A Fear That Refuses To Go

How revocation of Article 370 has reinforced old insecurities. An extract

Anuradha Bhasin

According to government records, the Indian military has grabbed 53,353 hectares in Kashmir under the guise of ‘national security’. In early 2018, former J&K chief minister, Mehbooba Mufti informed the legislative assembly that 51,116 kanals of state land in Jammu and 379,817 kanals of land in Kashmir were under the unauthorized occupation of the Indian armed forces. This includes occupation of agricultural land, forest land, state land and private buildings. Which has led to dispossession, depeasantization, and loss of livelihoods, further affecting food sovereignty of the peasantry in rural Kashmir.

In October 2020, just before the land-related laws were change, the Jammu and Kashmir government identified twenty-five acres of grazing land in Budgam district to set up Kashmir’s first Sainik colony. The colony is being set up to provide housing facilities to retired ex-servicemen, hailing from far-flung areas and will also provide them security, owing to their potential vulnerability amidst the bloody conflict.

However, locally this has triggered fears of a colony project aimed at settling retired armed forces by dislodging the locals. Many Kashmiris believe that with the broadened definition of domiciles and land now open to all outsiders, such colonies may be used to engineer an influx of settlers under the garb of providing facilities to the retired security personnel.

The chosen site has also raised many eyebrows. Revenue officials in all the ten districts of Kashmir were asked to identify land for the colony. The Budgam tehsildar, Nusrat Aziz, said that ‘the only place we could find that much land was Rakh-e-Arth near Bemina but nothing has been finalized yet. We have only given our recommendat