Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Nov 12: The High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh has dismissed Letters Patent Appeals (LPAs) filed by Ghulam Rasool Mistri and others over prime land at Rampora, Batamaloo and Bagh-i-Nandsingh in Srinagar, pulling up the appellants for indulging in “re-litigation and multiplicity of proceedings” to claim ownership over State land under the now-scrapped Roshni Act.
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A Division Bench of Justice Sindhu Sharma and Justice Shahzad Azeem upheld the common judgment dated July 24, 2018, by which a Single Judge had dismissed two writ petitions filed by Mistri and allowed a third petition filed by the Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC), affirming the Corporation’s title and possession over the land.
The appeals stemmed from a long-running dispute in which the appellants claimed that, having been in possession of patches of State land on the strength of alleged relinquishment deeds, they were entitled to conferment of ownership rights under the J&K State Lands (Vesting of Ownership to Occupants) Act, 2001, popularly known as the Roshni Act. They also sought parity with other beneficiaries, including Zainab Begum, Mirza Maqsood Ali and Adnan Manzoor Ahangar.
The Bench noted that the land measuring 177 kanals under Survey Nos. 7 (Batamaloo), 437 (Rampora) and 139 (Bagh-i-Nandsingh) already stood recorded in the name of the Corporation following acquisition proceedings initiated in 1989 and completion of formal handing over and taking over of possession in 1992. This, the Court said, categorically negated the appellants’ plea of continued possession.
Calling the case a “classic example of re-litigation,” the Division Bench observed that Mistri was not only a party to multiple writ petitions and LPAs on the same subject, but was also pursuing parallel civil proceedings, thereby abusing the process of the court and wasting public time.
Relying on the Supreme Court’s decision in “K K Modi Vs K N Modi”, the Judges reiterated that repeated attempts to re-agitate decided issues amount to abuse of process and can be curtailed summarily.
On the plea for Roshni benefits, the Court held that no such right survives after the Division Bench judgment, which declared the Roshni Act unconstitutional and void ab initio. Once the parent statute itself has been struck down, “the claimants could not derive even an iota of benefit from a void statute, as every superstructure erected thereon is wiped clean ab initio,” the Bench underlined.
Rejecting the argument of parity with other allottees, the Court clarified that equality cannot be claimed to perpetuate an illegality: if any irregular benefit has been conferred elsewhere, it cannot be cited as a precedent to demand similar illegal relief. Concluding that no error of law or fact had been committed by the Single Judge, the Bench dismissed all three appeals along with connected applications.
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