PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court has issued notices to the federal and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governments seeking response to a petition against a four-decade-old notification, which declared Chitral region’s all mountains, wastelands, jungles, pastures and riverbeds the property of the provincial government.

A bench consisting of Justice Roohul Amin Khan and Justice Mohammad Nasir Mehfooz fixed July 6 for the next hearing into the petition filed by over 100 Chitral residents, including former MNA Shahzada Iftikharuddin, former MPA Ghulam Mohammad and others, who claimed they represented the region’s entire population.

It stopped the settlement officer for Upper and Lower Chitral districts until further orders from handing over the relevant records to the revenue officers, including senior member of the Board of Revenue, commissioner of Malakand division, and deputy commissioners of Upper and Lower Chitral districts.

The petitioners have challenged some portions of a 1975 notification of the provincial (then NWFP’s) government claiming the notification declared all mountains, wastelands, forests, pastures and riverbedsin Chitral to be the property of the provincial government.

They requested the court to order a halt to the land settlement exercise over the ‘sequestration of their private or collective properties’.

Residents challenge four-decade-old notification on matter

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

Barrister Asadul Mulk and Muhibullah Tirchvi appeared for the petitioners and contended that 97 per cent of the total land mass of Chitral region was registered in the name of the provincial government that was unfathomable and against Article 172(1) of the Constitution.

They said it appeared that instead of land settlement, land expropriation was being carried out in Chitral.

The bench observed that when one of the petitioners was an MNA, he should have resolved the issue through parliament but his priorities at that time were different.

Barrister Mulk said there were several statutory and constitutional defects in the 1975 notification.

He said the petition also questioned the 1975 notification’s reconcilability with Article 171 of the Constitution, which dealt with ownerless properties, like its reconcilability with the report of the Land Dispute Inquiry Commission formed in 1970s.

The lawyer said the impugned parts of the 1975 notification were too vague and ambiguous to be the subject of legal enforcement and were without judicious illumination.

He added that the interpretation accorded by the settlement office to the impugned parts of the 1975 notification was draconian.

Barrister Mulk contended that for the last couple of years, the people of Chitral had been going from one office to another pleading for the registry of their ancestral property in their name.

He said the settlement office had been turning down their applications citing the 1975 notification as reason.

“Less than three per cent of Upper and Lower Chitral districts consists of arable land. If the 1975 notification is allowed to stand, the people of Chitral are at risk of being deprived of their ancestral property and reduced to non-entities,” he said.

Published in Dawn, June 27th, 2021