Waqf row: Of land ownership and beyond

Honawad village in Vijayapura district faces controversy over alleged land grab by Karnataka Waqf Board, sparking political tensions.

“El Dorado” is what one could call Honawad village if one were to translate the name into Spanish. Land of gold is what it means, the root word being honnu, gold in Kannada. However, little seems to be shining in this village in Vijayapura district in north Karnataka. Everyone is apprehensive, and few are willing to talk about why their village is in the news now.

Honawad hit the headlines recently when Tejaswi Surya, MP and BJP Yuva Morcha leader, claimed that the Karnataka Waqf Board had conspired to take over 1,500 acres of land in the village and issued notices to hundreds of farmers, seeking their eviction from lands they had been cultivating for centuries and had all the documents of ownership. Surya, a lawyer, said his office was open to farmers across Karnataka who had grievances against the Waqf Board.

M.B. Patil, Industries Minister of Karnataka and MLA from Babaleshwar constituency that Honawad is part of, denied the allegations. He released documents to show that no notices were issued in Honawad village, though he admitted 124 notices were issued elsewhere in the district.

Tukaram Dhadke, gram panchayat president, confirmed this to The Hindu. “We have held three meetings in the village in the last few days, one by Congress leaders, another by the BJP and the third by our village elders. We asked farmers to show the notices. No one came forward as none had received any.” Patil claimed that all the confusion arose due to an “error” in the name of the Takke area in Vijayapura being wrongly mentioned as “Honawad” in brackets.

Patil said the government had not carried out any mutation in Honawad village. Surya countered this by sharing a picture of a Records of Rights, Tenancy and Crops (RTC) that said around 9.14 acres of graveyard land was mutated by the State government. The date on the RTC, however, said it was done in 2022 when the BJP was in power in the State.

Interestingly, the total farmlands under the Honawad gram panchayat are less than 1,100 acres, belonging to around 900 families. The gazette of 2020 notes only 14 acres of waqf lands in the village.

Minority Welfare and Waqf Minister B.Z. Zameer Ahmed Khan insisted that the 124 notices issued in Vijayapura district were the only notices issued in the State. He denied as “false” the BJP’s claims that over 21,000 notices were issued. “We have held 10 waqf adalats in various districts to hear the grievances of people and to remove encroachments. These adalats are not against farmers but are aimed at removing encroachments. We issued notices in Vijayapura as it has a large portion of the total waqf properties,” he said, adding that the BJP government had mutated as many as 140 RTCs without giving notices to farmers during its regime.