CHANDIGARH: Taking cognisance of reports of attempts by the Uttar Pradesh government to displace more than 30, 000 Sikh farmers by taking over their hard-earned arable land, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Tuesday said he will take up the issue with his UP counterpart Adityanath Yogi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.
Captain Amarinder expressed serious concern over some media reports suggesting that the Sikh families were being sought to be displaced after living in UP for three generations.
If the reports were correct, it was undoubtedly a matter of worry, said the Chief Minister, adding that any such act was against the federal structure of India and its Constitutional polity, which gave every Indian the freedom to live in any part of the country.
As per available accounts, these families had been settled in the districts of Rampur, Bijnaur and Lakhimpur for three generations now, and had even received proprietorship rights from the UP government back in 1980, noted Captain Amarinder, questioning the rationale behind the reported attempts to dislocate them and push them out of their homes. Reports suggest that these Sikh families had shifted to the 17 villages in the three districts of Uttar Pradesh in 1947, at the time of the Indo-Pak partition, and had, with their hard work, converted the forest area into arable land.
Captain Amarinder said he would write to both Shah and Yogi Aditynath to ascertain the truth of the matter and get to the bottom of it. Any administrative problems in land ownership of these families could be resolved by following the due process of law, without resorting to such harsh measures, he stressed, adding that forcing people out of land which they had been tilling for three generations was definitely not a solution.