JAMMU: Three MLAs of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had voted in support of the ruling National Conference (NC) on October 24 in the Rajya Sabha elections. PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti had said the NC did not deserve support but this was necessary evil to keep the communal BJP at bay. The party also made some statements that it wanted to introduce a private members bill regarding proprietary rights for people who were living in houses they had constructed on state land.
When the time came for supporting the bill after PDP MLA Waheed ur Rehman Para moved it, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah outright rejected it. Incidentally, on the occasion to find out the verdict of the assembly on this bill, the NC and the opposition BJP voted together. Mr Abdullah said the bill being passed would amount to no less than an organised land grab. He also took Para to task for saying that Omar’s grandfather Sheikh Abdullah had done something similar once upon a time.
Omar drew a distinction between “land to the tiller’’his grandfather had made into a law and what the PDP MLA was bringing forth. He said the PDP has always been disowning everything that his party, the NC, has done. But on this occasion, the PDP was drawing false equivalences and misleading everyone else. Speaking against the bill, the CM said it was not an act of social justice but as a dangerous legislative precedent that threatened to erode the region’s land integrity.
“This bill would open floodgates for land grab,” CM Omar Abdullah said. He acknowledged the seemingly simple premise of the bill but drew parallels to the Roshni scheme (The Jammu and Kashmir State Lands (Vesting of Ownership to the Occupants) Act, 2001). This bill was brought forth by Omar’s father Dr Farooq Abdullah for apparently mobilising funds for setting up hydropower projects.
“On the surface, it looks easy. If someone has constructed a house on government land, give the land to him,” Abdullah stated. He elaborated that the Roshni scheme was changed beyond recognition when the government led by Ghulam Nabi Azad removed the crucial ‘pre-militancy’ cut-off clause. “There was a controversy, and there was talk of ‘land jehad’ and whatnot. It went to court, and we could not defend it there,” he pointed out.
“This proposal of the MLA (read Waheed Para) is beyond the Roshni scheme. The bill does not put a cut-off timeline. We cannot do this,” Omar said.
For genuinely landless people, Omar argued, there were provisions in the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), and thus a sweeping regularisation of encroachments on state land as proposed through this bill was both unnecessary and reckless. The proposed legislation The Jammu and Kashmir (Regularisation and Recognition of Property Rights of Residents in Public Land) Bill, 2025, sought to grant special, one-time provisions to recognise the proprietary rights of residential structures built on State land, Kahcharai land (grazing land), Common land, and Shamilat land. Its stated goals were humanitarian: to provide legal security of tenure and enable residents to access financial services.
The bill was aimed at stalling anti-encroachment drive launched in the preceding years, which had seen thousands of hectares of land retrieved. The PDP claims that the drive was aimed at targeting the marginalised sections and has created a climate of fear, especially in the Kashmir Valley. “While the state land is being allotted… will you render homeless those who are already living on the state land?” Para questioned the CM.
BJP MLA Sunil Sharma, Leader of the Opposition (LoP), articulated his party’s stance against what he termed an ideological failure. “The bill by Waheed ur Rehman Parra was to encourage those people who, with a certain intention, promote land jihad and ‘demographic change.’ It was for this purpose that they had encroached on the land,” Sharma said, thanking the CM for defeating this “nefarious design of the PDP”.
RS Pathania, a BJP MLA who is a lawyer dismissed the bill saying: “This bill has no head or feet, and it was wrongly linked with Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah and the Land to Tiller law. Land to Tiller was a separate law altogether… Whosoever has control over State land, it will be theirs, it will be an open loot.”
“The Chief Minister talks of ‘land grabbers’ and ‘floodgates,’ but the reality is that the ‘bulldozer moves’ made by the regime in the Muslim belt have created deep uncertainty and anxiety among people in Kashmir,” PDP MLA Para claimed. He said it was ironical that while the government was willing to give new land under PMAY, yet it threatened to dismantle homes already built.
The bill was subsequently put to a voice vote by Speaker Abdul Rahim Rather. Having faced the combined weight of the government’s executive opposition and the legal scrutiny of the broader opposition, the bill received support from only three members. It was defeated by a voice vote and was rejected at the admission stage itself on Tuesday (October 28).
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