Punjab and Haryana High Court (File Photo)
STATING THAT civil suit is an appropriate remedy for all pending land disputes of Gwal Pahari village in Gurgoan, the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Thursday said it would not be proper for the High Court to intervene in a case in which 120 civil suits were pending and asked the District and Sessions Judge Gurgoan to assign similar pending cases to a single court, preferrably of a senior division civil judge. The decision has come as a major relief for private parties in the public interest litigation who had contended that the case related to the land in question should only be decided by the civil courts and not the High Court. The division bench of Justice S S Saron and Justice Avneesh Jhingan passed separate orders on disputes related to Metro Valley Business Park Private Limited and ASF Buildwell Private Limited, who have ongoing SEZ projects in the Gurgoan village – close to Delhi and Faridabad.
The division bench, during the resumed hearing of the PIL filed by Gurgoan-based activist Harinder Dhingra seeking probe into a controversial mutation on the disputed 464 acres of Gwal Pahari village, asked the civil court to decide the case of ASF Buildwell as “expeditiously as possible” and ordered a status quo regarding the “construction, alienation, possession and change of land use” till the pending of the civil dispute.
M L Sarin, senior advocate and counsel for the Metro Valley Business Park, challenged the maintainability of the PIL and argued that the petition aimed to “scuttle” his client’s ongoing project in Gurgoan. “The petitioner has not come with clean hands. He did not disclose to the court that 120 civil suits related to the case are pending and it is in violation of the rules on PIL. I want the petitioner to be prosecuted,” Sarin told the division bench.
The HC bench also asked the civil court to decide the land dispute of Metro Valley Business expeditiously and at most within a year. The division bench also noted that no observation in the earlier order would have any effect on proceedings in the lower court. The court had earlier observed “it is accepted position that the land now vests with the Municipal Corporation, Gurugram, since 2010 with the enlargement of the area of the Municipal Corporation, Gurugram.”
Coming down hard on the Haryana government, the division bench observed the whole mess related to the disputed land in the Gurgoan village was a creation of the Haryana government and said the court would not have intervened if it had been told by the PIL litigant at the outset that 120 civil suits were pending on the land in question.
Though the main pleadings of the PIL were decided by the division bench on Thursday, related cases on the matter would be heard in the High Court barring disputes related to ownership and revenue records. The writ petition filed by the Gurgaon Municipal Corporation challenging the orders passed by then Additional Chief Secretary and Financial Commissioner, Revenue, Haryana, Y S Malik, in which he had quashed the mutation No. 3110 while ruling against the corporation would be heard on August 18.
