing the Naren­dra Modi regime as the gov­ern­ment of the Fas­cists, Amarinder Singh was work­ing hard to fa­cil­i­tate this Rural In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion.

On De­cem­ber 2, 2019, the Pun­jab Cab­i­net gave its in-prin­ci­ple ap­proval to amend the Pun­jab Vil­lage Com­mon Land (Reg­u­la­tion) Rules, 1964, thus al­low­ing the pan­chayat to sell the sham­lat land to en­tre­pre­neurs, busi­ness­men, com­pa­nies or whoso­ever can set up Mi­cro, Small or Medium en­ter­prises/​in­dus­trial houses on that land. The pro­posal — pushed through the Rural De­vel­op­ment and Pan­chay­ats De­part­ment which is pri­mar­ily tasked with safe­guard­ing the rights of the pan­chay­ats and pre­vent­ing any usurpa­tion of Vil­lage Com­mons — in­volves in­ser­tion of Rule 12-B in the ‘Pun­jab Vil­lage Com­mon Lands (Reg­u­la­tion) Rules, 1964’, cre­at­ing a spe­cial pro­vi­sion for trans­fer of Sham­lat Lands for de­vel­op­ment of in­dus­trial in­fra­struc­ture pro­jects.

It is to be im­ple­mented by the Pun­jab In­dus­try De­part­ment and the Pun­jab Small In­dus­tries and Ex­port Cor­po­ra­tion, a state-level PSU that is em­broiled in a thou­sand con­tro­ver­sies and whose of­fi­cials in the past have been found in­volved in shady deals.

For the Pan­chay­ati land thus pur­chased through the PSIEC, the gov­ern­ment has also come up with de­ferred pay­ment terms. The in­dus­tri­al­ist/​en­tre­pre­neur will only be ob­lig­ated to pay 25 per cent of the cost of land up­front and can pay the rest in four an­nual in­stal­ments that will start af­ter a two-year gap. The Cab­i­net lost no time in ap­prov­ing this amend­ment, in its words, “to cre­ate rural land banks for in­dus­trial de­vel­op­ment.” 

The Amarinder Singh gov­ern­men­t’s rea­son­ing is that it is us­ing the Gram Pan­chay­ats to pro­mote the de­vel­op­ment of vil­lages by un­lock­ing the value of Sham­lat land.

“I’ll give you what you want… tell me what’s needed, I’ll do every­thing that is needed.”

Chief Min­is­ter Amarinder Singh to prospec­tive in­vestors

In­deed, every­one knows what an­other well-wisher of vil­lages, Ma­hatma Gandhi, said. “The fu­ture of In­dia lies in its vil­lages.” But not if the vil­lage pan­chay­ats sell their land!

In­ter­est­ingly, and sig­nif­i­cantly, just three days af­ter the Pun­jab Cab­i­net’s de­ci­sion, CM Amarinder Singh stood be­fore the mon­ey­bags at an elite ed­u­ca­tional and re­search in­sti­tute ded­i­cated to teach­ing how to make money and be­come a mon­ey­bag. At the jar­ringly-ti­tled two-day (Dec 5-6, 2019) Pro­gres­sive Pun­jab In­vestors’ Sum­mit at the In­dian School of Busi­ness in Mo­hali, Amarinder Singh said:
“I’ll give you what you want… tell me what’s needed, I’ll do every­thing that is needed.”
“What­ever we have done in our in­dus­trial pol­icy or oth­er­wise is not sacro­sanct. If any of you re­quire changes, we are quite pre­pared for it… I hope you go from here con­vinced that we are com­mit­ted to your wel­fare. We will give you se­cu­rity, we will en­sure peace for you…There are no labour prob­lems in Pun­jab, no strikes.”
Not once has Amarinder Singh said to the farm­ers of Pun­jab: “I’ll give you what you want… tell me what’s needed, I’ll do every­thing that is needed.”

Some two-thirds of Pun­jab’s vil­lages, 7,941 to be pre­cise, have cul­tivable Sham­lat land. Pan­chay­ats in Pun­jab auc­tion the cul­tivable land and the money thus ac­crued, by a rough es­ti­mate about Rs 340 crore, is used for the de­vel­op­ment of the vil­lage. In a pe­cu­liar arrange­ment, Pun­jab’s fund-crunched gov­ern­ment de­vised a bla­tant and in­ex­plic­a­ble way to steal some of this money to pay off some of its em­ploy­ees. Through an ex­ec­u­tive or­der, it made it oblig­a­tory for the pan­chay­ats to give 20 per cent of the money earned through an auc­tion of cul­tivable land to the Pun­jab Rural De­vel­op­ment and Pan­chayat De­part­ment to pay the salaries of the em­ploy­ees.

So, ef­fec­tively, the pan­chay­ats in Pun­jab have been pay­ing the salaries and fi­nanc­ing the perks en­joyed by the em­ploy­ees re­cruited by the Pun­jab gov­ern­ment who are nei­ther ac­count­able nor re­port to the pan­chay­ats.

Even oth­er­wise, Pan­chay­ats have in­vari­ably been ad­min­is­tered by the gov­ern­ment in a cav­a­lier fash­ion, with the pol­icy of­ten tweaked by babus sit­ting in the sec­re­tariat with no claim of be­ing in touch with ground re­al­i­ties. Rules and laws are for­mu­lated, changed or in­ter­preted at the in­stance of the politi­cians who use in­flu­ence, power and funds at their dis­cre­tion to play one fac­tion against the other and, thus, be­come the dis­penser of favours. For in­stance, some time back, the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment had framed new rules to re­vert to dis­trict-wise reser­va­tion of sarpanches, a change from its pre­vi­ous prac­tice of re­serv­ing these con­stituen­cies block-wise. No pub­lic de­bate pre­ceded the move, and not a sin­gle protest or ag­i­ta­tion fol­lowed it.

Gand­hi’s idea, af­ter di­rect ex­pe­ri­ence with the vil­lage life, was that “If the vil­lages per­ish, In­dia will per­ish, too. It will be no more In­dia. Her own mis­sion in the world will get lost.” (Har­i­jan, Au­gust 29, 1936; 63:241.) Some­where down the line, Amarinder Singh and his co­terie de­cided that if vil­lages per­ish, Pun­jab will thrive. But they for­got to tell us about their ex­pe­ri­en­tial and in­tel­lec­tual jour­ney that brought them to this pe­cu­liar wis­dom.

The pan­chay­ats in Pun­jab have been pay­ing the salaries and fi­nanc­ing the perks en­joyed by the em­ploy­ees re­cruited by the Pun­jab gov­ern­ment who are nei­ther ac­count­able nor re­port to the pan­chay­ats.

Pun­jab gov­ern­ment and the rural dalit pop­u­lace have been in a bat­tle mode over the lat­ter’s right to one-third of the cul­tivable sham­lat land. Dal­its, with vir­tu­ally no ac­cess to fod­der or graz­ing lands, have been press­ing their statu­tory right but, in ac­tual prac­tice, the up­per caste land­lords have been suc­cess­ful in thwart­ing all their ef­forts.

Among all In­dian states, Pun­jab has the high­est per­cent­age (31.94%) of SC pop­u­la­tion, which is pre­dom­i­nantly rural, with size­able num­bers liv­ing be­low poverty line. As per a decade old Agri­cul­tural Cen­sus (2010-11), SC-held op­er­a­tional hold­ings com­prise 6.02%, but more than 85% are un­vi­able.

(In ma­jor­ity of Pun­jab’s dis­tricts, SCs form one third or more of the pop­u­lace, in­clud­ing SBS Na­gar (42.51%), Muk­t­sar (42.31%), Firozpur (42.17%), Ja­land­har (38.95%), Farid­kot (38.92%), Moga (36.50%), Hoshiarpur (35.14%), Ka­purthala (33.94%), Tarn Taran (33.71%), Mansa (33.63%), Bathinda(32.44%), Bar­nala (32.24%) and Fate­hgarh Sahib (32.07%).)

Of the to­tal 12,168 in­hab­ited vil­lages, 4,799 vil­lages were recorded as hav­ing SC pop­u­la­tion of 40% or more, in­clud­ing 57 vil­lages with 100% SC pop­u­la­tion. In the last few decades, not a sin­gle gov­ern­ment scheme has even been an­nounced for the sin­gu­larly SC vil­lages.

Data from the 70th round of Land and Live­stock Hold­ings Sur­vey of the NSSO showed that 58.4% of rural Dalit house­holds are land­less and 71% of SC ‘farm­ers’ are agri­cul­tural labour­ers. They are clearly a dis­em­pow­ered de­mo­graphic seg­ment. A sur­vey sourced from the book, “Un­touch­a­bil­ity in Rural In­dia,” au­thored by Ghan­shyam Shah, Harsh Man­der, Sukhadeo Tho­rat, Satish Desh­pande and Amita Baviskar (SAGE, New Delhi, 2006), showed that a quar­ter of the Dal­its do not even en­ter po­lice sta­tions or ra­tion shops, 33% of the pub­lic health work­ers refuse to visit Dalit homes, and 23.5% Dal­its still do not get let­ters de­liv­ered to their homes. In nearly 14.4% of In­dian vil­lages, Dal­its are not per­mit­ted even to en­ter the pan­chayat build­ing and in 48.4% of vil­lages, Dal­its are still de­nied ac­cess to com­mon wa­ter sources. In 35.8% vil­lages, they are de­nied en­try into vil­lage shops and in 73% of vil­lages, they are not per­mit­ted to en­ter non-Dalit homes. In 70% of vil­lages, non-Dal­its do not eat to­gether with Dal­its. Pun­jab’s Dal­its are just rel­a­tively bet­ter in terms of any pro­nounced so­cial dis­crim­i­na­tion, a fac­tor largely at­trib­uted to the in­flu­ence of Sikhism that ab­hors caste. It re­mains an in­con­tro­vert­ible fact that the caste, nev­er­the­less, pre­vails in the Sikh com­mu­nity and the state. Any in­ter­caste mar­riages across the Ma­son-Dixon Dalit-up­per caste lines are more of an aber­ra­tion. Dis­crim­i­na­tion is the sub­text of a Dal­it’s life.

In such a sce­nario, the le­gal pro­vi­sion un­der which one-third of the cul­tivable sham­lat land has to be re­served for auc­tion in which only Dal­its can par­tic­i­pate was be­ing ob­served mostly in the breach. Pow­er­ful land­lords of­ten put up proxy dal­its, then pay them off with a pit­tance and cul­ti­vate the land them­selves. A strong and ag­gres­sive grass­roots move­ment to stress the Dal­its’ le­gal right to one-third of the cul­tivable Vil­lage Com­mons has seen clashes, blood­let­ting, ar­rests, and a tense at­mos­phere in many vil­lages of Pun­jab.

“A quar­ter of the Dal­its do not even en­ter po­lice sta­tions or ra­tion shops, 33% of the pub­lic health work­ers refuse to visit Dalit homes, and 23.5% Dal­its still do not get let­ters de­liv­ered to their homes. In nearly 14.4% of In­dian vil­lages, Dal­its are not per­mit­ted even to en­ter the pan­chayat build­ing and in 48.4% of vil­lages, Dal­its are still de­nied ac­cess to com­mon wa­ter sources. In 35.8% vil­lages, they are de­nied en­try into vil­lage shops and in 73% of vil­lages, they are not per­mit­ted to en­ter non-Dalit homes.”

The strug­gle is un­der­stand­able. Ex­perts es­ti­mate the to­tal cul­tivable Sham­lat land in vil­lages at around 1.57 lakh acres, of which about 53,000 acres should be the Dal­its’ share. A num­ber of farmer and agri­cul­tural labourer unions are now in­volved in fight­ing for this share, among these be­ing the Pun­jab Khet Maz­door Union (led by Zora Singh Nas­rali and Lach­man Singh Sewe­wala), Kran­tikari Pendu Maz­door Union (headed by San­jeev Mintoo, largely ac­tive in San­grur, Bar­nala and Mansa), De­hati Maz­door Sabha (led by Gur­nam Singh and Mahipal, and largely ac­tive in Doaba and Ma­jha), the Za­meen Prapti Sang­harsh Com­mit­tee (ZPSC, headed by Mukesh Malaud and Gur­mukh Singh, is the most ac­tive of these and has achieved some re­sults in San­grur and Pa­tiala), the Pendu Maz­door Union (led by Tarsem Pe­ter, ac­tive in Doaba since 1991), and the Maz­door Mukti Mor­cha (led by Bhag­want Samao’n). The list is by no means ex­haus­tive.

At cer­tain places, the strug­gle is sound­ing bu­gles of a com­plete re­bel­lion. For ex­am­ple, in San­grur’s Malerkotla tehsil, 225 mem­bers of gram sabha of Tole­wal vil­lage passed a res­o­lu­tion on June 8, 2019 to lease out 25 bigha (5.25 acres) of vil­lage’s pan­chayat land to Dal­its at a nom­i­nal an­nual rate of Rs 500/​acre for 33 years. The 225 com­prised more than 20 per cent of the 870 gram sabha votes. While there is no pro­vi­sion in law for leas­ing out the land for 33 years, the re­bel­lious ac­tion gal­va­nized the Dalit ac­tivists. Since then, while the Pan­chayat de­part­ment did not ac­cept the res­o­lu­tion, mul­ti­ple at­tempts by the gov­ern­ment to auc­tion the land ended in fra­cas, dis­putes or fail­ures.

Dis­crim­i­na­tion is the sub­text of a Dal­it’s life.

Iron­i­cally, far from sell­ing off the Sham­lat land to in­dus­tri­al­ists, Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment had ear­lier the same year an­nounced its in­ten­tion of ac­tu­ally buy­ing land to give to Dal­its for con­struct­ing houses.

In Jan­u­ary 2019, the CM had an­nounced al­lot­ment of one lakh plots of 1,360 square feet each to home­less Dalit fam­i­lies in the state. He had also an­nounced that these five marla (one marla=272 sq ft) plots would be al­lot­ted to home­less sched­uled caste fam­i­lies in each vil­lage, and where land is not avail­able with the vil­lage pan­chayat, the state gov­ern­ment will arrange the land. This was in keep­ing with the Con­gress’ poll man­i­festo. The law, in fact, pro­vides for giv­ing such plots to land­less, home­less peo­ple with­out con­sid­er­a­tion of caste.

In re­al­ity, Amarinder Singh has been long fix­ated upon the idea of get­ting land from the farm­ers, giv­ing it to in­dus­tri­al­ists and then fac­ing se­ri­ous re­sis­tance to his plans. In 2006, dur­ing his first tenure as chief min­is­ter, Amarinder Singh had come up with his favoured Farm to Fork pro­ject that saw the ac­qui­si­tion of 100 acres of land for in­dus­tri­al­ists in Lud­hi­ana’s Nas­rali, 42 acres in Dhoorkot in Bar­nala, 35 acres in Sunetta in Mo­hali, and sev­eral other land parcels. The 150-acre Lad­owal farm was also given on a 30-year lease at a pit­tance of Rs 16,000 per acre an­nual lease. None of those pro­jects fruc­ti­fied, and a lot of lands went into the in­dus­tri­al­ists’ kitty.

When it comes to re­sources, the Pun­jab gov­ern­ment has lit­tle room left for de­vel­op­ment. Most wel­fare schemes have al­ready come to a grind­ing halt. The non-tax rev­enue col­lec­tion is down. Of the es­ti­mated Rs 9,477 crore non-tax rev­enue, the state has only col­lected Rs 1,325 cr so far. Tax rev­enues re­main far be­low the tar­get. Pun­jab has been com­plain­ing about and strug­gling to get the Cen­tre to pay up about Rs 4,100 crore as GST com­pen­sa­tion. State Fi­nance Min­is­ter Man­preet Singh Badal had ad­mit­ted in his Feb­ru­ary 2019 bud­get speech that Pun­jab’s to­tal debt is ex­pected to rise in 2019-20 to Rs 2,29,612 crore, thus ef­fec­tively land­ing it in a debt trap.

Pun­jab, with just 1.54 per cent of the coun­try’s ge­o­graph­i­cal area, has come a long way since the days of the Green Rev­o­lu­tion.

* * *

PO­LIT­I­CALLY, with its lat­est leg­isla­tive sur­gi­cal strike to snatch peo­ple’s wealth and hand it over to his in­dus­tri­al­ist hon­cho friends, much like the Con­gress’ Am­bani-Adani jibe, the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment is ef­fec­tively up­end­ing the only cred­i­ble vic­tory that Rahul Gandhi ever scored against Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi.

It was Amarinder Singh’s leader Rahul Gandhi who led from the front the fight against a new and big busi­ness-friendly ver­sion of the Land Ac­qui­si­tion Act.

Rahul Gand­hi’s party and mother, Con­gress and So­nia Gandhi, take much pride in the Man­mo­han Singh gov­ern­men­t’s ver­sion of the Land Ac­qui­si­tion Act, and had put up a spir­ited fight against the Naren­dra Modi gov­ern­men­t’s move to pass a more re­gres­sive ver­sion of that when it came to power in 2014, dec­i­mat­ing the Con­gress.

Called the “Right to Fair Com­pen­sa­tion and Trans­parency in Land Ac­qui­si­tion, Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and Re­set­tle­ment Act, 2013, (LARR),” this United Pro­gres­sive Al­liance (UPA) leg­is­la­tion dealt with the con­tro­ver­sial and highly emo­tive is­sue that had huge po­lit­i­cal im­pli­ca­tions and re­placed a colo­nial-era law of 1894.

It was im­por­tant to get it right since the law fol­lowed some of the most in­tractable strug­gles and peo­ple’s move­ments that in­de­pen­dent In­dia saw, in­clud­ing large-scale protests against pro­jects like the Sar­dar Sarovar dam in Gu­jarat; a spe­cial eco­nomic zone in Nandi­gram and a Tata Mo­tors plant in Sin­gur (both in West Ben­gal) as well as Vedan­ta’s baux­ite min­ing plans in Niyam­giri and Posco’s steel pro­ject in Ja­gats­ingh­pur (both in Odisha).

Among the In­dian state’s biggest sins has been a mer­ci­less ap­proach to­wards land ac­qui­si­tion in the name of de­vel­op­ment, be it pub­lic sec­tor re­sources or pri­vate in­dus­try. This new leg­is­la­tion, con­sid­ered a marked im­prove­ment over the colo­nial-era law, came into ef­fect just five months be­fore Naren­dra Modi burst on the In­dian po­lit­i­cal scene with a de­ci­sive man­date af­ter more than three decades of frac­tured elec­toral ver­dicts.

Gandhi was clear that self-re­liant vil­lages form a sound ba­sis for a just, eq­ui­table and non-vi­o­lent or­der. He held that the na­tion can be re­built only by re­build­ing its vil­lages, as ev­i­denced by his work at Cham­paran (1917), Se­va­gram (1920) and Wardha (1938). In the years to come, he vi­su­alised an even more elab­o­rate pro­gramme of con­struc­tive work that was based upon a de­cen­tral­ized po­lit­i­cal sys­tem with self-re­liant vil­lages.

Amarinder Singh’s and Rahul Gand­hi’s party con­sid­ers the LARR as among the most im­por­tant laws passed dur­ing the ten years of UPA rule (2004 to 2014), helmed by a tur­baned Pun­jabi, along with the Right to In­for­ma­tion Act, For­est Rights Act and the Na­tional Food Se­cu­rity Act.

ਇਸ ਲੇਖ ਨੂੰ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਪੜੋ

ਪੰਜਾਬ ਉੱਤੇ ਮੰਡਰਾ ਰਹੀ ਹੈ ਇਹ ਕਾਨੂੰਨੀ ਤਲਵਾਰ – ਕੀ ਬਚੇਗਾ ਪੰਜਾਬ?

The key as­pects in which the UPA Act dif­fered from the 1894 law were com­pen­sa­tion, con­sent, so­cial im­pact as­sess­ment (SIA) and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion & re­set­tle­ment. It man­dated com­pen­sa­tion up to twice the mar­ket value in rural ar­eas, equiv­a­lent to mar­ket value in ur­ban ar­eas plus an ad­di­tional 100% so­latium, cal­cu­lated on the com­pen­sa­tion paid for the land, un­like 30% in the old law. So, ef­fec­tively, it en­ti­tled the landown­ers get, up to four times the mar­ket value in vil­lages and twice the mar­ket value in cities.

Un­der the Land Ac­qui­si­tion Act passed by the UPA, which is still the law of the land since the Modi-I regime had to back off from its plan to ram through a much harsher law, all pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship pro­jects need con­sent of 70% of af­fected fam­i­lies while pri­vate pro­jects need 80% of the af­fected fam­i­lies to give con­sent. While gov­ern­ment pro­jects do not need con­sent, it is not a fact Con­gress is proud of.

Jairam Ramesh, who was In­di­a’s Min­is­ter for Rural De­vel­op­ment when the Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha and Ra­jya Sabha be­tween Au­gust 29 and Sep­tem­ber 5, 2013, terms the ex­emp­tion given to gov­ern­ment pro­jects from con­sent as “a com­pro­mise I had to make to get the bill passed.”

“Ide­ally, con­sent should be re­quired even for gov­ern­ment pro­jects,” Ramesh has since main­tained. His book, “Leg­is­lat­ing for Jus­tice: The Mak­ing of the 2013 Land Ac­qui­si­tion Law,” co-au­thored with Muham­mad Ali Khan, is a tes­ta­ment to the thought process and the strug­gle that went through in push­ing this bill through the Par­lia­ment.

It is this legacy of the Man­mo­han Singh gov­ern­ment, So­nia Gand­hi’s lead­er­ship and Rahul Gand­hi’s brag­ging rights that Amarinder Singh is out to de­stroy with his push for leg­is­la­tion to en­able the in­dus­tri­al­ists, en­tre­pre­neurs, spec­u­la­tors to ac­quire sham­lat land that has vested in pan­chay­ats for hun­dreds of years.

Quot­ing Gandhi to Pun­jabis is a lit­tle out of fash­ion, but try this: “We are in­her­i­tors of a rural civ­i­liza­tion… To up­root it and sub­sti­tute for it an ur­ban civ­i­liza­tion seems to me an im­pos­si­bil­ity.” (Young In­dia, No­vem­ber 7, 1929; 42:108.) Neo-Gand­hian Con­gress­man Amarinder Singh, a royal who is loathe to be seen in khadi, is mak­ing it pos­si­ble. Cap­tain hai to mumkin hai!

A lot is pos­si­ble with this Cap­tain of the Con­gress in Pun­jab. He de­manded a brav­ery medal for the army of­fi­cer who trussed up a Kash­miri cit­i­zen on his jeep as a hu­man shield against pos­si­ble stone pelt­ing, ad­vo­cated a free hand for army in Kash­mir, and de­manded 10 heads of Pak­istani sol­diers in lieu of each In­dian fauji killed on the bor­der. On most burn­ing is­sues dear to the Con­gress, Amarinder has stayed on mute mode, be it beef ban, love ji­had, ghar wapsi, Ishrat Ja­han en­counter, as­saults on JNU stu­dents, sui­cide of Ro­hit Vem­ula, Rafael, Verma-Asthana CBI squab­bles, Ro­hingyas, lynch­ings, or even on the Na­tional Her­ald case in which all he could man­age was a state­ment against Sub­ra­man­ian Swamy. When pushed into crit­i­cis­ing the BJP, he man­ages to do so with­out nam­ing Modi or Amit Shah. Since Amarinder Singh is clearly with the BJP line on mat­ters of na­tional se­cu­rity, now with his push to pull off the sale of vil­lage Sham­lat lands, he has de­ci­sively moved to­wards the Right on the eco­nomic front, too. But for ap­pear­ances’ sake, let us con­tinue to call him a Con­gress­man. As we said, Cap­tain hai to mumkin hai.

It is this legacy of the Man­mo­han Singh gov­ern­ment, So­nia Gand­hi’s lead­er­ship and Rahul Gand­hi’s brag­ging rights that Amarinder Singh is out to de­stroy with his push for a leg­is­la­tion to en­able the in­dus­tri­al­ists, en­tre­pre­neurs, spec­u­la­tors to ac­quire sham­lat land that has vested in pan­chay­ats for hun­dreds of years.

Though not every­one agrees it will be mumkin for him to pull off this one.
“The Sham­lat land is a so­cial se­cu­rity of the vil­lage. Vil­lages are re­source-crunched, and in many cases, the Vil­lage Com­mons are ei­ther the sole or the most sig­nif­i­cant source of in­come for the pan­chayat. As things stand, the state gov­ern­ments have al­ready pulled out from al­lo­cat­ing even min­i­mal re­sources to lo­cal bod­ies. If the pan­chay­ats are made to sell sham­lat land, it will be the end of vil­lages as we have known them for cen­turies,” said Bal­bir Singh Ra­je­wal, pres­i­dent of the Bharti Kisan Union (BKU).

Hamir Singh, a se­nior jour­nal­ist with a deep un­der­stand­ing of the grass­roots func­tion­ing of vil­lages, rural econ­omy, re­sources avail­able to pan­chay­ats and the func­tion­ing of this third tier of democ­racy, said the lat­est move of mak­ing/​en­abling pan­chay­ats to sell off the Vil­lage Com­mons was part of a pat­tern of pau­peri­sa­tion of vil­lages.

“The po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship of Pun­jab, across party lines, is no more in­vested in the idea of a vil­lage. Not even a third rung leader of any po­lit­i­cal party ac­tu­ally lives in his vil­lage. Any­one with a se­cure job has al­ready shunned the vil­lage. Those who still live in vil­lages ac­tu­ally live in their pala­tial farm­houses, ef­fec­tively hav­ing in­su­lated them­selves from the vil­lage econ­omy and so­cial life. Every politi­cian, and al­most every econ­o­mist, is sold on the idea that the vil­lage is an un­sus­tain­able en­tity in mod­ern civil­i­sa­tion, that mi­gra­tion from the vil­lage to the city is in­evitable, that agri­cul­ture has to yield to in­dus­tri­al­i­sa­tion, and grad­u­ally we will all live in ur­ban habi­ta­tions and our food can be pro­duced by a frac­tion of those who are still in­volved in cul­ti­va­tion. It is a nar­ra­tive bought lock, stock and bar­rel and shows the bank­ruptcy of imag­i­na­tion and lit­tle un­der­stand­ing of what this huge mass of peo­ple will even­tu­ally do,” Hamir Singh said.

It is ex­actly such an ap­proach that has made it pos­si­ble for the Amarinder Singh regime to not even face a ques­tion as sim­ple as why he is go­ing to tear the rep­u­ta­tion of Man­mo­han Singh, So­nia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and all of 2004-2014 UPA to smithereens.

Amarinder Singh’s leg­is­la­tion, which will make it pos­si­ble, and will fa­cil­i­tate, the takeover of sham­lat land of vil­lages by pri­vate land sharks, does not have any pro­vi­sion for ob­tain­ing the con­sent of even 10 per cent of the fam­i­lies af­fected. In fact, every sin­gle fam­ily in the vil­lage could be against it, but if the pan­chayat wants to, it can sell the land.

It does not guar­an­tee proper com­pen­sa­tion, does not have a fair re­mu­ner­a­tion for­mula, does even broach the idea of com­pen­sa­tion for those de­pen­dent upon the sham­lat land, has no pro­vi­sion of a so­cial au­dit and im­pact as­sess­ment (SIA) and does not of­fer any­thing else in re­turn ex­cept for money, the amount of which is to be de­cided with­out con­sult­ing the vil­lage.

It also negates every sin­gle spirit of the Pan­chay­ati Raj Act pushed by Ra­jiv Gandhi and tom-tommed by So­nia and Rahul Gandhi as it cares two hoots for the idea of a Gram Sabha. In his as­sess­ment cum re­view of twenty years’ worth of func­tion­ing of the Pan­chay­ati Raj In­sti­tu­tions (PRIs), Mani Shankar Ai­yar, for­mer Union Min­is­ter for Pan­chay­ati Raj and some­one who worked closely with Ra­jiv Gandhi and was a vir­tual mid-wife for ush­er­ing in this re­mark­able piece of leg­is­la­tion lamented that the Pan­chay­ati raj was to be­come a sys­tem of ad­min­is­tra­tion through the in­sti­tu­tion of Gram Sabha, but has merely be­come rule through gram pan­chayat. In fact, he ac­knowl­edged that on the ground, it has been re­duced to rule by sarpanch.

“The worst con­se­quence … is the dis­tor­tion of Pan­chayat Raj…into ‘Sarpanch Raj’, that is, the re­duc­tion of Pan­chayat Raj In­sti­tu­tions to a ne­far­i­ous nexus be­tween the Pres­i­dent of the Pan­chayat at the vil­lage/​in­ter­me­di­ate and dis­trict lev­els, on the one hand, and el­e­ments of the bu­reau­cracy, on the other, that have made Pan­chayat Raj syn­ony­mous with the de­cen­tral­iza­tion of cor­rup­tion. This, in turn, has led to enor­mous ex­pen­di­ture on Pan­chayat elec­tions as the means to se­cur­ing even greater re­turns by milk­ing the Pan­chayat Raj sys­tem,” Ai­yar wrote in his 2013 re­port (Vol 1, page 37, Para 2.41 of To­wards Holis­tic Pan­chay­ati Raj – Twen­ti­eth An­niver­sary Re­port of the Ex­pert Com­mit­tee on Lever­ag­ing Pan­chay­ats For Ef­fi­cient De­liv­ery of Pub­lic Goods and Ser­vices).

Ig­nor­ing the Pan­chay­ati Raj In­sti­tu­tional frame­work, pum­melling the safe­guards his party con­ceived and fought for in its Land Ac­qui­si­tion Act, Amarinder Singh has kept the Gram Sabha, a body com­pris­ing all the bonafide vot­ers of the vil­lage/​pan­chayat, com­pletely out of a cru­cial and life/​lifestyle-chang­ing de­ci­sion-mak­ing about the com­mon wealth of the vil­lage col­lec­tive.

And yet, the op­po­si­tion par­ties, in­clud­ing the Akali Dal and the Aam Aadmi Party have raised ex­tremely fee­ble voices against the move.

“The worst con­se­quence … is the dis­tor­tion of Pan­chayat Raj…into ‘Sarpanch Raj’, that is, the re­duc­tion of Pan­chayat Raj In­sti­tu­tions to a ne­far­i­ous nexus be­tween the Pres­i­dent of the Pan­chayat at the vil­lage/​in­ter­me­di­ate and dis­trict lev­els, on the one hand, and el­e­ments of the bu­reau­cracy, on the other, that have made Pan­chayat Raj syn­ony­mous with the de­cen­tral­iza­tion of cor­rup­tion. This, in turn, has led to enor­mous ex­pen­di­ture on Pan­chayat elec­tions as the means to se­cur­ing even greater re­turns by milk­ing the Pan­chayat Raj sys­tem,” 

Mani Shankar Ai­yar in his book To­wards Holis­tic Pan­chay­ati Raj 

It is also a sur­prise that nei­ther the re­li­gious de­mo­graphic, in­clud­ing the SGPC or Sikh, Hindu, Mus­lim re­li­gious bod­ies, nor the en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists have picked up the gaunt­let and chal­lenged the Amarinder gov­ern­ment. Tax-payer funded in­sti­tu­tions such as the Pun­jab State In­sti­tute of Rural De­vel­op­ment (SIRD), the Cen­tre for Re­search in Rural and In­dus­trial De­vel­op­ment (CR­RID) or the  Na­tional In­sti­tute of Rural De­vel­op­ment & Pan­chay­ati Raj (NIRD&PR) have not lifted a fin­ger on the is­sue or made their opin­ion known.

Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment has sin­gu­larly failed on the Pan­chay­ati Raj front, and the idea of Gram Sabha, os­ten­si­bly dear­est to the Con­gress at the na­tional level, is alien to Pun­jab, thanks to the politi­cians’ pro­cliv­ity to keep a vice-like grip on vil­lages and vil­lagers. These same vil­lages could have been a source of new lead­er­ship. Af­ter all, 1.27 crore vot­ers in Pun­jab’s coun­try­side elect al­most 13,000 sarpanches and 83,831 panches. With 85,000 wards, 145 pan­chayat sami­tis with 2,750 mem­bers, 22 Zila Parishads and 350 Zila Parishad con­stituen­cies, the state ef­fec­tively elects one lakh di­rectly elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives, some 50,000 of them women. Imag­ine the re­source pool for pol­i­tics that Pun­jab could have cre­ated if the gov­ern­ment had let a bet­ter ver­sion of democ­racy pre­vail at the vil­lage level!

The fact is that the Pan­chay­ats have be­come a new till for the politi­cians to loot. Un­der the 14^th Fi­nance Com­mis­sion, Pan­chay­ats were pro­vided money di­rectly. Across In­dia, they re­ceived Rs 2,00,292 crore in five years, that comes to around Rs 15 lakh an­nu­ally for each pan­chayat with big ones get­ting up to Rs 1 crore. The en­tire ex­er­cise was pred­i­cated on the Gram Sabha tak­ing a lead, the pan­chayat be­ing merely the ex­e­cut­ing agency to ful­fil the wishes of the Gram Sabha. A fixed num­ber of pe­ri­odic meet­ings of the Gram Sabha are manda­tory un­der the 73rd Con­sti­tu­tional Amend­ment.

GRAM SABHA en­joys im­mense power un­der the law. It can con­duct a so­cial au­dit of all de­vel­op­ment work, and the con­cerned au­thor­i­ties are bound to fa­cil­i­tate it. The ba­sic phi­los­o­phy was that the vil­lagers should think, de­cide and act for and in their own col­lec­tive so­cio-eco­nomic in­ter­ests. While a Gram Sabha en­hances peo­ple’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the de­ci­sion-mak­ing processes, it also avoids the pit­falls that a Pan­chayat can fall into, and thus ef­fec­tively deals with the sad so­cial re­al­ity of a stark power im­bal­ance where the mar­gin­al­ized know the least. It un­der­lines the prin­ci­ple that col­lec­tively, they are a force.

In sim­ple terms, the Gram Sabha is the Cor­po­rate Body while the Pan­chayat is the Ex­ec­u­tive Body, or in other words, Gram Sabha is a leg­is­la­ture while Pan­chayat is a Cab­i­net. Be­sides, a Gram Sabha can over­rule a Pan­chayat and re-di­rect it. It also deals with in­tran­si­gent sarpanches or pan­chay­ats since it is em­pow­ered to call a meet­ing even if the sarpanch re­fuses to con­vene one. All it re­quires is for 20 per cent of the vot­ers to sign and give no­tice of 15 days. This is Di­rect Democ­racy 101.

For every gov­ern­ment ben­e­fit scheme, the law em­pow­ers the Gram Sabha to draw up a list of ben­e­fi­cia­ries. Only if it fails to do so, the pan­chayat is to take over that task. In prac­tice, it is a lo­cal po­lit­i­cal tough who dis­penses favours. Politi­cians of all hues in Pun­jab are guilty of killing the spirit of pan­chay­ati raj.

And this is the spirit that the Amarinder Singh Gov­ern­ment, too, first com­pletely negated, and is now adamant on dis­em­pow­er­ing and dis­en­fran­chis­ing the rural pop­u­lace by en­abling and em­pow­er­ing pan­chay­ats to sell off the cen­turies-old so­cial se­cu­rity de­posit of the vil­lages to pri­vate in­dus­trial and land sharks for a pit­tance and then giv­ing them de­ferred pay­ment op­tions.

GRAM SABHA en­joys im­mense power un­der the law. It can con­duct a so­cial au­dit of all de­vel­op­ment work, and the con­cerned au­thor­i­ties are bound to fa­cil­i­tate it. The ba­sic phi­los­o­phy was that the vil­lagers should think, de­cide and act for and in their own col­lec­tive so­cio-eco­nomic in­ter­ests. 

To just give you an idea of how hare­brained the new law is, it ac­tu­ally men­tions that a Pan­chayat can sell off the sham­lat land in the vil­lage to an in­dus­trial house which is not even re­quired to make the full pay­ment but can pay just one-fourth up­front, the rest tak­ing years to be re­alised, and then, us­ing that money, the pan­chayat can go and buy land else­where if it needs it.

So a pan­chayat in Mansa in Pun­jab’s deep south can sell off its sham­lat land, but since the Dalit women need it to make dung-cakes and the lo­cal land­less labourer needed five mar­las to con­struct a house, the new law em­pow­ers the pan­chayat to buy land in Gur­daspur, give five mar­las to the needy guy and ask the dalit woman of Mansa to go make dung-cakes in Gur­daspur!

It is as­tound­ing as to how valu­able land could be in Pun­jab and to what fruit­ful uses it could have been put to. Cou­pled with the pro­vi­sions of the MGN­REGA, an all-em­pow­ered Gram Sabha can put the Sham­lat land to many imag­i­na­tive uses, en­sur­ing a con­stant in­come stream for vil­lagers.

The­o­ret­i­cally, the Gram Sab­has in Pun­jab can move Res­o­lu­tions against any plans to sell off the fam­ily jew­els of the vil­lage, but in prac­tice, the in­sti­tu­tion has been de­stroyed. A spir­ited band of po­lit­i­cal ac­tivists work­ing un­der the ban­ner of In­ter­na­tional De­mo­c­ra­tic Party (IDP) has been fight­ing hard for years now to push the cause of Gram Sabha, try­ing to set up net­works of aware vil­lagers, ed­u­cate ac­tivists, dis­sem­i­nate an un­der­stand­ing about the Gram Sab­ha’s pow­ers and in­spir­ing peo­ple to hold Gram Sab­has, but no main­stream po­lit­i­cal party has come even close to touch­ing the agenda with a barge pole.

* * *

THE STORY OF the Pun­jab’s elite gob­bling up the Vil­lage Com­mons with a mon­strous hunger is now the stuff of leg­ends. The vil­lage com­mon lands around Chandi­garh were en­croached upon with so much im­punity that it took a Tri­bunal ap­pointed by the Pun­jab and Haryana High Court un­der the lead­er­ship of a re­tired judge of the Supreme Court to dig out facts so shock­ing that one is in­clined to sus­pend all sense of be­lief.

The ex­plo­sive rev­e­la­tions about land­grab of Sham­lat land in the Pun­jab vil­lages around the pe­riph­ery of Chandi­garh are closely linked to the afore­said or­der of the Supreme Court in the Jag­pal Singh case. The Vil­lage Com­mons loot scan­dal came to light when, in 2007, a Naya­gaon res­i­dent, Kuldip Singh, filed a writ pe­ti­tion in the Pun­jab and Haryana High Court against VIPs’ land loot (CRM No. 23125 of 2011).

Once it be­came ap­par­ent how pub­lic prop­erty be­long­ing to Gram Pan­chay­ats, in and around the pe­riph­ery of Chandi­garh and in the Mo­hali Dis­trict (cre­ated in Pun­jab in 2006), called Sahibzada Ajit Singh (S.A.S.) Na­gar, were sold, the HC asked the Deputy Com­mis­sioner, S.A.S. Na­gar, to file a de­tailed af­fi­davit by 30 March 2012, giv­ing the steps he pro­posed to take against the ven­dors, the vendees, the per­son who al­lowed reg­is­tra­tion of the sale deeds and the Gram Pan­chay­ats who did not raise any plea with re­spect to their ti­tle.

The ex­plo­sive rev­e­la­tions about land­grab of Sham­lat land in the Pun­jab vil­lages around the pe­riph­ery of Chandi­garh are closely linked to the afore­said or­der of the Supreme Court in the Jag­pal Singh case. 

Af­fi­davits (filed in April and May 2012) of about 60 in­flu­en­tial per­sons along with that of the then Chief Sec­re­tary con­vinced the judges that the mat­ter re­quired to be probed by an in­de­pen­dent tri­bunal which should be presided over by an em­i­nent judge of ei­ther Supreme Court or from this Court. It had by then be­come clear that top bu­reau­crats, po­lice of­fi­cials and top po­lit­i­cal lead­ers were among ben­e­fi­cia­ries as gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials were per­mit­ting the sale of pub­lic prop­erty, i.e. sham­lat or com­mon land, in rural ar­eas/​ad­ja­cent cities. The Court em­pha­sised (with ref­er­ence to Rule 16 (ii) of the East Pun­jab Hold­ings (Con­sol­i­da­tion and Pre­ven­tion of Frag­men­ta­tion) Rules, 1949) that though own­er­ship of such land vests in pro­pri­etors, its man­age­ment and con­trol lies with the Gram Pan­chayat. These pan­chay­ats, whose fam­ily jew­els were be­ing looted, had no prob­lem with the state of af­fairs.

Once the Tri­bunal was set up on May 29, 2012, un­der re­tired Supreme Court judge, Jus­tice Kuldip Singh, to in­ves­ti­gate this scam worth hun­dreds of crores, the State it­self re­tal­i­ated, ar­gu­ing that the High Court had no right to set up the Tri­bunal.

Chron­i­cling and in­ves­ti­gat­ing the Sham­lat land grab in vil­lages around Chandi­garh, such as Nada, Karo­ran and Bar­tana in the pe­riph­ery of the cap­i­tal, the Jus­tice Kuldip Singh Tri­bunal found record mu­ta­tions done in con­nivance with rev­enue and pan­chayat of­fi­cers and was com­pelled to name top politi­cians, po­lice of­fi­cers and bu­reau­crats as hav­ing grabbed sham­lat land of pan­chay­ats.

The Tri­bunal sub­mit­ted its re­port on March 13, 2013, which had de­tails of 23,082 acres of sham­lat and 653 acres of Jumla Malkana land en­croached just in Mo­hali. At the time, the re­tired judge of the Supreme Court put the con­ser­v­a­tive mar­ket price fig­ure for this en­croached Sham­lat land at Rs 25,000 crore. The Pun­jab Gov­ern­ment of Cap­tain Amarinder Singh set up a sub-com­mit­tee of the Cab­i­net, headed by the then Lo­cal Bod­ies Min­is­ter Navjot Singh Sidhu, Rural De­vel­op­ment and Pan­chayat Min­is­ter Tript Ra­jin­der Singh Ba­jwa and Rev­enue Min­is­ter Sukhbinder Singh Sarkaria, to study the re­port. Sidhu, later eased out from the Cab­i­net, went on to say that the value of land grabbed in Mo­hali alone ex­ceeded the en­tire debt bur­den of Pun­jab, nearly Rs 2 lakh crore.

A for­mer Di­rec­tor-Gen­eral of Po­lice, Chan­dra Shekhar, who probed land grab in Chandi­garh UT’s pe­riph­ery, sub­mit­ted 12 re­ports af­ter ex­am­in­ing rev­enue records and found nearly 25,000 acres il­le­gally oc­cu­pied in Mo­hali dis­trict alone. Those who have tracked the de­vel­op­ment claim that an es­ti­mated five to six lakh acres of gov­ern­ment land is un­der il­le­gal oc­cu­pa­tion through­out Pun­jab.

The Tri­bunal had also rec­om­mended a CBI or sim­i­lar probe into “land grab cases” in­volv­ing pub­lic lands in Pun­jab vil­lages around Chandi­garh and set­ting up of a Spe­cial Bench to fol­low up on the Tri­bunal’s work. It also pushed for spe­cial of­fi­cers to deal with land mat­ters and not leave the work of pro­tect­ing Pan­chayat/​Gov­ern­ment/​Pub­lic lands to gov­ern­men­tal au­thor­i­ties. The Tri­bunal also wanted to re-open and de­cide afresh the or­ders of the Civil Courts/​Con­sol­i­da­tion and Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ties which were prima fa­cie il­le­gal and based on fraud/​col­lu­sion and con­spir­acy. It also wanted the High Court to in­voke suo moto pow­ers for the cleanup act, and rec­om­mended pun­ish­ment for Rev­enue/​Con­sol­i­da­tion De­part­ment of­fi­cials found in­volved. It also rec­om­mended abo­li­tion of the in­sti­tu­tion of pat­waris/​ka­nun­gos, call­ing them highly cor­rupt. Most im­por­tantly, it asked for a reg­u­lar au­dit of the Sham­lat lands.

ਇਸ ਲੇਖ ਨੂੰ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਪੜੋ

ਪੰਜਾਬ ਉੱਤੇ ਮੰਡਰਾ ਰਹੀ ਹੈ ਇਹ ਕਾਨੂੰਨੀ ਤਲਵਾਰ – ਕੀ ਬਚੇਗਾ ਪੰਜਾਬ?

Since then, the mat­ter has only been lin­ger­ing in red tape. Cap­tain Amarinder Singh has never broached the sub­ject on his own, and the op­po­si­tion Akali Dal has never trou­bled him on the is­sue of loot of the Vil­lage Com­mons. The Aam Aadmi Party is ba­si­cally an elec­toral ma­chine and the moral com­pass of its Delhi-based lead­er­ship is a bit tricky when it comes to Pun­jab is­sues. It once chucked out its state pres­i­dent cit­ing a video of an act of moral turpi­tude, but years later, no one has ever seen the video and it is dif­fi­cult to find a sin­gle soul who be­lieves it ever ex­isted.

* * *

Fam­ily jew­els are most im­por­tant to fam­i­lies that are pushed to­wards pau­peri­sa­tion. How im­pov­er­ished are Pun­jab’s vil­lages can be guaged from the Gov­ern­ment of In­di­a’s So­cio-Eco­nomic and Caste Cen­sus (SECC) data that puts the num­ber of rural house­holds with at least one salaried job at just 12.82 per cent, with 56.56 per cent rural house­holds sur­viv­ing on a monthly gross in­come of less than Rs 5,000. Only less than 18 per cent rural house­holds have an in­come of Rs 10,000 or more, and 64.51 per cent house­holds own zero land. Half the rural house­holds, 48.84 per cent, have no mo­torised means of trans­port (two wheeler, car, trac­tor etc). When, as per the same SECC data, only 3.02 per cent of the rural house­holds in Pun­jab have a mem­ber who is a qual­i­fied grad­u­ate or above, and with the Cen­sus data show­ing lit­er­acy rate among SCs as 64.81% (com­pared to Pun­jab’s 75.84% and In­di­a’s 73.00%) with fe­male lit­er­acy rate at 58.39%, where do you think the ed­u­cated, en­gaged re­sis­tance was to come from to gov­ern­ment poli­cies that are squeez­ing the life out of Pun­jab’s vil­lages?

Per­haps the Dal­its should have come out in huge num­bers to hold protests, storm the so­cial me­dia or in­un­date the state with cre­ative posters, as you saw in the on­go­ing anti-CAA-NRC ag­i­ta­tion, but with al­most all of them be­ing ei­ther agri­cul­tural labour­ers or stuck in low wage, ar­du­ous oc­cu­pa­tions, a dharna be­comes a lux­ury, a day at Chandi­garh’s Sec­tor 17 plaza means loss of in­come, some­times even a loss of three meals. Life at the mar­gins is a lit­tle hard, you know.

Fam­ily jew­els are most im­por­tant to fam­i­lies that are pushed to­wards pau­peri­sa­tion. 

Since the land­less agri­cul­tural labour­ers are a ma­jor stake­holder in the sham­lat land, thanks to the way the life of Pun­jab vil­lages has evolved as well as the law that gives the Dal­its among them the ex­clu­sive rights to cul­ti­vate one-third of the cul­tivable land, one won­ders if the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment, sworn to im­prove their liv­ing con­di­tions, paid heed to the lat­est re­search about their so­cio-eco­nomic con­di­tions.
The first-ever sur­vey about farm in­debt­ed­ness in Pun­jab that cov­ered agri­cul­tural labour­ers, un­like ear­lier stud­ies that left out farm labour, showed that more than 80% of the state’s agri­cul­ture labour fam­i­lies are un­der debt. En­ti­tled “In­debt­ed­ness Among Farm­ers and Agri­cul­tural Labour­ers,” the sur­vey by renowned econ­o­mist, Prof Gian Singh of Pun­jabi Uni­ver­sity, Pa­tiala and his as­so­ci­ates Dr Anu­pama, Dr Rupin­der Kaur, Dr Sukhvir Kaur (all from De­part­ment of Eco­nom­ics at Pun­jabi Uni­ver­sity) and Dr Gurinder Kaur, a pro­fes­sor at the De­part­ment of Ge­og­ra­phy at the same uni­ver­sity, de­picted a shock­ing skew in in­comes, ex­pen­di­ture and con­sump­tion pat­terns of farm labour­ers. Large land­hold­ing farm­ers spend more than six times than mar­ginal farm­ers and more than 12 times than agri­cul­tural labour­ers on durables, non-durables, ser­vices and so­cio-re­li­gious cer­e­monies.

While av­er­age an­nual in­come of a farmer fam­ily is Rs 2.92 lakh – rang­ing from Rs 12.03 lakh for large farm-size owner farmer’s fam­ily to Rs 1.39 lakh for mar­ginal farmer’s fam­ily – an av­er­age agri­cul­ture labour­er’s fam­ily earns a mere Rs 81,452 in a year, with more than 90 per cent of it com­ing from hir­ing out labour in agri­cul­ture.

The sur­vey un­der­lined the pitiable state of farm labour­ers, a sec­tion hith­erto ig­nored by many farm econ­o­mists. Jux­ta­posed with the fact that the much-talked about farm debt waiver of the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment com­pletely left out the land­less agri­cul­ture labour­ers, it be­trayed a mind­set that is again con­firmed by the lat­est move to sell off sham­lat lands, in many cases the only means of sur­vival of this im­pov­er­ished lot.

Clev­erly and de­lib­er­ately, Amarinder Singh has made a ma­jor push for this leg­is­la­tion when no one is look­ing. The coun­try is em­broiled in a fast-paced news cy­cle about the Cit­i­zen­ship Amend­ment Act and the pro­posed Na­tional Reg­is­ter of Cit­i­zens, the head­lines are be­ing claimed by the blood spilling in uni­ver­sity cam­puses, and Pun­jab is de­void of any real op­po­si­tion as Akali Dal strug­gles to keep its flock to­gether and the AAP waits in the wings to see when can it ac­tu­ally come into the elec­toral pic­ture.

The very first at­tempt to sell off the Vil­lage Com­mons is go­ing to be made in Ra­jpura in the Chief Min­is­ter’s home dis­trict of Pa­tiala. The Pun­jab gov­ern­ment plans to give away al­most 1,000 acres of Vil­lage Com­mon Land to in­dus­trial in­vestors. In­ci­den­tally, the pre­vi­ous state gov­ern­ment had also floated a sim­i­lar idea to lease pan­chayat lands to in­dus­try, but now the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment wants to out­rightly sell it. 

And this is not a stand-alone move to push the mar­gin­alised over the brink and sound the death knell of the idea of the vil­lage as we have known it so far. Com­ing up next are amend­ments in the Fac­to­ries Act, the In­dus­trial Dis­putes Act and the Con­tract Labour Act, all os­ten­si­bly aimed at boost­ing em­ploy­ment and in­dus­trial de­vel­op­ment, and in prac­tice aimed at dis­em­pow­er­ing labour­ers’ right to unionise, and mak­ing them vul­ner­a­ble to whims and fan­cies of ex­ploita­tive prac­tices.

Along­side the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­men­t’s push to “gift” sham­lat lands to MSMEs, it has also made it eas­ier for them to in­dulge in ex­ploita­tive prac­tices with­out fac­ing reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ance. The Pun­jab Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cially stated last month (De­cem­ber 2019) that it wanted “to re­duce the reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ance bur­den by waiv­ing the re­quire­ment of cer­tain ap­provals and in­spec­tions for es­tab­lish­ment and op­er­a­tions for MSMEs.” Mere self-de­c­la­ra­tion would hence­forth be enough, it said. Pun­jab cur­rently has ap­prox­i­mately 2 lakh MSME units.

Os­ten­si­bly prepar­ing for its Rural In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment also weak­ened the Fac­to­ries Act, 1948, In­dus­trial Dis­putes Act 1947 and Con­tract Labour (Reg­u­la­tion & Abo­li­tion) Act, 1970. In­sert­ing cer­tain amend­ments and a new sec­tion 106 B in the Fac­to­ries Act, 1948, it in­creases the thresh­old limit of num­ber of work­ers from ‘ten’ and ‘twen­ty’ to ‘twen­ty’ and ‘forty’, in fac­to­ries with man­u­fac­tur­ing processes car­ried out with or with­out the aid of power, re­spec­tively. The new tweaks also al­lowed for com­pound­ing of of­fences. So ea­ger was Amarinder Singh to see this that his Cab­i­net gave its nod to do all this through an or­di­nance.

The Cab­i­net has also ap­proved amend­ment to Sec­tion 25K (1) to in­crease the min­i­mum num­ber of work­ers for ap­ply­ing the pro­vi­sions re­lat­ing to lay­offs, re­trench­ment and clo­sure to 300 from 100, while shrink­ing the lim­i­ta­tion pe­riod to just three months. The gov­ern­ment is also amend­ing the Con­tract Labour (Reg­u­la­tion & Abo­li­tion) Act, 1970, jack­ing up the am­bit of the Act from pre­sent thresh­old limit of 20 to 50 work­ers.

And these MSMEs are com­ing soon, to a vil­lage next to you.

The very first at­tempt to sell off the Vil­lage Com­mons is go­ing to be made in Ra­jpura in the Chief Min­is­ter’s home dis­trict of Pa­tiala. The Pun­jab gov­ern­ment plans to give away al­most 1,000 acres of Vil­lage Com­mon Land to in­dus­trial in­vestors. In­ci­den­tally, the pre­vi­ous state gov­ern­ment had also floated a sim­i­lar idea to lease pan­chayat lands to in­dus­try, but now the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment wants to out­rightly sell it. In­ter­mit­tent re­ports have al­ready started trick­ling in about a strong lo­cal-level re­sis­tance to the move. In the past, Pun­jab saw a strong anti-land ac­qui­si­tion strug­gle in Bar­nala (against the Tri­dent in­dus­try group) and in Mansa (against In­di­a­b­ulls Power firm).

Un­like the “Right to Fair Com­pen­sa­tion and Trans­parency in Land Ac­qui­si­tion, Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and Re­set­tle­ment Act, 2013,” which has a pro­vi­sion that if any land ac­quired from farm­ers is not used for the stated pur­pose, then it can be vested back to the orig­i­nal land own­ers, the new pro­vi­sions backed by the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment have no such clause.

Com­mon prop­erty re­sources, which con­sti­tute 15 per cent of the coun­try’s to­tal area, are shrink­ing at a rate of 1.9 per cent every five years due to en­croach­ment, as per the Na­tional Sam­ple Sur­vey Or­gan­i­sa­tion. Since In­de­pen­dence, more than 834,000 hectares of vil­lage com­mons have been en­croached. Vil­lage com­mons in­clude every­thing from pas­tures, forests and com­mon thresh­ing grounds to ponds, ir­ri­ga­tion chan­nels and rivers, and play an im­por­tant role in rural econ­omy.

The Pun­jab Vil­lage Com­mon Lands (Reg­u­la­tion) Act, 1961 nowhere pro­vides that the state gov­ern­ment can leg­is­late a law en­abling pan­chay­ats to sell land to in­dus­tri­al­ists to set up MSMEs in vil­lages, said Dr Pyara Lal Garg, a widely-re­spected so­cial and po­lit­i­cal ac­tivist and for­mer Reg­is­trar of Pun­jab’s Baba Farid Uni­ver­sity of Health Sci­ences.

“Pun­jab gov­ern­ment has not ex­plained how any vil­lage pan­chayat can sell some­thing that does not be­long to it, or that never be­longed to it? Sham­lat land, by its very de­f­i­n­i­tion, is land in col­lec­tive pos­ses­sion of the res­i­dents of a vil­lage,” said Dr Garg.

Com­mon prop­erty re­sources, which con­sti­tute 15 per cent of the coun­try’s to­tal area, are shrink­ing at a rate of 1.9 per cent every five years due to en­croach­ment, as per the Na­tional Sam­ple Sur­vey Or­gan­i­sa­tion. Since In­de­pen­dence, more than 834,000 hectares of vil­lage com­mons have been en­croached. 

Vil­lages have had com­mon land re­sources for cen­turies that re­mained se­cure sim­ply be­cause no one ever had the real power to sell them off whole­sale. The Sham­lat land ex­ist­ing in Pun­jab’s vil­lages to­day in­cludes land var­i­ously de­scribed as ‘Jumla Malkan Wa Di­gar Haq­daran Arazi Has­sab Rasad’, ‘Jumla Malkan’, ‘Mushtarka Malkan’, ‘ban­jar qadim’ etc lands which were re­served for the com­mon pur­poses of a vil­lage un­der Sec­tion 18 of the East Pun­jab Hold­ings (Con­sol­i­da­tion and Pre­ven­tion of Frag­men­ta­tion) Act, 1948. [See 2(g)(6) of Act of 1961].

Gram Pan­chayat can de­cide us­age, main­tain, or even make a de­ci­sion to lease or sell but how will do so with­out evolv­ing a mech­a­nism or rules for as­cer­tain­ing con­sent is not clear. Non-con­sen­sual sale of sham­lat land by Pan­chayat will be vi­ola­tive of Ar­ti­cle 31-A of the Con­sti­tu­tion of In­dia.

The NSSO sur­vey says 45 per cent of the rural house­holds de­pend upon the Vil­lage Com­mons for fire­wood col­lec­tion, 13 per cent for fod­der col­lec­tion, 20 per cent for graz­ing land, 30 per cent for wa­ter for live­stock and 23 per cent for wa­ter for ir­ri­ga­tion.  As for the rural SC pop­u­la­tion, they are al­most en­tirely de­pen­dent on these Vil­lage Com­mons for all such needs.

“Pun­jab gov­ern­ment has not ex­plained how any vil­lage pan­chayat can sell some­thing that does not be­long to it, or that never be­longed to it? Sham­lat land, by its very de­f­i­n­i­tion, is land in col­lec­tive pos­ses­sion of the res­i­dents of a vil­lage,”

Dr Pyare­lal Garg, so­cial and po­lit­i­cal ac­tivist, for­mer Reg­is­trar, Baba Farid Uni­ver­sity of Health Sci­ences

“The loss of Sham­lat land will ac­tu­ally be a much big­ger loss,” said Dr Garg, adding, “Most vil­lage in­fra­struc­ture has been built on land parcels given from the Sham­lat lands, be these pan­chayat ghars, schools, dis­pen­saries, an­gan­wadis, janj ghars, cre­ma­tion grounds or graz­ing lands. Vil­lage fes­ti­vals are nor­mally held on these Vil­lage Com­mons, as are women fes­ti­vals such as Teeyan Da Mela. Sale of sham­lat land will mean non-avail­abil­ity of land for upgra­da­tion of schools, or ex­pan­sion of any ex­ist­ing struc­ture. It will also mean the end of so­cial life as vil­lages have known for cen­turies.”

Even with­out pow­ers to sell off land, Sham­lat lands have been heav­ily en­croached, ponds have been filled, sold and lost for­ever. With these pow­ers to sell com­mon land, how many dry ponds will sur­vive? How many grounds will not be sold be­cause the pan­chayat will de­cide that it is most nec­es­sary for the vil­lage mela?

It is true that states across In­dia have been skimp­ing on con­sent, so­cial im­pact as­sess­ments and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and re­set­tle­ment but the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment is guilty of let­ting the bar plum­met to lev­els un­prece­dent­edly low in cen­turies.

Of Pun­jab’s 5.03 mil­lion hectares ge­o­graph­i­cal area, 4.20 mil­lion hectares, or 83%, is un­der cul­ti­va­tion, with crop­ping in­ten­sity pegged at al­most 190% or above. Imag­ine the kind of pres­sure the in­dus­try sec­tor will bring upon the pan­chay­ats to sell off their lands!

Vet­eran jour­nal­ist Tar­lochan Singh, who has chron­i­cled for years the saga of those vil­lages whose land was ac­quired to set up the city called Chandi­garh, said if the pur­pose was to set up in­dus­try and gen­er­ate em­ploy­ment, there are a hu­mon­gous num­ber of units ly­ing closed in town af­ter town.

He is right. Thou­sands of MSMEs in Pun­jab have been reel­ing un­der heavy debt for years, cry­ing hoarse for bailout pack­ages, and RTI ac­tivists in 2015 found that 18,770 units had shut down or mi­grated out of Pun­jab since 2007, in ad­di­tion to 6,550 in­dus­trial units that had been de­clared sick. Since then, things have moved fur­ther south. Alarm­ing data spews out of every source, be it the Union Min­istry of Mi­cro, Small and Medium En­ter­prises talk­ing about Pun­jab units run­ning in heavy losses, the Pun­jab Fi­nance Cor­po­ra­tion (PFC), the nodal agency for ex­tend­ing loans to in­dus­trial units, de­tail­ing units de­fault­ing on loan re­pay­ment, or the Pun­jab In­dus­try De­part­ment for­ever busy prepar­ing bailout pack­ages for sick in­dus­tries.

ਇਸ ਲੇਖ ਨੂੰ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਪੜੋ

ਪੰਜਾਬ ਉੱਤੇ ਮੰਡਰਾ ਰਹੀ ਹੈ ਇਹ ਕਾਨੂੰਨੀ ਤਲਵਾਰ – ਕੀ ਬਚੇਗਾ ਪੰਜਾਬ?

“Those whose lands were ac­quired for the so-called City Beau­ti­ful are still run­ning from pil­lar to post to seek com­pen­sa­tion. What makes you think those sell­ing sham­lat lands will be able to re­cover costs?”

Tar­lochan Singh, in his book, “Chandi­garh: Uj­jaadiyan Di Das­taan” (The Saga of the Dis­placed)

New law has pro­vi­sion that in­dus­tri­al­ist will pay 75% of cost of land to pan­chayat in four an­nual in­stal­ments. “How many pan­chay­ats will be able to af­ford the lit­i­ga­tion to drag the in­dus­trial houses to court if they do not pay one or more in­stal­ments? If the PSIEC will stand guar­an­tee, what is the guar­an­tee that to­mor­row, the PSIEC will not be­come a sick PSU it­self?” asks Dr Garg.

Tar­lochan Singh, whose book, “Chandi­garh: Uj­jaadiyan Di Das­taan” (The Saga of the Dis­placed), said, “Those whose lands were ac­quired for the so-called City Beau­ti­ful are still run­ning from pil­lar to post to seek com­pen­sa­tion. What makes you think those sell­ing sham­lat lands will be able to re­cover costs?” A more sig­nif­i­cant ques­tion is if there ever can be com­pen­sa­tion for cen­turies of way of life.

In his re­mark­able book, “The Price of Land: Ac­qui­si­tion, Con­flict, Con­se­quence,” San­joy Chakra­vorty, pro­fes­sor of Ge­og­ra­phy and Ur­ban Stud­ies, Tem­ple Uni­ver­sity, Philadel­phia, says land should not be ac­quired through gov­ern­ment writ at all but should in­stead be bought through ne­go­ti­a­tions like in a free mar­ket.

It is a view with which Jairam Ramesh, a fel­low Con­gress­man of Amarinder Singh, con­curs in his book. “Land ac­qui­si­tion should be un­der the rarest of rare cir­cum­stances. In fact, over a 10-15-year pe­riod, we should move to a sit­u­a­tion where gov­ern­ments do not ac­quire land even for their own use. They should buy.”

When seen in the con­text that con­tem­po­rary In­dia has seen the most vi­o­lent of peo­ple’s move­ments on the is­sue of land ac­qui­si­tion for in­dus­try or in­fra­struc­ture, be these in Sin­gur, Nandi­gram, Niyam­giri or Maha Mum­bai, this sim­ple mar­ket truth makes sense. If the in­dus­try needs it, it should go and buy at mar­ket rates. The counter-ar­gu­ment that land ac­qui­si­tion is an ob­sta­cle in In­di­a’s growth path is a spin put out by cham­bers and apol­o­gists of big busi­ness. At the end of the day, the is­sue of land is pri­mar­ily a po­lit­i­cal is­sue. Your view hinges on your pol­i­tics. Cap­tain Amarinder Singh is mak­ing his pol­i­tics, pri­or­i­ties and pro­cliv­i­ties clear with his lat­est leg­isla­tive move. That his pol­i­tics, pri­or­i­ties or pro­cliv­i­ties are not very dif­fer­ent from the other claimants to power in Pun­jab should be no rea­son why ques­tions should not be raised.

“Land should not be ac­quired through gov­ern­ment writ at all but should in­stead be bought through ne­go­ti­a­tions like in a free mar­ket.”

Amarinder Singh could have used the Supreme Court judge­ment in Ro­har Ja­gir vil­lage in his back­yard to re­trieve his peo­ple’s com­mon land that was robbed on the strength of money and mus­cle power, but in­stead, he is now find­ing le­gal ways of tak­ing away that land from the vil­lages. (Of course, the Supreme Court judge­ment could also be used to evict the poor from sham­lat lands. A case in point is the evac­u­a­tion of the poor from the Ya­muna riverbed in Delhi and in­stead us­ing that land for set­ting up the Com­mon­wealth Games Vil­lage at the same site.)

“Given Pun­jab’s re­al­i­ties, one would imag­ine that the cen­tral po­lit­i­cal ques­tion would have been of land re­forms, of clar­i­fy­ing land records, of iden­ti­fy­ing land pos­ses­sions in breach of the land ceil­ing act. In­stead, the gov­ern­ment is deny­ing the share of dal­its in Sham­lat land and is now out to al­to­gether sell the sham­lat land,” said Paramjit Kaur Lon­gowal, a se­nior ac­tivist of the Za­meen Prapti Sang­harsh Com­mit­tee (ZPSC), adding that this will only widen the scope of their move­ment.

Thanks to the stag­na­tion in the agri­cul­ture sec­tor, farmer or­gan­i­sa­tions’ view is more in­formed by the eco­nom­ics of land prices than by the prin­ci­ple of se­cur­ing fam­ily jew­els. While dalit and agri­cul­ture labour­ers are strongly op­pos­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s move to sell sham­lat land to in­dus­tries, the far more re­source­ful farmer or­gan­i­sa­tions have been de­ploy­ing lan­guage that be­trays ei­ther con­fu­sion or plau­si­ble flex­i­bil­ity. While the fac­tion led by Bal­bir Singh Ra­je­wal has clearly op­posed the move and Ra­je­wal has said the gov­ern­ment will get to know the real ex­tent of the op­po­si­tion once its bu­reau­crats and of­fi­cials reach the vil­lages to de­mar­cate the Vil­lage Com­mons, the BKU (Ekta Ugra­han) fac­tion did op­pose but kept enough mar­gin for nu­anc­ing.

“The de­ci­sion will hit the land­less and farm labour­ers hard,” Jogin­der Singh Ugra­han and Sukhdev Singh Kokri Kalan of the BKU (Ekta-Ugra­han) said in a state­ment, but also added, “The union is not op­posed to set­ting up in­dus­try in rural ar­eas and pan­chay­ats will be happy to give land for this pur­pose, but cre­at­ing a land bank in ad­vance will cre­ate prob­lems as in many cases, there are fears that no in­dus­try will be set up and the land will be gob­bled by spec­u­la­tors.”

Farmer or­gan­i­sa­tions are more likely to pro­tect the in­ter­ests of landed farm­ers, and is­sues of land­less or those de­pen­dent on land-own­ing farm­ers are sec­ondary for them. With not just mar­ginal or small farm­ers fac­ing a bleak fu­ture, but even big­ger farm­ers stuck in the sec­toral cri­sis, sell­ing land does not seem like such a bad idea.

The “Pind Bachao, Pun­jab Bachao,” an um­brella body of do-good­ers that in­cludes widely re­spected se­nior re­tired pro­fes­sion­als, so­cial and po­lit­i­cal ac­tivists, has strongly op­posed the gov­ern­men­t’s move and has given a clar­ion call to the Gram Sab­has to pass res­o­lu­tions and refuse to sell the Sham­lat lands.

The is­sue of us­age of sham­lat land, its con­nec­tion with en­sur­ing food se­cu­rity and its role as sole source of sus­te­nance for many is well un­der­stood by econ­o­mists. Con­gress­man Amarinder Singh may not be very keen to read schol­ars from a uni­ver­sity his party is fight­ing for but Amit Bhaduri, Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of Jawa­har­lal Nehru Uni­ver­sity, in his fore­word to the re­cent tome on “Food Se­cu­rity in In­dia: Myth and Re­al­ity” by Vikas Ba­j­pai and Anoop Saraya, writ­ing about the is­sue of food se­cu­rity, said: “(The) ques­tion is not the high or low rate of eco­nomic growth, fis­cal or cur­rent ac­count deficit…but what needs to be done to not just pre­tend to al­le­vi­ate poverty and hunger as an elec­tion gim­mick but to de­mol­ish that evil struc­ture that nur­tures it in the name of democ­racy. Iden­ti­fy­ing that struc­ture is the first step of a longer jour­ney.” (Dur­ing the writ­ing of this story, Prof Bhaduri re­signed from his po­si­tion in the JNU in protest against the at­tack on stu­dents protest­ing against the Cit­i­zen­ship Act.)

It will be a no-brainer to ask of the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment whether it is plan­ning to sell the Sham­lat land of Pun­jab’s vil­lages to in­dus­tri­al­ists in the name of Rural In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion to re­move the struc­tures that keep our vil­lages im­pov­er­ished and dis­em­pow­ered, or whether this will ac­tu­ally strengthen the struc­tural claws which will snuff the life out of this civil­i­sa­tional en­tity called a vil­lage. My guess is that you know the an­swer. The ques­tion is what do you plan to do about it?

A se­nior lawyer who closely tracked the Ro­har Ja­gir res­i­dent Jag­pal Singh’s case, said with­out restor­ing and pro­tect­ing the Vil­lage Com­mons, the 73rd Amend­ment of the Con­sti­tu­tion of In­dia, aligned with Ma­hatma Gand­hi’s vi­sion about gram swaraj, will have no mean­ing, in­clud­ing what is pro­vided un­der the XI Sched­ule of the Con­sti­tu­tion for the Pan­chay­ats to eco­nom­i­cally de­velop the vil­lages and en­sure so­cial jus­tice.

It will be a no-brainer to ask of the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment whether it is plan­ning to sell the Sham­lat land of Pun­jab’s vil­lages to in­dus­tri­al­ists in the name of Rural In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion to re­move the struc­tures that keep our vil­lages im­pov­er­ished and dis­em­pow­ered, or whether this will ac­tu­ally strengthen the struc­tural claws which will snuff the life out of this civil­i­sa­tional en­tity called a vil­lage. My guess is that you know the an­swer. The ques­tion is what do you plan to do about it?

The state of the vil­lages can be gauged from the fact that the state gov­ern­men­t’s own sur­veys have pegged farm­ers’ and farm labour­ers’ sui­cides at over 16,000 in 15 years.  The lat­est data re­leased by the Na­tional Crime Records Bu­reau (NCRB) within days of Pun­jab Cab­i­net giv­ing its ap­proval to sell Sham­lat land, showed that farm sui­cides are on a de­cline, but Amarinder gov­ern­men­t’s own data shows these are on the rise in Pun­jab. The NCRB has not shared Pun­jab data with the gov­ern­ment, a fact ad­mit­ted by KS Pannu, Sec­re­tary, Agri­cul­ture. The NCRB did not re­lease data for farm sui­cides for 2017 and did not share state­wise data for 2018, draw­ing wide­spread crit­i­cism but not one min­is­ter or MLA of rul­ing Con­gress is on record as hav­ing is­sued a sin­gle state­ment to con­demn this ac­tion of Modi gov­ern­ment.

ਇਸ ਲੇਖ ਨੂੰ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਪੜੋ

ਪੰਜਾਬ ਉੱਤੇ ਮੰਡਰਾ ਰਹੀ ਹੈ ਇਹ ਕਾਨੂੰਨੀ ਤਲਵਾਰ – ਕੀ ਬਚੇਗਾ ਪੰਜਾਬ?

Since we are cur­rently watch­ing In­dia in the throes of a bat­tle to save the Con­sti­tu­tion, it will be ap­pro­pri­ate to re­call Ar­ti­cle 39 (a), (b) & (c) of the In­dian Con­sti­tu­tion (Di­rec­tive Prin­ci­ples of State Pol­icy):

The State shall, in par­tic­u­lar, di­rect its pol­icy to­wards se­cur­ing
(a) that the cit­i­zens, men and women equally, have the right to an ad­e­quate means to liveli­hood;
(b) that the own­er­ship and con­trol of the ma­te­r­ial re­sources of the com­mu­nity are so dis­trib­uted as best to sub­serve the com­mon good;
(c) that the op­er­a­tion of the eco­nomic sys­tem does not re­sult in the con­cen­tra­tion of wealth and means of pro­duc­tion to the com­mon detri­ment;

Var­i­ous apex court judg­ments have held that in Ar­ti­cle 21 — “No per­son shall be de­prived of his life or per­sonal lib­erty ex­cept ac­cord­ing to the pro­ce­dure es­tab­lished by law.” — ‘life’ does not mean merely the phys­i­cal act of breath­ing, does not con­note mere an­i­mal ex­is­tence or con­tin­ued drudgery through life but has a much wider mean­ing that in­cludes right to live with hu­man dig­nity, right to liveli­hood, right to health, right to pol­lu­tion-free air, right to a mean­ing­ful, com­plete, and worth liv­ing life.

Whether or not the Con­gress gov­ern­ment of Cap­tain Amarinder Singh is work­ing as per the dik­tats of the Con­sti­tu­tion that his par­ty’s pres­i­dents, both for­mer and in­terim, are fight­ing to safe­guard, is a ques­tion we leave you to an­swer. All we know is that Pun­jabis’ favourite slo­gan of ‘In­quilab Zind­abad’ clearly means some­thing very dif­fer­ent to Amarinder Singh who is in a hurry to usher in this dan­ger­ous Rural In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. If you al­low pas­sage of a law to sell the Sham­lat lands in vil­lages to the in­dus­try, it will be the end of Pun­jab as you and your fore­fa­thers have al­ways known. The time to put up a fight to save the land of the Gu­rus is now. To­mor­row will be too late. Choose your side in this bat­tle.

A Rev­o­lu­tion is com­ing any­way.

SP Singh is an in­de­pen­dent jour­nal­ist who has worked with lead­ing na­tional mast­heads in the cap­i­tals of In­dia and Pun­jab, has been track­ing Pun­jab for close to twenty years now and is firmly plonked on the in­ter­sec­tion of jour­nal­ism and acad­e­mia. He is also the host of one of Pun­jab’s longest-run­ning news tele­vi­sion de­bate shows, cur­rently writes a weekly col­umn for a lead­ing Pun­jabi news­pa­per and un­apolo­get­i­cally ploughs a lonely fur­row. He lives in the ter­mite hills be­yond Chandi­garh, brews his own cof­fee and stews in his own ver­bose world.