The Madras High Court has restrained the Commissioner of Land Administration (CLA) from taking coercive action against actors P.I. Mohammed Kutty alias Mammooty, his son Dulquer Salmaan Mohammed Kutty and their family members with respect to 40 acres of land owned by them at Karuguzhipallam village in Chengalpattu district near here.
Justice C.V. Karthikeyan granted the interim protection after the family filed a joint writ petition challenging an order passed by the CLA on March 16 this year instructing the Chengalpattu District Revenue Officer to treat the entire piece of land as ‘Kazhuveli Poromboke’ (wetland) and declare it a reserve forest under Section 26 of the Tamil Nadu Forest Act of 1882.
The judge, however, made it clear that it would be open to the CLA to proceed with the initiation of criminal or departmental proceedings against the government officials who were reportedly involved in certain irregularities in the matter. He directed government counsel Yogesh Kannadasan to ensure that a counter affidavit to the writ petition was filed by August 26.
“Let the facts come out during the said proceedings. However, let no coercive action be initiated against the petitioners till further orders are passed by this court,” the judge ordered. In his affidavit, Mr. Mammootty, 67, told the court that the title of the land owned by his family could be traced to an assignment of mortgage deed dated June 14, 1927.
It was part of a much larger tract of 247 acres of agricultural land that had been mortgaged. It had been subjected to several transactions including sale by an official assignee of the High Court to G. Sirur in 1929.
When Sirur failed to pay the revenue department its dues, the property was auctioned on June 1, 1933, after due publication in the Madras Chengalpattu district gazette.
C. Kunnappa Naicker purchased the property in the auction. After obtaining patta, he had sold 121 acres to Muthukrishna Naidu in 1936 and the latter, in turn, sold 40 acres to one Kapali Pillai. After the death of Pillai in 1941, his legal heirs sold the property by way of 13 different sale deeds to the petitioner’s family members in 1997, Mr. Mammooty said.
After the sale, the legal heirs cancelled the sale deeds unilaterally and a civil dispute with regard to it was still pending before the principal sub-court in Chengalpattu since 2007.
In the meantime, on September 26, 1997, the then CLA cancelled the patta granted by the Assistant Settlement Officer, Tiruvannamalai, on May 13, 1996, to the legal heirs of Pillai.
Since the cancellation was done without notice to the petitioner and his family, he filed a writ petition in 1997 and the High Court remanded the matter to the CLA on November 17, 1997. After a detailed inquiry, during which the petitioner claimed that the property had been wrongly classified as ‘Kazhuveli Poromboke’, the CLA on March 21, 2007 classified the property as private land.
However, suddenly in March this year, there was a suo motu revision of the 2007 order and the land was ordered to be re-classified as ‘Kazhuveli Poromboke’ forcing the two actors and their family members to move the High Court again.
