Click to play videoJammu: Hundred acres of land near the Amarnath shrine had entire Jammu and Kashmir state burning last month. And on Thursday, an elderly Kashmiri migrant couple set themselves on fire after losing their 22.5 acres of land, allegedly due to encroachment.
Ramanand, 72, and his wife Vaishno Devi killed themselves in their house in the Nagrota migrant camp. The couple had left Kashmir in 1989 and been living in their one-room house for the last 19 years.
“He (Ramanand) had come from Srinagar and told me that his land was encroached upon by neighbours and a tehsildar. He said a school had been built there,” Ramanand's friend, Moti Lal Bhat, said. “He wasn’t given any compensation for the land. He had been fighting for it for several years and was extremely frustrated.”
The couple had no children. Their closest friend, Gauri Singh, says that for the last five years Ramanand had been regularly going to Kashmir to reclaim his land in the Man'd Gori village of Kulgam.
“His petitions have been lying with administration, DCs, tehsildars, and even relief commissioner for the last five years but no one has responded,” Gauri said.
Such instances of land encroachment are not the first for Kashmiri migrants. Recently, the state assembly even passed a bill to prevent encroachment. Organisations have even been demanding that revenue records be digitalised and posted on the web to prevent tampering. But before all that is implemented, two lives have already been lost.
The incident is another reminder of the fact that land still remains an emotional for those who left Kashmir.
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