After allegations that former Health Minister Etala Rajender had
encroached on endowment lands belonging to the Sri Seetha Rama Swamy temple at Shamirpet mandal's Devaryamjal village, in Medchal-Malkajgiri district, the state government had appointed a
special enquiry committee, headed by Panchayat Raj and Rural Development commissioner M Raghunandan Rao, to investigate the allegations.
The other members of the enquiry team are Nalgonda District Collector Prashanth Jeevan Patil, Mancherial District Collector Bharathi Holikeri, and Medchal-Malkajgiri District Collector Swetha Mohanty. They are in charge of assessing whether Rajender and several other persons have indeed usurped over 1,521 acres of land belonging to the temple, whose value crosses more than Rs 1,000 crore, or not.
The Congress today criticised the decision of the TRS government to utilise the services of the three Collectors for the land grabbing enquiry during the ongoing pandemic, and claimed that by doing so, it had disregarded the advice of the Telangana High Court, which had also questioned the regime's haste to carry out the probe.
Party spokesperson G Niranjan said that the committee members, all IAS officers, had visited the disputed lands yesterday, "blatantly ignoring the opinion" of the court on the matter, and asked, "Does the KCR government pay its respects to the authority and opinions of the high court by ignoring the court's advice?"
The leader also expressed his surprise over the appointment of the district collectors to the committee amid the rising number of Covid-19 cases, and rebuked the government for making the officials inspect the lands at such a time, when the "more pressing matter" was the pandemic and its management.
He requested Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan to take into account the prevailing health emergency in the state, to direct the TRS government to exercise restraint in the face of the pandemic.
The Congress' censure comes after the state's high court, too, made more than clear that it was unsatisfied with the way the enquiry was proceeding - on May 8, it issued notices to both the government and the temple authorities on the matter after it heard a writ petition that had challenged GO 1014, the order formally ratifying the formation of the encroachment enquiry committee.
The petitioners, who sought a stay on the committee's probe, cited that lands owned by them would also come under the scanner if the same was conducted. They also pointed out that a notice accusing them of encroaching the temple's lands, issued by the endowments department, had already been set aside by the HC.
Though Justice Vinod Kumar, who was hearing the petition, refused to stay the GO or the probe, he did ask the enquiry committee to serve official notices to the petitioners, and instructed it to allow the petitioners a chance to present their arguments. He also asked the committee and the government not to take any further action against the petitioners for the time being as the probe had originally been ordered only so that a government report could be generated on the findings.
Like many others in the state, he then asked the government what the tearing hurry to carry out the investigation was, especially since the disputes over the properties in question had first emerged in 1996. He said that the timing of the investigation was questionable since high-level district officials, instead of focusing on providing relief to the public during a deadly pandemic, would be working on the enquiry.
Further, the judge raised questions about the KCR government's reason for focusing on this specific instance of temple land encroachment when hundreds of similar incidents had been reported.
This was the second time that the state's apex court had to step into the conduct of the probe against Rajender. Before this, the court had pulled up the state government and the concerned officials for initiating A, href="/hyderabad-news/telangana-high-court-slams-trs-regime-for-unlawful-probe-23176.html">an "unlawful" enquiry into the former minister's alleged land grabbing.