The Bombay High Court has granted a stay on demolition notices issued to over 100 tenements situated around Kolhapur’s Vishalgarh Fort. This interim stay has been granted until March 10 while the court has sought information from the government whether there is a policy dealing with old settlements within a protected monument, reported Livelaw.
The petitioner’s counsel Pradnya Talekar contended that some of the tenements that have received the notice were even regularized. The bench led by Justice GS Patel told the State to justify these regularizations. According to the petitioners, they have been in possession for over 30-60 years. One of them submitted that land was allotted to them in 1983 and some of the regularization applications are still pending in court.
These notices were issued by the Department of Archaeology under Section 21 (2) of the Maharashtra Ancient Monuments and Archeological Sites Remains Act, 1960 stating that demolition would be carried out within 30 days.
On February 5 it was reported that the state government allotted the administration in Kolhapur Rs. 1 crore to get these “encroachments” near Vishalgarh fort removed. The Kolhapur District Collector Rahul Rekhawar had assured people that the “encroachments” would be removed before Mahashivratri on February 18, reported Times of India. It was also stated that while the government had allotted the sum for removal of these tenements, the cost would be alter recovered from the “encroachers”, the Vishalgarh Conservation Committee had issued a warning to the administration that if they were not successful in removing these “encroachments” before Mahashivratri, they would remove them on their own.
Some petitioners have even claimed that some Right Wing organisations have a part to play in these sudden notices being issued as they had raised these issues of alleged encroachments by Muslims on the fort site.
This apprehension seems to be legitimate as at a march organized by Sakal Hindu Samaj, on January 1, Sudarshan News Editor Suresh Chavhanke had also demanded that Vishalgarh be “freed from encroachments before Mahashivratri”. He also said, “Kolhapur should be freed from Jihadis”.
A Bombay High Court led by the same judge, Justice GS Patel, had, in its order dated February 8 had granted stay on demolitions to be carried out by the Western Railways stressing upon the need for rehabilitation of those displaced. “Throughout, we bear in mind that merely labelling these persons as “encroachers” is not going to answer the problem. This is a serious problem in the city and it is a problem of human displacement. Sometimes, the scale of the displacement is beyond the imagination. It has to be addressed in a more considered fashion than by merely deploying bulldozers on the site,” the court had said. Even the Supreme Court in its December 16, 2021 order directed Railways to follow directions before people are evicted from Railway land and rehabilitation was one of the pertinent factors.
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