– Mohammed Atherulla Shariff
Bengaluru: The Congress government in Karnataka on Monday dismissed the allegations of the BJP that the state Waqf Board had issued notices to farmers to claim 1,200 acres of farmland at Honvad village in Vijayapura district.
It accused the BJP of raking up the controversy to influence the upcoming polls in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, and the bypolls in Karnataka while drumming up a narrative for the proposed Waqf Amendment Bill of the Centre.
In a joint news conference, Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda, Industries and Vijayapura District-In-Charge Minister MB Patil, and Waqf Minister Zameer Ahmed Khan said the allegations of the Waqf claiming 1,200 acres of land at Honvad were based on a wrong entry in the 1974 gazette notification of Waqf properties. It was rectified in 1977 and none from Honvad was served notice by the government, Gowda said, adding that the extent of Waqf land in the village was only 11 acres.
While a total of 14,201 acres were notified in the 1974 gazette, the Waqf Board was currently in possession of only 773 acres as 11,835 acres were allotted to farmers under the Land Reforms Act, 1,459 acres under the Inam Abolition Act and 133 acres were acquired for various government projects. The remaining 1,345 acres were encroached, according to the data released at the news conference.
Gowda said of the 124 notices served following a Waqf Adalat held on October 10, this year, re-entry of property details was done for 41 by the Tahsildar “without issuing notice to the concerned,” which was a “procedural lapse”, at Indi taluk of the district. Directions were issued to set aside the mutations, the minister said.
He said a task force led by the deputy commissioner of the district will be formed to verify all entries in Waqf and Revenue records. “If any land is notified in 1973-74 and farmers have documents to prove that they had possession of the land before that year, the government will consider them,” he said, citing examples of cases where wrong entries of the 1974 gazette were rectified after documents were presented.
According to Gowda, the episode was a ‘systematic conspiracy’ even when the facts about the case were clear.
Zameer Ahmed Khan said that save for the land allotted by the government for graveyard, all land under Waqf Board was donated. “Though the total extent of land under Waqf Board was 1.12 lakh acres, now only 23,860 acre remained,” he said.
Following the notices served by the local administration, BJP had alleged that notices for thousands of acres of land were being served by the Waqf Board, with Leader of Opposition R Ashok terming it as ‘land jihad’. Meanwhile, the BJP has also formed a fact-finding panel to visit Honvad Tuesday over the issue.
