The Supreme Court not only decided that the nearly 12 hectares of reserved forest land in Kondhwa, near Pune, diverted for agricultural purposes and later for construction in 1998-99, was “totally illegal” but also left Narayan Rane with no place to hide. Rane, a former chief minister of Maharashtra and minister in the Narendra Modi government, who hopped from his native Shiv Sena to Congress before switching over to the Bharatiya Janata Party, has become the latest millstone around the neck of the ruling party—yet another corrupt leader in its once-pristine ranks. Rane, then revenue minister in Maharashtra, along with the then Pune divisional commissioner, “acted totally in breach of public trust to illegally cause gain to private individuals at the cost of sacrificing precious forest land”, the Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice BR Gavai pointed out.
Rane and the BJP may well dismiss this as an old case and a relatively unimportant one by pointing fingers at other cases of larger land grabs in the state, but they know too well that it is a flimsy cover-up. Whether it is Rane, who faced this case, or Congress party’s Adarsh scam-tainted Ashok Chavan, also a former chief minister, or the Rs 70,000 crore irrigation scam-accused Ajit Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party—to name only three top politicians—the tainted have been embraced by the BJP without a shadow of regret. The scam-accused or indicted leaders did not do their native parties any justice, nor did they bring glory to the BJP, but the latter finds them useful pawns in its larger game to diminish the opposition. Their contested decisions and alleged scams became the lever that the BJP unabashedly used to switch their political loyalties. With such harsh words from the Supreme Court, the party will find it hard to rehabilitate Rane in the echelons of power. His two sons, both politicians, raising the communal temperature with their speeches, might find space as rabble-rousers though.
This judgement is as much about forest land as about Rane’s corrupt ways. The land parcel was cleared by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests for the construction of a residential, shopping and IT complex; that clearance stands quashed by the Supreme Court. The judges pointed to “the nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and builders in the conversion of precious forest land” in contravention of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980. However, this is not limited to the 12 hectares near Pune. Across India, between 2018 and 2023, as much as 88,903 hectares of forest land has been diverted for non-forest purposes, according to government data. That’s the combined size of Mumbai and Kolkata. In the 15 years till 2023, a staggering 3 lakh hectares has been diverted, most with the approval of government agencies. So, while Rane gets his just desserts, this one rap hardly means anything to the cause of saving India’s forests.
