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The Bombay High Court, which granted stay on the eviction notice issued by BMC on June 21 in a land encroachment case, on Tuesday, refused to grant an extension of time to vacate “for even a minute” as the petitioners “tried to pull a fast one on the HC”.
A division bench of Justice Gautam S Patel and Justice Neela K Gokhale was on Tuesday hearing a plea filed by the Ekta Welfare Society from the city, which challenged the eviction and demolition notices issued to its residents for allegedly encroaching on Railway property.
It dismissed the petition and said that authorities are at liberty to proceed in accordance with law.
The court observed that its earlier protective order of June 23 was obtained on a complete misrepresentation and suppression of facts by the petitioner society.
The bench further said there is no fundamental right to trespass or squat and once a procedure mandated by law has been followed, eviction of trespassers cannot be indefinitely delayed. “We are supposed to permit and turn a blind eye to constant encroachment on public lands and properties. This has to stop,” it said.
On February 8, the bench had directed that no demolition be carried out in contravention of the Supreme Court order of December 16, 2021, on Western Railway (WR) land anywhere in the Greater Mumbai area till further orders.
The court had then observed that merely labelling certain people as encroachers is not going to answer the “serious problem of human displacement in the city” and that the issue needs to be “addressed in a more considered fashion than by merely deploying bulldozers on the site”.
On June 27, the High Court vacated all previous orders in the plea.
The court noted that it was not told on June 23 that the petitioners have already filed a Suit in the city civil court at Dindoshi in 2021, which is not mentioned in the present petition and the same emerged from an affidavit filed by the Central government.
The HC stressed that the 2021 suit, which made “wild allegations authorities suggesting that illegal trespassers can do no wrong,” should ought to have been mentioned before it and that there was no ad-interim relief obtained from the citi Civil Court. It added that the Society cannot claim that it was unaware of the Suit as the same was in its name.
“… We do not agree that when it comes to persons who claim that they are poor, etc., that there is a different standard for candour and that the requirement of a complete disclosure of all material factors does not apply to such persons or that it is confined to other entities. We see no reason why a party who comes to Court with such a suppression should be entitled to any protective orders,” the bench stated.
The Court noted that complaints by petitioners have been going on since 2020 and therefore “to say now in 2023 that all of these notices have been suddenly issued with no prior warning and no survey is patently and demonstrably untrue.”
It added that illegal construction and encroachment started afresh after the February, 2023 order and “there is little purpose in saying that the demolition was partial or that the fresh encroachments are not by the petitioners.” It remarked that if the petitioners did not put up the said structures, they had nothing to fear.
“The claim of being poor only means that we will not make an order of costs. But the non-disclosure of relevant and material facts is unpardonable and cannot be excused. It must have consequences.
The Court said that if petitioners want extension of time to vacate the premises, they must approach Railways or BMC. “We refuse to grant any such extension. Enough is enough,” Justice Patel said.
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