SC order will stop govts from arbitrary house razing: Cong

Dehradun: The Congress’ Uttarakhand unit on Wednesday welcomed the Supreme Court’s guidelines on the demolition of properties, saying it will stop governments from razing houses arbitrarily.

The opposition party’s state unit vice president Mathura Dutt Joshi said the top court’s decision will force governments to become more fair in their approach. Equating ‘bulldozer justice’ with a lawless state of affairs where might is right, the Supreme Court laid down pan-India guidelines and said no property should be demolished without a prior show cause notice and the affected must be given 15 days to respond. The executive cannot assume judicial powers to punish citizens by demolishing their properties without following due process, the apex court said while terming such excesses “high-handed and arbitrary” and ruling that they need to be dealt with the “heavy hand of the law”.

Reacting to the verdict, Joshi said, “We welcome the apex court’s directives. It will put an end to the undemocratic practice of demolition of houses by governments with bulldozers in an arbitrary manner.” “Democratically elected governments are supposed to work for the welfare of people, not ruin them. Such arbitrary actions shake the faith of the people in democracy,” he told PTI. When asked about incidents of bulldozer action in Uttarakhand, Joshi said he cannot recall any incident in which a private house was demolished but there has been large-scale demolition of mazars in the state.

Encroachments have been removed from more than 5,000 acres of government land in Uttarakhand as part of the state’s action against “land jihad”, a term used by the BJP government in Uttarakhand for largescale encroachment of government land by a particular community.