Ahmedabad: Octogenarian Jashumati Dasani has regained her status as a farmer 59 years after her brother snatched away her rights as an agriculturist in 1967 by using forged pedigree and a fabricated ‘kabulatnama’ to exclude her from inheritance records.On Friday, Gujarat High Court quashed Porbandar district collector’s orders that annulled her purchase of a few land parcels and imposed fines in lakhs. HC allowed her petition, recognising her right as an agriculturist as inherited from her agriculturist grandfather and father. She can now retain the land parcels she bought in 1990.According to the case details, Dasani was a daughter and granddaughter of an agriculturist. She was married to a non-agriculturist. After her father’s demise, her brother used a forged pedigree and a fabricated consent affidavit relinquishing her rights in the ancestral property to exclude her from the inheritance records, causing her name to be omitted from the revenue entry mutated in 1967 and making her brother the sole inheritor of her father’s property.More than two decades later, Dasani’s matrimonial family decided to purchase agricultural lands. For this, she obtained an agriculturist certificate from talati-cum-mantri in 1989, purchased land parcels in 1990, and the corresponding entries were duly mutated and certified after statutory notice under the Bombay Land Revenue Code.However, multiple revenue disputes arose after complaints about Dasani’s status as an agriculturist, and the Porbandar district collector cancelled the 1990 entries in 2009 for alleged breach of Section 54 of the Saurashtra Gharkhed Tenancy Settlement & Agricultural Lands Ordinance, 1949. The collector, holding her to be a non-agriculturist, imposed a penalty in lakhs on her for dealing in agricultural land.In 2011, special secretary, revenue department, quashed this decision and ordered the collector to initiate proceedings again under the Ordinance. In 2016, the collector again ordered cancellation of entries in Dasani’s name.Dasani challenged this before the HC through senior advocate Anshin Desai, who contended that a woman’s agriculturist status is not extinguished by marriage to a non-agriculturist and that inheritance rights keep the status intact.After the hearing, Justice D A Joshi said, “The authority has lost sight of the fact that the certificate clearly reveals that her brother, Ramesh, has agricultural land which he got by way of inheritance; therefore, the petitioner no.1 (Dasani) being a daughter of an agriculturist can be said to have status of an “agriculturist”.”HC also held that the complainants, who challenged her purchasing agricultural land, lacked standing as “aggrieved persons”.Moreover, HC also said that even where law does not prescribe a time limit, suo motu revisional powers by the authority must be exercised within a reasonable time. In this case, the collector did so in 2009 regarding entries mutated in 1990, some 19 years later.
