Gold rush in Sonbhadra: IAS lobby suspected in land deals     

Bhanu Pratap Sharma, an IAS officer of the Bihar cadre (1981 batch) is the current chairman of the Bank Board Bureau (BBB). In April last year he replaced former CAG Vinod Rai as the BBB chairman. Sharma, a physics graduate, had served in the Department of Personnel & Training which reports to the PMO. He was earlier the Union Health Secretary and chairman of Recruitment and Assessment Centre at Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

It was Sharma’s wife Vinita Sharma alias Kiran who sold the disputed plot of land at Sonbhadra to village head Yagya Dutt in 2017, allegedly for a consideration of Rupees two crore. When Dutt went to take possession of the land at Umbha village on July 17, Adivasis who claimed to have been tilling the land for generations, resisted. But Dutt had gone prepared with armed henchmen. He opened fire and his men ended up killing 10 Adivasis and injuring 30 more. Among the dead were seven men and three women.

Vinita Sharma apparently was gifted the land by her mother Asha Mishra, in whose name the land was allegedly transferred in 1989 by Maheshwar Prasad Sinha, a Bhumihar leader from Bihar. Vinita Sharma’s father Prabhat Kumar Mishra was also an IAS officer and it is being alleged that he had used his influence to get the land transferred in the name of his wife.

What little information is available suggests that the land belonged to the Gram Sabha but had mysteriously been transferred to a society or Trust registered in Robertsganj and promoted by Sinha in 1955. This transfer itself was problematic, suggest officials in Lucknow, and possibly illegal.

And even more problematic was the transfer of the land from the society to an individual, Vinita Sharma’s mother. Since Mahesh Prasad Sinha in the fifties was associated with the Congress, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has accused the Congress for the alleged land scam. But of course, there has been no Congress government in Uttar Pradesh since 1989, the year when the plot was allegedly transferred from a society to an individual.

Even more mysteriously, the 1955 order of land transfer to the society, allegedly by the Tehsildar who exceeded his jurisdiction and violated the law, has gone missing from the office of the Sonbhadra collectorate. All other land records of the time, by all accounts, are still there but the record related to this particular plot of land are missing.

The original land deed and the order of the Tehsildar which allowed the transfer of the plot to the society have ‘vanished’, raising a question mark over the probe ordered by the Yogi government to expose the land deal. Officials in Lucknow confirmed that the main order through which the then Tehsildar transferred 639 bighas of land of the Gram Panchayat to the co-operative society on December 17, 1955 are missing.

“That document was important because it would have thrown light as to how and on what basis and under which law, the then Tehsildar transferred the ownership right. The District Magistrate has been asked to explain how such an important paper has gone missing,” an official told NH at Lucknow.

Sinha was indeed an influential political leader and an affluent landlord of the time. As the land transfers indicate, he got his children married to bureaucrats from elite families. What is not clear is whether the society which acquired the land was active or if it was a paper organisation.

What is also not clear is when the 1955 land record disappeared from the collectorate. Sonbhadra was carved out of Mirzapur district and it is again not clear if the records disappeared in transit after the new district was formed.

However, the previous District Magistrate of Sonbhadra, Amit Kumar Singh, is known to have refused to sign the Mutation Certificate of the land in 2018. Any inquiry would need to find out why he had refused to sign it and whether the original deed and the order were available during his stint in the district.

It also needs to be probed why the present District Magistrate, Ankit Agarwal, was in such a tearing hurry to sign the Mutation certificate the very month he took over as District Magistrate of Sonbhadra in February this year. Only then will the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall in place.

There is a deafening silence in Sonbhadra’s Umbha village. Every now and then, some women wail out from some houses, where not even the cooking stoves have been lit since the day of the massacre.

Four days after the incident, which shook the nation’s conscience, UP CM Yogi Adityanath dropped by at the village on Sunday, to dole out a few compensation cheques to the victims’ families and attribute the massacre at Umbha to the opposition parties, more precisely the Congress, the SP and the BSP. He also tried to deflect his opwn government’s responsibility by claiming that the main perpetrator, Yagya Dutt Bharotiya, was an SP member.

The complicity of the local officials is evident. Villagers claim that they had communicated their apprehension to the local police and the district administration. They also claim that they had been warned that unless they agreed to the terms of the village headman, they should be prepared for consequences. Tension was simmering the area and yet the district administration failed to take preventive steps. Movement of armed people in 50 or 70 tractors should have attracted sufficient attention but the law-enforcing agencies were caught napping.

But the Yogi Adityanath government appears to be least concerned at addressing these issues. Although the state government prevented Priyanka Gandhi from reaching the village, the fact is that her determination to do so made the massacre hog headlines across the country.

Till about a decade ago, Sonbhadra was better known for Maoist insurgency. It kept government officials and police terrified and away. Since then, renewed mining activity, deforestation and green shoots of industry have placed renewed pressure on land.

Sonbhadra’s Ghorawal tehsil was once a part of Badhar royal estate. The land in Umbha which triggered the massacre belonged to Raja Sahib Anand Brahm Shah, but even before Independence, Adivasis used to till the land. After Zamindari abolition, the land was declared as barren in revenue records and transferred to the Gram Sabha.

Shortly after Independence, it came to the notice of Muzzafarpur’s strongman Mahesh Prasad Sinha, who colluded with the then-Tehsildar to have 639 bighas of land transferred to a society controlled by him against the rules in 1955.

Later, Bhumihar leader Mahesh Sinha used the influence of his son-in-law Prabhat Kumar Mishra, an IAS officer to have 148 bighas of the land transferred in the name of his daughter, i.e. Mishra’s wife, Asha Mishra.Investigations have revealed that the ownership of the same land was later transferred in the name of Asha Mishra’s daughter Vinita Sharma alias Kiran and her husband Bhanu Prasad Sharma, the present BBB chairman.

For the uninitiated, Banks Board Bureau (BBB) is an autonomous body set up by the Modi government to improve governance of Public Sector Banks, recommend selection of chiefs of government owned banks and financial institutions and to help banks develop strategies for raising capital.

Even as ownership rights of the land kept changing, the Adivasis were made to cultivate the land and claim to have been paying lagaan (land tax).

The Adivasis kept protesting the change of ownership in 1989 and thereafter in 2017 and complained that they were under pressure to vacate the land or face eviction at gunpoint. But their pleas fell on deaf ears.

On the day of the massacre, i.e. July 17, prime accused Yagya Dutt arrived at the site to take over the ownership at around 2 pm along with 300 of his henchmen in tractor trolleys numbering 32 to 70. It had just rained and about 100 Adivasis were busy tilling the land. Dutt ordered them to vacate the land. When they refused, his gunmen began firing indiscriminately.

Eyewitnesses claimed that the intruders began hitting even people who had sustained bullet wounds. Police lodged an FIR against 11 known and 55 unknown suspects in the matter, of whom 27 have been arrested.

Narendra Nirav, working with Adivasis in the area, says the massacre could have been averted if politicians, social workers or government officials had been sensitive to the issue and tried to arrive at a consensus. Adivasis, he pointed out, are law-abiding people and peaceful by nature.

He also expressed surprise that Bharotiyas, the caste to which the main accused belongs, could have indulged in a cold-blooded massacre of the Adivasis, especially since they have traditionally lived and worked hand-in-hand with the adivasis there.

A land survey has been carried out in Sonbhadra since 1986 in compliance with Supreme Court orders. But huge doubts have arisen about the survey process considering that out of 11 lakh hectares that was surveyed, about one lakh hectares belonging to Adivasis and other forest-dwellers have allegedly disappeared from the records, suspected to have been transferred to outsiders.

The survey was expected to demarcate forest land as well as settle ownership claims of Adivasis residing in the proposed forest land. However, what actually happened, apparently, was that the Adivasis were hoodwinked to testify before the survey agency that they had no claims to the land.

It has also come to light that the Adivasis have not only lost their land but also left short-changed by their non-classification as Schedule Tribes (ST). Even when some castes were classified as ST in 2012, the Election Commission failed to notify constituencies as reserved for them. As a result, Adivasis of the area have no real political representation at any level even after Ghorawal Assembly constituency came into being in 2012.

It has also emerged from central government records that out of 92,000 claims for forest land ownership made till March 2019 in Uttar Pradesh, only 17,000 were admitted. This amounts to 80 per cent of the claims being dismissed outright.

It is significant that most such claims were made by Adivasis in Sonbhadra itself. As a result, those who made a claim for 10 bighas did not get even 10 per cent of the land they had claimed. Only a few got land titles to small parcels of land measuring 1-2 biswas. The rest of the land was simply subsumed into forest land, and Adivasis dwelling there are being forced to leave.

The Adivasis of Sonbhadra have been left to fend for themselves after being displaced by projects such as the Rihand dam. They are constrained to work in power plants, aluminium factories or in limestone, and dolomite mines and in sand quarries. It surprises nobody to find that most of the legislators from Sonbhadra are engaged in sand mining. It is an open secret that any police or revenue department official who gets posted to Sonbhadra ends up being a ‘partner’ in some mine.

Since 1995, as mining gained steam and its owners began to accumulate wealth, Adivasis began to lose their land. Indeed, it may sound strange but local folklore has it that land in Ghorawal could be had for free by anyone.

A three-member committee headed by the Additional Chief Secretary (Revenue) is conducting a probe into how the gram panchayat land was transferred to a society in 1955 and thereon to an individual in 1989. How in 2017 the individual, who happened to be relative of an IAS officer, sold off the said land to the Gram Pradhan?

“In the absence of the original land deed, the probe is likely to be affected. Tehsildar’s comments and the law under which he transferred the land to the name of Adarsh Co-operative Society is important. If there was a dispute after that deal, why no action was taken by then administration ?

In 1955, Sonbhadra district was not in existence. There was Robertsganj tehsil whose headquarter was Mirzapur. In 1989, when Sonbhadra district was created, that’s when the documents were misplaced, claim officials.