PESHAWAR: More than 100 inhabitants of Chitral have moved Peshawar High Court, challenging some portions of a 1975 notification of the provincial government.

They claim that all mountains, wastelands, forests, pastures and riverbeds in Chitral were declared to be the property of provincial government through the notification.

The petition was filed by former MPA Ghulam Mohammad, Muhibullah and others, claiming that they filed the petition in representative capacity on behalf of entire population of Chitral.

The petitioners have requested the court to halt a land settlement process which they termed as “sequestration of their private or collective properties”.

Petitioners say because of ambiguities, most parts of the district to be declared state property

The petitioners stated that as land settlement in Upper and Lower Chitral was in full swing, the provincial government relying on the ambiguous notification issued by home and tribal affairs department in July 1975 was bent upon declaring all mountains, wastelands, jungles, pastures and riverbeds of Chitral to be properties of the provincial government.

The petitioners have requested the court to strike down the impugned notification, stating that unless the notification is struck down by the high court, the government will proceed to declare over 95 per cent area of Upper and Lower Chitral as its property.

The petition, filed through Barrister Asadul Mulk, points out that the districts of Upper and Lower Chitral previously formed the Princely State of Chitral. It added that the State of Chitral acceded to Pakistan when the then ruler Muzaffarul Mulk executed an Instrument of Accession with the founder of Pakistan Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah on February 18, 1948.

The petitioner state that Chitral, Dir and Swat remained autonomous princely states until 1969 when Gen Yahya Khan merged them into Pakistan.

They state that thereafter periodically the government promulgated numerous regulations, according protection to the proprietary rights of the people of Chitral and pledging to take into account the geography and topography of the area.

The petitioners claim that following the abolition of the Frontier States, a phenomenal amount of disputes concerning immovable property suddenly shot up.

They stated that in order to redress those disputes, Dir, Swat and Chitral Land Disputes Enquiry Commission was constituted. They added that one of the tasks of the commission was bifurcation of the private and official property of the former Mehtar of Chitral.

It said that the property, which belonged to the Mehtar in his official capacity, was to vest in the provincial government.

The petitioners claimed that the commission confined itself to looking at details into only those 6,000 or so petitions, which were lodged with it.

“As regarding those properties, which were not disputed, and never found mention in the final report of the commission, the commission gave no findings in respect thereof. Similarly, since the title of the vast majority of area forming the district of Chitral, never came before the commission for determination, the commission abstained from holding whether the same was private property of someone or state property,” they said.

They contended that to make up for the commission’s shortcomings, the government issued the 1975 notification pursuant to a special law called the Distribution of Property (Chitral) Regulation 1974.

The petition states that the impugned parts of the 1975 notification are too vague and ambiguous, to be the subject of legal enforcement, without judicious illumination.

Published in Dawn, October 15th, 2019