‘Will not allow land jihad’: Uttarakhand CM promises to demolish ‘illegal’ shrines

Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said his government will demolish all the ‘mazars’ (tombs) and other structures illegally built in the state. Addressing a function in Kaladhungi in the Nainital district, Dhami said the government has identified more than 1,000 places where such illegal structures have been built.
“There are more than 1000 such places in this state where tombs have been made but no remains were being found under them,” Dhami said.

“We have said that we are not against anyone, but we will not allow forcible occupation anywhere here. We will not allow land jihad to proceed anywhere,” he added.

The state government over the last two years has been acting tough on the encroachments over government land.

He stressed that the BJP government will not harm anyone but will also not allow appeasement of any community.

“Because we are the ones who believe in the law, we are not going to do any work to harm anyone. But we will not allow anyone to be appeased either. We will work hard to curb appeasement,” Dhami said.

Dhami was in Nainital to inaugurate and lay the foundation stone of 36 schemes worth ₹ 95 crores.

Dhami said the state has enacted a stricter law to stop forced conversions in the state, apart from constituting a committee for the implementation of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC). The Uttarakhand assembly recently passed an amendment bill to make the anti-conversion law in the state more stringent by enhancing punishment for forced conversions and for religious conversion of two or more people defined as “mass conversion”.

In December last year, the forest officials started a crackdown on illegal religious structures and demolished 15 tombs in the Dehradun forest division at that time. According to senior forest officials, around 293 religious structures had come up in the protected forests of the state according to the departmental survey.