By Syed Sammar Mehdi
A Gujjar family in a forest hamlet in Central Kashmir spent last week doing something they hoped they would never have to do again: packing their belongings into sacks and moving them to a relative’s house, just in case.
They had already lost part of their land to the Forest Department once before.
Word had lately spread through the settlement that officials were back in the area to retrieve more forest land, and this time nobody wanted to wait and find out what would happen next.
That fear is spreading through forest communities across North, Central and South Kashmir right now, and it comes from a simple, painful contradiction.
A national law passed in 2006 was supposed to protect these families for good. The Forest Department is instead using the Indian Forest Act 1927, a law written by the British in 1927 to retrieve the land they live on.
The 2006 law, called the Forest Rights Act, gives legal recognition to Gujjars, Bakarwals, Chopans, and Kashmiri and Dogri families who have lived on forest land for 75 years or more.
Parliament extended it to Jammu and Kashmir about six years ago, soon after the abrogation of Article 370, when officials in Delhi told residents that federal protections would finally reach them.
That promise hasn’t translated into practice, as the Forest Department continues to enforce the colonial statute instead, the same one the newer law was designed to replace.
Dr. Raja Muzaffar Bhat, founder of the J&K RTI Movement and the Jammu & Kashmir Climate Action Group (JKCAG), has spent months looking into the reasons.
He points to a Jammu and Kashmir High Court ruling from September 3, 2020, in a case called SAVE v. J&K Government, which the Forest Department now cites to justify its land retrieval drives.
The lawsuit was filed back in 2017, three years before the Forest Rights Act reached Jammu and Kashmir.
By the time the court issued its order, the law was already active, but nobody told the judges that.
“Forest Department had started evicting forest dwellers in many places of J&K quoting Hon’ble J&K High Court order SAVE v/s J&K Govt and others dated 3.09.2020,” Bhat said.
The activist believes the Tribal Affairs Department, the agency responsible for rolling out the Forest Rights Act, should have flagged the change to the court and never did.
A similar fight played out on a much bigger scale seven years ago.
On February 13, 2019, the Supreme Court ordered sixteen states to evict more than a million forest-dwelling and tribal families whose land claims had been turned down.
Protests broke out almost immediately, and the central government admitted in a filing that many of those rejections had come from a broken, careless process.
Within two weeks, the Supreme Court halted the evictions and ordered every rejected claim to be reviewed again.
That hold remains in place today.
Bhat, however, sees a direct parallel. “If these evictions have been put on hold by Hon’ble Supreme Court and Forest Rights Act 2006 is yet to be rolled out and is like a new born baby in Jammu & Kashmir, how can Forest Department of J&K invoke J&K High Court’s orders and start issuing eviction notices to forest dwelling STs and other traditional forest dwellers?” he asks in a memorandum he has now submitted on the issue.
He carried that memorandum, along with Mushtaq Ahmad Lone, the RTI Movement’s district coordinator for Budgam, to a meeting with Abdul Rahim Rather, Speaker of the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly, on July 30.
The duo asked the speaker to step in with the Chief Minister and the Forest Minister and get the land retrieval drives stopped. Rather listened closely and asked several questions, though he made no promises on the spot.
But the Tribal Affairs Department itself moved soon after.
In a circular dated July 30, 2026, the department directed every Deputy Commissioner in Jammu and Kashmir to finish the three-tier claim verification and settlement process required under the Forest Rights Act, or certify that the process is already complete, at the earliest.
The circular also pointed directly to the law’s own safeguard, noting that no forest dweller can be evicted or removed from land under his occupation until that recognition and verification process is finished.
Meanwhile, families in the affected districts are still watching the road for Forest Department officials, still packing sacks just in case, and still waiting for a law written to protect them to actually start doing its job.
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