The entry into Sonipat, Haryana via the NH344 is now lined with hoardings of townships, high-rise buildings, and elite universities. The 69-year old Savitri Devi, however, remembers the area differently.
She was just 20 years old when she got married in Asawarpur, a village in Sonepat; at that time, she says, there were no townships, no university campus, no industries. There was only agriculture, but now, that is slowly fading away as most farmers have sold off their land.
“Those who could afford to buy and build new land managed to sustain themselves, but those who could not start working in nearby factories as contractual workers, as drivers, or whatever other odd jobs they could find,” Ms. Devi says.
Lost lands
Spread over 2,000 acres, the Rajiv Gandhi Education City was planned as a hub for higher learning and a centre for research in cutting-edge technologies by Haryana’s Congress-ruled government in 2009, just ahead of that year’s State Assembly election. As private university campuses started popping up, villages such as Asawarpur, Patla, Khewra, and Seoli started shrinking.
Om Prakash, 70, owned one-and-a-half acres of land in Asawarpur along with his three brothers, where they grew enough to sustain themselves and their families. “In 2005, we received notices from the government telling us that they would be acquiring the land to build the education city at the cost of ₹12 lakh per acre,” he recalls.
“We were never told that they will further sell the land to private players. They sold the land at triple the cost they bought from us, leaving us to barely manage. Around 2011, they gave us some more money after a High Court ruling, but all of that has gone into lawyer fees or the cost of raising our families,” he says.
Focus on land, jobs
Mr. Prakash is just one of the many former landowners who is still upset at the then-Congress government for acquiring the land at minimum cost and then selling it off to mostly private players.
In Seoli village, Surender Singh, 52, says, “None of our children can afford to study in expensive private universities, and most of the employees of the university are also not from the surrounding villages.”
In the villages of the Sonipat Assembly constituency, land and employment remain a sore point and have come to the fore again ahead of this week’s election for the Haryana Assembly. In 2009, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Kavita Jain defeated the incumbent Congress MLA Anil Kumar Thakkar, and in 2014, she won again against the Congress’s Dev Raj Diwan. In 2019, however, the Congress’s Surender Panwar managed to defeat Ms. Jain. This time around, the fight is between Mr. Panwar and the BJP’s Nikhil Madaan.
Generational divide
Villagers explain that there is still lingering anger against that Congress government of a decade and a half ago. “If we knew that our land will be sold to private players, we would have brokered the deals ourselves and reaped the benefits, but we were given the short end of the stick, our villages were destroyed slowly,” says Mr. Prakash.
“That is a thing of the past, now nothing can be done about this. Therefore, many of us would rather demand jobsfrom the government, so we can build our homes,” rebuts Anil Pal, 31, a contractual worker in a factory in Sonipat’s industrial area and a resident of Khewra. He attributes the differing opinions to a generational divide. “Many of the elders think that the Congress, instead of acting in their interest, acted as if they were property dealers. But the younger generations that do not remember the farmland, hold the BJP accountable for lack of secure employment opportunities,” he says.
Published - October 01, 2024 08:21 pm IST
