Interim relief for Mammootty and Dulquer Salmaan in land row

The Madras High Court has asked the Commissioner for Land Administration to await further orders from it regarding a 40-acre tract belonging to the actors that had suddenly been classified as protected wetlands in March this year.
Dulquer Salmaan, Mammootty
Dulquer Salmaan, Mammootty
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Actors Mammooty and Dulquer Salmaan (also the son of the Malayalam superstar) have been granted interim relief by the Madras High Court with regard to the 40 acres of land they own in Karughuzhipallam in Chengalpet district which the Commissioner for Land Administration had declared a wetland to be protected under the Tamil Nadu Forest Act, 1882. According to The Hindu, the CLA order, passed in March this year, re-classified the land as a “kazhuveli poromboke” which makes the area a reserved forest. The actors and other members of the family had filed a joint writ petition challenging this order.

Mammooty has said in the writ petition that his 40-acre land had once been part of a 247-acre agricultural tract that had been mortgaged off in 1927 and that land title could be traced to the mortgage deed for the same year. Further, he declared in the petition, it had later gone through several sales including when the High Court itself officially auctioned the land to a certain G Sirur in 1929.

His petition also said that the land had then changed hands several times and had been broken up until it was finally sold to Mammooty’s family in 1997 by the then legal heirs. In the same year, the patta of the land granted to the then legal heir was cancelled by the then CLA. Mamootty had filed a writ petition regarding this in the High Court. He says in his current petition that the land had already been classified once, following the cancellation of the patta, as “kazhuveli poromboke”. That decision was reversed in 2007 and the land categorized as private land. It appears that in March 2021 the CLA went back on this decision, re-categorizing the area as “kavzhuveli proomboke”.

While Justice CV Karthikeyan who oversaw the current case restrained the CLA from taking action against Mammooty and Dulquer Salmaan, he said that appropriate proceedings could be taken against government officials accused of alleged irregularities.

The CLA has been instructed to await further orders from the High Court with respect to actions again the actors. In the meantime, the counsel for the government, Yogesh Kannadasan, is expected to file a counter affidavit to the writ petition by August 26.

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