BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court on Monday took the Bengaluru police to task for usurping the powers of civil courts and issuing an eviction notice to the residents of shanties in Bellandur and indicated that the state will have to rehabilitate the people whose houses were demolished.

Posting the matter to February 10 to pass orders, the division bench of Chief Justice Abhay Shreeniwas Oka and Justice Hemant Chandangoudar said that it (eviction) all began with the state government and hence it should be ended by the government.

Hearing the public interest litigation filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties-Karnataka, the bench expressed serious displeasure over the actions of the police inspector who issued a notice to the land owners even though he had no authority to do so. The police inspector should be removed from his post instead of being transferred, the bench said, saying the inspector had not followed due process.
If there were complaints that undocumented Bangladesh immigrants lived in the shanties, the inspector should have conducted a survey before acting. This was not done. Instead, notice was issued to the land owner and a copy marked to the DCP and ACP, who failed to apprise the inspector about usurping the powers of a civil court, the bench said.

The state informed the Court that the union government had issued a communication on June 1, 2019 to check illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.

Polite request?
In their statement of objections filed before the court, the two owners of the land claimed that they visited the residents who had put up shanties on their property. When the residents could not produce documents to prove their identity, they politely requested them to remove the structures. Accordingly, the residents removed the shanties on their own, the landowners claimed. “Prima facie, it is impossible to accept the statement of the landowners that the residents vacated their shanties on their own”, the bench said, referring to the stand of the state government, BBMP and landowners that they had not carried out the demolition. The bench observed that if encroachers oblige,  state can take help of these land owners to evict all illegal encroachments in city.