SC has paused the eviction of people from land in Haldwani and sought some workable solution

The Supreme Court order checking an eviction drive on railway land in Uttarakhand’s Haldwani is a big relief for the people concerned. The apex court rightly said, “There cannot be uprooting of 50,000 people overnight... It’s a human issue; some workable solution needs to be found.” It would indeed have been very harsh for those people to be made homeless suddenly. The court has also barred any construction in the area and asked the Railways and the Uttarakhand Government to respond. Both will respond; ideally, the response should pertain to not just the instant case of encroachments but all Railway and state Government lands that have been illegally occupied. In fact, the Central Government should come up with some kind of mechanism to (i) get all such land evacuated and (ii) ensure that no future encroachments are made in the future. That would be the “workable solution” that the SC favours. Is it possible? Yes, it is, but the current state of affairs is not conducive for that; the situation in the Haldwani locality and various reactions to it inform us why. The 2-km strip of land near the Haldwani railway station has houses, schools (including four government schools), water tanks, mosques, temples, shops, etc. All these came up over decades. The colony came on the radar in 2013 in an illegal sand mining case in a river near the area. The matter reached the High Court which ordered eviction, even suggesting that paramilitary force be used for the purpose. The SC didn’t find that correct.

Typically, the issue has got embroiled in politicking. Activists and Congress leaders are blaming the BJP Government in the state for eviction because most residents in the area are Muslim. “Uttarakhand is a spiritual state,” senior Congress leader and former chief minister Harish Rawat said. “If 50,000 people including children, pregnant women, old men and women are forced to vacate their homes and come out on roads, then it would be a very sad sight.” Now that the apex court has paused the eviction, what does he, or his party, have to offer for a workable solution? Such are the perils of a polity in which sentiments rule the roost and from which reason has been exiled. Statesmen, they say, think of the next generation, politicians of the next election—and Indian politicians of the next day’s Twitter trends. Encroachment is a huge problem, resulting in environmental degradation (as in the Haldwani case), urban decay, corruption, and waste of national resources. Worse, it is not just illegal occupation of government and public land that makes the countryside, towns, and cities ugly; there is also the issue of ‘plotting’—that is, unauthorised conversion of land (mostly agricultural land) into habitations. The so-called unauthorised colonies. The need of the hour is a comprehensive policy, involving major political parties and other stakeholders. Our political leaders have to lead such an endeavour, but they are busy fighting each other.